Science Shows Lying Is Hard Work

A convicted sex offender, released on parole, submits to a polygraph test.

"Have you ever told even one lie?" asks the examiner. "No," says the man - and the needles on the polygraph machine barely shift from their rhythmic movements.

You can guess, of course, whether the man was answering truthfully - but today's polygraphs cannot. All they record are pulse, respiration, skin temperature, and other signs that may suggest whether someone seems nervous when asked a damning question.

Machines can be fooled, but it may not always be that way.
"I suspect that it may be much harder to manipulate brain blood flow," says Dr. Daniel Langleben, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School.

Langleben and his colleagues have been experimenting with computerized brain scans - functional magnetic resonance imaging. This giant machine can show the amount of blood flow to different sections of the brain in precise detail.

They wanted to see what changes could be measured inside the brain when people are deceitful. They asked people to lie inside the scanner and lie through their teeth .when answers from many test subjects were combined and averaged by a computer, they clearly showed that when people lie, they use more sections of the brain than when they tell the truth.
"The question it raised for me is whether, in order to tell a lie, you need to inhibit something, and whether that something is the truth," he says. In other words, people may naturally be truth tellers. The brain works harder to lie."

Langleben was never out to make a better lie detector, but his research, along with others', could someday lead to one.

Wanted: Anti-Terror Technology

Silicon Valley companies are being enlisted into the War on Terrorism.

As U.S. airports search for ways to implement the federal mandate for improved security, Congressman Michael Honda, who represents part of Silicon Valley, says he believes the technology industry must play a fundamental role.

A congressional coalition is working to forge a security alliance between the tech industry and the government. Honda says he wants to "make sure that the tools of high technology arelooked at and considered seriously."

He recently hosted a gathering of Silicon Valley CEOs in Washington, DC. Executives fromdozens of companies, including Hewlett-Packard, Lockheed Martin, Identix, and Sun Microsystems, searched for homeland security solutions.

"We truly believe it's a social responsibility of Silicon Valley companies who have the right technology to contribute to defining a platform," said Krish Panu, CEO of At Road, Inc., a company that develops systems to manage mobile workforces.

Some Silicon Valley CEOs say that technology such as At Road's system could help with national security.

At Road's system is based on a PDA-size black box that transmits vehicle position, direction, speed, and other information to allow real-time monitoring. The system's "geo-fencing" capabilities can set up invisible safety parameters and will notify security whenever a vehicle wanders into an area where it doesn't belong.

All of the information is encrypted, password-protected, and then sent to At Road's servers on the East and West coasts. The servers run 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

In terms of tightening national security, Honda says it is important to track potentially dangerous vehicles, especially high-load fuel trucks and outside catering trucks which currently travel unmonitored on airport property.

The company's system also could safeguard against bioterrorism and potentially dangerous ground shipments. "[The system] can be equipped on a vehicle that's transporting hazardous waste or chemicals," said Carey Fan, At Road project manager.

Honda and others say they believe that Silicon Valley can provide important security solutions with both existing and emerging technologies.

"It's a great opportunity to leverage all that entrepreneurial energy to create new technologies that would also enhance our homeland security," said J.D. Fay, At Road vice president of corporate affairs.

Proposed legislation would establish a pilot program to quickly test and evaluate existing, new, and emerging technologies to help reshape domestic security.

More than 40 security bills and amendments have been filed in Congress since Sept. 11, including the Bioterrorism Protection Act, which allocates $7 billion to deploy tech solutions for monitoring hazardous materials transportation.

The Air Travel Security and Technology legislation targets $24 billion for the 20 largest USairports to conduct pilot programs and deploy travel security technology.

Both bills are moving through the House of Representatives, each with more than 100 co-sponsors. However, Honda says he is concerned that unless the House acts on this legislation soon, opportunities to find new high tech solutions to security concerns could be lost as the drive for security languishes.

Retailers test paying by fingerprint

Major retailers are putting in payment systems that let your finger do the paying. Paying for products with a fingerprint, rather than checks, cards or electronic devices, is among the newest cashless options at checkout.

Biometric access, as the process is called, might have a Big Brother feeling, but it is expected to speed customer checkout and cut identity fraud. In some ways, biometric access tests consumers' willingness to give up some privacy to gain convenience.

