The BBC carried a story tonight about Russian cosmonauts who want to hit a golf ball off the International Space Station. NASA, ever the spoilsport, is cool to the idea.

The stunt is apparently yet another effort by the Russian space agency to raise funds. The cosmonauts will use a special golf club provided by Element 21, a golf equipment maker, and a special golf ball equipped with global positioning transmitters, also from Element 21.

The goal is to see how far the ball will go. Element 21 gets bragging rights, and the Russians get to one-up the US yet again. One of our astronauts, Alan Shepard, hit a nice drive on the moon in 1971, but the Russian ball will travel millions of miles and be the first golf ball in orbit.

NASA says it’s not sure the stunt is safe, and may nix the deal. (Of course, Shepard smuggled his equipment on board Apollo 14 to avoid NASA safety nazis. Who’s to say the Russians won’t try it, too?) A golf ball in the same orbital plane as the ISS could damage the habitat, the NASA guys say.

So the cosmonaut has to hit the ball hard enough and in the right direction to minimize that possibility. While wearing a bulky space suit. In microgravity (aka zero-G). Uh-huh. This I gotta see.

March 4th, 2006 | Tags: Science, Technology | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (1)

Fancy vacuums with high-efficiency HEPA filters do no better than regular vacs in protecting allergy sufferers from dust mites, a study at the University of Manchester in the UK shows.

So forget about all those expensive, high tech vacs that promise cleaner air, and just get a cheap one. I guess if you’re really allergic, you should wear a dust mask.

February 13th, 2006 | Tags: Technology | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Partnerships in two countries, Sweden and South Africa, have seen the writing on the wall and are making concrete steps toward life without oil. One hopes that the US can learn some things from their planning.

In Sweden, a committee representing a cross-section of society, will offer to parliament plans to wean the nation of 9 million off oil within the next 15 years, without building any more nuclear power plants. The committee will focus on alternatives to heating oil and gasoline. Nuclear and hydroelectric plants already provide all the nation’s electricity. If successful, the plan would make Sweden largely free of dependence on oil.

Meanwhile, SASOL, the South African petroleum giant, and the Central Energy Fund, are planning to build a major biodiesel plant, using soybeans as the source. Biodiesel supplements petroleum-based diesel fuel, simultaneously stretching diesel supplies and reducing tailpipe emissions. A feasibility study is expected by the end of the year.

The Guardian also reported today that French automaker Renault plans to manufacture half its cars to run on a mixture of ethanol and gasoline by 2009.

“French car groups have seized on the call by President Jacques Chirac to end the country’s “addiction to oil” with plans for bio-fuels or hybrid power. Peugeot Citroën last week opted to produce diesel hybrids emitting 90 grams of carbon dioxide and reducing consumption to 3.4 litres per 100 kilometres by 2010.”

February 9th, 2006 | Tags: Technology | Category: General stuff | Leave a comment

Using a specialized form of microscopy, paleobiologists at UCLA have been able to create three-dimensional images of Precambrian-era bacteria trapped inside rocks, without damaging the rocks or the specimens, for the first time.

The fossil cyanobacteria are contained in rocks from Kazakhstan and are estimated to be between 650 to 850 million years old. J. William Schopf and colleagues used techniques called confocal laser scanning microscopy and Raman spectroscopy to create the 3D images. The microscopic technique causes the fossils’ cell walls to fluoresce, making details more vivid. The spectropic technique allows the researchers to determine the chemical makeup of the fossils.

Schopf said the same techniques could allow scientists to test rocks from Mars, for example, for signs of ancient organic life.

Also known as blue-green algae, ancient cyanobacteria were photosynthetic and are believed to have radically changed ancient earth’s atmosphere by adding oxygen to it. Sometime during the Precambrian era, some cyanobacteria took up residence in other organisms in a symbiotic relationship. We call those organisms plants and their symbiotes, chloroplasts.

Cradle of Life : The Discovery of Earth’s Earliest Fossils

February 5th, 2006 | Tags: Science, Technology | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

We read articles about the governments of other nations — China comes to mind — restricting their citizens from easy and open access to the internet, and cluck about how much better we have it here. Yet our access to the ‘net may be threatened as well, not by the government but by the corporations that own the “pipes.”

According to The Nation, the telephone and cable giants are discussing (in house) ways for them to corral most of the bandwidth on the internet, leaving little guys like me and you to make do with what’s left. In addition, according to the article, the corporate bigwigs are also planning a megadatabase of internet traffic, vestiges of which already exist.

To succeed in this nefarious plot to co-opt one of the last remaining avenues of free and open expression, the telecom companies will have to convince Congress to adjust existing telecom laws in their favor. Watchdog groups have already begun to muster opposition, and small-time operators like your local internet service providers will likely join in the fray.

I would encourage anyone reading this post to read the Nation article, then to contact your own congressmen and women to urge them to resist a corporate stranglehold on the internet.