A customer signs up by having a finger scanned into a database by special machines and designating a credit or debit card to which purchases will be charged. To make a purchase, consumers have their finger read at checkout, often on a pad incorporated into a console that also reads swipe cards and provides for personal identification number (PIN) entry.

Though once only commonplace in legal situations, fingerprinting is being used more in commerce. Institutions from banks to pawnshops are fingerprinting to authenticate transactions. Transaction processing time is less than 30 seconds, compared with three minutes before using the technology.

The increase in interest in biometric access stems from an increase in fraud involving more money, as well as a decline in the cost of the technology. The system now costs about ＄ 10,000, experts say.

Artificial intelligence in the game of go

Early in the film "A Beautiful Mind," the mathematician John Nash is seen sitting in a Princeton courtyard, hunched over a playing board covered with small black and white pieces that look like pebbles. He was playing Go, an ancient Asian game. Frustration at losing that game inspired the real Nash to pursue the mathematics of game theory, research for which he eventually was awarded a Nobel Prize.
In recent years, computer experts, particularly those specializing in artificial intelligence, have felt the same fascination and frustration. Programming other board games has been a relative snap. Even chess has succumbed to the power of the processor. Five years ago, a chess-playing computer called Deep Blue not only beat but thoroughly humbled Garry Kasparov, the world champion at that time. That is because chess, while highly complex, can be reduced to a matter of brute force computation. Go is different. Deceptively easy to learn, either for a computer or a human, it is a game of such depth and complexity that it can take years for a person to become a strong player. To date, no computer has been able to achieve a skill level beyond that of the casual player.

The game is played on a board divided into a grid of 19 horizontal and 19 vertical lines. Black and white pieces called stones are placed one at a time on the grid's intersections. The object is to acquire and defend territory by surrounding it with stones. Programmers working on Go see it as more accurate than chess in reflecting the ways the human mind works. The challenge of programming a computer to mimic that process goes to the core of artificial intelligence, which involves the study of learning and decision-making, strategic thinking, knowledge representation, pattern recognition and perhaps most intriguingly, intuition.
Danny Hillis, a computer designer and chairman of the technology company Applied Minds, said the depth of Go made it ripe for the kind of scientific progress that came from studying one example in great detail.
"We want the equivalent of a fruit fly to study," Hillis said. "Chess was the fruit fly for studying logic. Go may be the fruit fly for studying intuition."
Along with intuition, pattern recognition is a large part of the game. While computers are good at crunching numbers, peopl are naturally good at matching oetterns. Humans can recognize an acquaintance at a glance, even from the back.
Daniel Bump, a mathematics professor at Stanford, works on a program called GNU Go in his spare time.

"You can very quickly look at a chess game and see if there's some major issue," he said. But to make a decision in Go, he said, players must learn to combine their pattern-matching abilities with the logic and knowledge they have accrued in years of playing.
One measure of the challenge the game poses is the performance of Go computer programs. The past five years have yielded incremental improvements but no breakthroughs, said David Fotland, a programmer and chip designer in San Jose, California, who created and sells The Many Faces of Go, one of the few commercial Go programs.

Part of the challenge has to do with processing speed. The typical chess program can evaluate about 300,000 positions in a second, and Deep Blue was able to evaluate some 200 million positions in a second. By midgame, most Go programs can evaluate only a couple of dozen positions each second, said Anders Kierulf, who wrote a program called SmartGo.
In the course of a chess game, a player has an average of 25 to 35 moves available. In Go, on the other hand, a player can choose from an average of 240 moves. A Go-playing computer would need about 30,000 years to look as far ahead as Deep Blue can with chess in three seconds, said Michael Reiss, a computer scientist in London. But the obstacles go deeper than processing power. Not only do Go programs have trouble evaluating positions quickly; they have trouble evaluating them corectly. Nonetheless, the allure of computer Go incereases as the difficulties it poses encourages programmers to advance basic work in artificial intelligence.
"We think we have the basics of what we do as humans down pat," Bump said. "We get up in the morning and make breakfast, but if you tried to program a computer to do that, you'd quickly find that what's simple to you is incredibly difficult for a computer."
The same is true for Go. "When you're deciding what variations to consider, your subconscious mind is pruning," he said. "It's hard to say how much is going on in your mind to accomplish this pruning, but in a position on the board where I'd look at 10 variations, the computer has to look at thousands, maybe a million positions to come to the same conclusions, or to wrong conclusions."

Reiss, an expert in neural networks, compared a human being's ability to recognize a strong or weak position in Go with the ability to distinguish between an image of a chair and one of a bicycle. Both tasks, he said are hugely difficult for a computer.
For that reason, Fotland said, "writing a strong Go program will teach us more about making computers think like people than writing a strong chess program."

High-Mileage Black Holes

High-Mileage Black Holes

By Phil Berardelli
ScienceNOW Daily News
24 April 2006

Astronomers have discovered that, deep inside the biggest and brightest galaxies in the universe, jets are spewing particles from around black holes in an incredibly energy-efficient manner. If an automobile engine worked as well as one of these monsters, it could go more than a billion miles on a gallon of gas.

The surprise is these high-mileage black holes aren't quasars, which are considered the most energetic and efficient bodies in the universe at converting matter to energy . Instead, astronomers have discovered, they are relatively old and quiet supermassive black holes that somehow can maintain similar efficiencies while expelling much less energy.

The astronomers used data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory to study nine supermassive black holes populating very large elliptical galaxies. In all cases, they found the areas around the black holes to be dim in visible light but quite bright in x-ray wavelengths. For the nine objects studied, they calculated that the black holes could convert up to 2.5% of the infalling gas and dust to energy--not quite as good as a quasar, which can average 5% or more, but still about 25 times better than the best nuclear power reactors.

The team also found that the jets produced by the supermassives are streaming outward at incredible speeds--in some cases 95% of the speed of light. "The energy in these jets is absolutely huge," says lead researcher Steven Allen of Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, "about a trillion, trillion, trillion watts." The findings were announced during a media teleconference today and will be published in an upcoming issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The question is what process converts the energy from the gas streaming in toward the black holes to the enormous energy in the jets. So far, there is only speculation, says co-author Christopher Reynolds of the University of Maryland, College Park. One idea is that the rotational energy of the supermassives powers the engine.

"We already knew quasars were enormously efficient at making light," says Kimberly Weaver, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "Now we know black holes in elliptical galaxies are also as efficient at making x-rays." This also could explain why there are few young stars in these galaxies: When the jets collide with the surrounding interstellar gas, they heat it to the point where it cannot condense into new stars.

"Just as with cars, it's critical to know the fuel efficiency of black holes," Allen adds. "Without this information, we cannot figure out what is going on under the hood, so to speak, or what the engine can do."

new LED design employs

A new LED design employs a handy combination of light and phosphors to produce light whose color spectrum is not so different from that of sunlight.

Light emitting diodes (LEDs) convert electricity into light very efficiently, and are increasingly the preferred design for niche applications like traffic and automobile brake lights. To really make an impression in the lighting world, however, a device must be able to produce room light. And to do this one needs a softer, whiter, more color balanced illumination.

The advent of blue-light LEDs, used in conjunction with red and green LEDs, helped a lot. But producing LED light efficiently at blue, red, and yellow wavelengths is still relatively expensive, and an alternative approach is to use phosphors to artificially achieve the desired balance, by turning blue into yellow light. Scientists at the National Institute for Materials Science and at the Sharp Corporation, in Japan, have now achieved a highly efficient, tunable white light with an improved yellow-producing phosphor . Their light yield is 55 lumens per watt, about twice as bright as commercially available products operating in the same degree of whiteness.

Clean Energy

Clean energies are forms of energy which do not pollute the air, the ground, or the sea.

Clean energies include:

Solar power

Solar power describes a number of methods of harnessing energy from the light of the Sun. It has been present in many traditional building methods for centuries, but has become of increasing interest in developed countries as the environmental costs and limited supply of other power sources such as fossil fuels are realized. It is already in widespread use where other supplies of power are absent such as in remote locations and in space.

As the Earth orbits the Sun, it receives approximately 1,400 W / m² of energy, as measured upon a surface kept normal (at a right angle) to the Sun (this number is referred to as the solar constant). Of the energy received, roughly 19% is absorbed by the atmosphere, while clouds on average reflect a further 35% of the total energy. The generally accepted standard is 1020 watts per square meter at sea level.

After passing through the Earth's atmosphere, most of the sun's energy is in the form of visible and ultraviolet light. Plants use solar energy to create chemical energy through photosynthesis. We use this energy when we burn wood or fossil fuels or when we consume the plants as a source of food.