The following books are worth reading for further information:
Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition

No Place to Hide: Behind the Scences of Our Emerging Surveillance SocietyWho Rules the Net? : Internet Governance and Jurisdiction

February 2nd, 2006 | Tags: Technology | Category: Commentary | Leave a comment

Some critics call the WWW the “worldwide waste of time,” but researchers at the distinguished Max Planck Institute have used a curious little internet game to deduce how a pandemic might spread worldwide.

Seeking a means to track how humans might spread a contagious disease, Dirk Brockmann and Lars Hufnagel analyzed the travel routes of U.S. and Canadian paper currency featured on the website, Where’s George?. Since money travels with humans, Brockmann and Hufnagel could use the “behavior” of the bills as virtual radio tags to simulate the likely movements of infected travelers.

Here’s an excerpt from their Nature abstract:

Like viruses, money is transported by people from place to place. Surprisingly, the scientist found that the human movements follow what are known as universal scaling laws. They developed a mathematical theory which describes the observed movements of travellers amazingly well over distances from just a few kilometres to a few thousand. The study represents a major breakthrough for the mathematical modelling of the spread of epidemics (Nature, 26 January 2006).

Click here for the full press release from the Institute.

Extrapolating from their conclusions, it seems unlikely that Asian bird flu will present much of a threat globally until either Asian and Turkish poultry farmers cash in their frequent-flyer miles or chickens learn to fly the transoceanic air routes. Perhaps I’m just a cynic, or woefully uninformed about pandemics, but all this fuss about the Asian bird flu here in the U.S. seems to be just another PR ploy by politicians to distract us from more pressing matters.

January 30th, 2006 | Tags: Science, Technology | Category: Uncategorized | Comments (1)

… the Shuttle Challenger, exploded shortly after launch over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven of its crew. Among them was the first (and so far only) Teacher in Space, a radiant, inspiring woman named Sharon Christa McAuliffe.

The accident, 73 seconds into the flight, remains fixed in my mind for many reasons. One, quite selfish, is that fateful day was also my 30th birthday. Another is the consideration I made to apply to the Teacher in Space myself (though I never did). Christa and I shared the same profession, and I understood the deep emotional connections that can exist between teachers and their students. And yet another was just the shock of it all. We had grown so accustomed to routine launches from Cape Canaveral that collectively we forgot how dangerous space flight really is.

In the months that followed, we learned, courtesy of an impatient demonstration by physicist Richard Feynmann, that O-ring seals in the external boosters had failed in the unusually cool weather of the launch date. Chilled below their design temperature, the rings lost their pliability and allowed jets of burning solid propellant to ignite the liquid hydrogen and oxygen in the external fuel tank. The crew had no chance to escape; it happened all too quickly.

In the four decades of human space flight, the U.S. and the other space faring nations have been overall very fortunate, given the risks. No one has died in space, although the crew of Apollo 13 came uncomfortably close. But we have lost astronauts and cosmonauts on the launch pad and on re-entry, which are arguably the riskiest times of spaceflight.

January 28th, 2006 | Tags: Technology | Category: General stuff | Leave a comment

who really is NOT a scientist, his success in pulling the latest South Parkepisode off the air just drove the ep onto the internet. Strangely, no one in the South Park production crew seems too upset by the copyright infringement.

The episode not only pokes fun at Tom’s chosen religion, Scientology, but also cracks a joke about his animated self “coming out of the closet.” The real Tom threw a fit and threatened to sue. Comedy Central pulled the episode from distribution. Resourceful fans, however, immediately posted the episode on the internet. Tom’s going to have a tough time tracking all those links down.

At the risk of bringing the wrath of Tom and the “Church” of Scientology down on me, as a public service, here’s a link to the controversial episode.

And links to South Park DVDs (hover over the images for the titles):
    South Park:Complete Seventh Season

January 23rd, 2006 | Tags: Technology | Category: General stuff | Comments (1)

Internet superpower Google is fighting off a US Dept of Justice attempt to obtain a week’s worth of search terms and visited websites. The DOJ wants the data as part of its defense of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which the US Supreme Court has blocked, citing constitutionality issues. Google’s competitors, like Yahoo, have already rolled over and handed over what the DOJ wants.

Apparently, the DOJ wants to have some evidence that search engines are used to find pornographic sites, presumably by minors. Seems like a no-brainer to me, actually. Google, meanwhile, says divulging the information would reveal trade secrets and weaken its users’ trust in the company.

I say, bully for Google! Someone needs to stand up to Washington’s efforts to whittle away at online privacy and personal first amendment rights. I fail to see how the Google data could possibly support an already questionable law.

To see a news account about the issue from a non-US source, click here.

For a brief review of the COPA controversy, check out Wikipedia.

Author Judith Levine has an interesting take on children and sexuality. Her book, Harmful to Minors: the Perils of Protecting Children from Sex is available from amazon.com.
(Click on the book.)

January 22nd, 2006 | Tags: Technology | Category: Uncategorized | Leave a comment