Wind power

Wind power is the kinetic energy of wind, or the extraction of this energy by wind turbines. This article deals mainly with the intricacies of large-scale deployment of wind turbines to generate electricity.

Wave power

Wave power refers to the capture of ocean surface wave energy to do useful work including electricity generation, desalination, and filling a reservoir with water. Wave power is a form of renewable energy. Though often co-mingled, wave power is physiologically distinct from the diurnal flux of tidal power and the steady gyre of ocean currents which are powered by the earth's rotation. Wave power generation is not a widely employed technology with only a few experimental sites in existence.

Salinity gradient power

Salinity Gradient is a technology that takes advantage of the osmotic pressure differences between salt and fresh water.

If we place a semipermeable membrane (like that in a reverse osmosis filter) between sealed bodies of salt water and fresh water, the fresh water will gradually travel through the filter by osmosis. By exploiting the pressure difference between these two bodies of water we can extract energy commensurate to the difference in pressure.

Tidal power

Tidal power is a means of electricity generation achieved by capturing the energy contained in moving water mass due to tides. Two types of tidal energy can be extracted: kinetic energy of currents due the tides and potential energy from the difference in height (or head) between high and low tides.

Geothermal power

Geothermal power is electricity generated by utilizing naturally occurring geological heat sources. It is a form of renewable energy.

Some renewable energies are not clean energies - for example:

Biofuels because they release NOX and particulates into the environment.
Hydroelectric power because it destroys the river basin and has a negative effect on fish migration.

GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOODS: Are They Sa

The world seems increasingly divided into those who favor genetically modified (GM) foods and those who fear them. Advocates assert that growing genetically altered crops can be kinder to the environment and that eating foods from those plants is perfectly safe. And, they say, genetic engineering－which can induce plants to grow in poor soils or to produce more nutritious foods－will soon become an essential tool for helping to feed the world's burgeoning population. Skeptics contend that GM crops could pose unique risks to the environment and to health－risks too troubling to accept placidly. Taking that view, many European countries are restricting the planting and importation of GM agricultural products. Much of the debate hinges on perceptions of safety. But what exactly does recent scientific research say about the hazards? The answers, too often lost in reports on the controversy, are served up in the pages that follow.

Two years ago in Edinburgh, Scotland, eco-vandals stormed a field, crushing canola plants. Last year in Maine, midnight raiders hacked down more than 3,000 experimental poplar trees. And in San Diego, protesters smashed sorghum and sprayed paint over greenhouse walls. 　 　This far-flung outrage took aim at genetically modified crops. But the protests backfired: all the destroyed plants were conventionally bred. In each case, activists mistook ordinary plants for GM varieties. 　 　It's easy to understand why. In a way, GM crops－now on some 109 million acres of farmland worldwide－are invisible. You can't see, taste or touch a gene inserted into a plant or sense its effects on the environment. You can't tell, just by looking, whether pollen containing a foreign gene can poison butterflies or fertilize plants miles away. That invisibility is precisely what worries people. How, exactly, will GM crops affect the environment－and when will we notice? 　　Advocates of GM, or transgenic, crops say the plants will benefit the environment by requiring fewer toxic pesticides than conventional crops. But critics fear the potential risks and wonder how big the benefits really are. “We have so many questions about these plants,” remarks Guenther Stotzky, a soil microbiologist at New York University. “There's a lot we don't know and need to find out.” 　　As GM crops multiply in the landscape, unprecedented numbers of researchers have started fanning into the fields to get the missing information. Some of their recent findings are reassuring; others suggest a need for vigilance.

Fewer Poisons in the Soil?

Every year u.s. growers shower crops with an estimated 971 million pounds of pesticides, mostly to kill insects, weeds and fungi. But pesticide residues linger on crops and the surrounding soil, leaching into groundwater, running into streams and getting gobbled up by wildlife. The constant chemical trickle is an old worry for environmentalists. 　　In the mid-1990s agribusinesses began advertising GM seeds that promised to reduce a farmer's use of toxic pesticides. Today most GM crops－mainly soybean, corn, cotton and canola－contain genes enabling them to either resist insect pests or tolerate weed-killing herbicides. The insect-resistant varieties make their own insecticide, a property meant to reduce the need for chemical sprays. The herbicidetolerant types survive when exposed to broad-spectrum weed killers, potentially allowing farmers to forgo more poisonous chemicals that target specific weed species. Farmers like to limit the use of more hazardous pesticides when they can, but GM crops also hold appeal because they simplify operations (reducing the frequency and complexity of pesticide applications) and, in some cases, increase yields. 　　But confirming environmental benefit is tricky. Virtually no peer-reviewed papers have addressed such advantages, which would be expected to vary from plant to plant and place to place. Some information is available, however. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, farmers who plant herbicidetolerant crops do not necessarily use fewer sprays, but they do apply a more benign mix of chemicals. For instance, those who grow herbicide-tolerant soybeans typically avoid the most noxious weed killer, turning instead to glyphosate herbicides, which are less toxic and degrade more quickly. 　 　Insect-resistant crops also bring mixed benefits. To date, insect resistance has been provided by a gene from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt). This gene directs cells to manufacture a crystalline protein that is toxic to certain insects－especially caterpillars and beetles that gnaw on crops－but does not harm other organisms. The toxin gene in different strains of B. thuringiensis can affect different mixes of insects, so seed makers can select the version that seems best suited to a particular crop. 　　Of all the crops carrying Bt genes, cotton has brought the biggest drop in pesticide use. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, in 1999 growers in states using high amounts of Bt cotton sprayed 21 percent less insecticide than usual on the crop. That's a “dramatic and impressive” reduction, says Stephen Johnson, an administrator in the EPA's Office of Pesticide Programs. Typically, Johnson says, a farmer might spray insecticides on a cotton field seven to 14 times during a single growing season. “If you choose a Bt cotton product, you may have little or no use for these pretty harsh chemicals,” he notes. Growers of Bt corn and potatoes report less of a pesticide reduction, partly because those plants normally require fewer pesticides and face fluctuating numbers of pests. 　　Defining the environmental risks of GM crops seems even harder than calculating their benefits. At the moment, public attention is most trained on Bt crops, thanks to several negative studies. Regulators, too, are surveying the risks intensely. This spring or summer the EPA is expected to issue major new guidelines for Bt crops, ordering seed producers to show more thoroughly that the crops can be planted safely and monitored in farm fields. 　　In the face of mounting consumer concern, scientists are stepping up research into the consequences of Bt and other GM crops. Among their questions: How do Bt crops affect “nontarget” organisms－the innocent bugs, birds, worms and other creatures that happen to pass by the modified plants? Will GM crops pollinate nearby plants, casting their genes into the wild to create superweeds that grow unchecked? What are the odds that the genetically engineered traits will lose their ability to protect against insects and invasive weeds, leaving GM plants suddenly vulnerable?

At What Cost to Wildlife?

In 1998 a swiss study provoked widespread worry that Bt plants can inadvertently harm unlucky creatures. In this laboratory experiment, green lacewing caterpillars proved more likely to die after eating European corn-borer caterpillars that had fed on Bt corn instead of regular corn. The flames of fear erupted again a year later, when Cornell University entomologist John Losey and his colleagues reported that they had fed milkweed leaves dusted with Bt corn pollen to monarch butterfly larvae in the lab and that those larvae, too, had died. 　　 “That was the straw that broke the camel's back,” says David Pimentel, also an entomologist at Cornell. Suddenly, all eyes turned to the organisms munching GM plant leaves, nipping modified pollen or wriggling around in the soil below the plants－organisms that play vital roles in sustaining plant populations. Another alarming study relating to monarch butterflies appeared last August. 　　But the lab bench is not a farm field, and many scientists question the usefulness of these early experiments. The lab insects, they note, consumed far higher doses of Bt toxin than they would outside, in the real world. So researchers have headed into nature themselves, measuring the toxin in pollen from plots of GM corn, estimating how much of it drifts onto plants such as milkweed and, finally, determining the exposure of butterfly and moth larvae to the protein. Much of that work, done during the 2000 growing season, is slated to be reported to the EPA shortly. 　　According to the agency, however, preliminary studies evaluating the two most common Bt corn plants (from Novartis and Monsanto) already indicate that monarch larvae encounter Bt corn pollen on milkweed plants－but at levels too low to be toxic. What is toxic? The EPA estimates that the insects face no observable harm when consuming milkweed leaves laden with up to 150 corn pollen grains per square centimeter of leaf surface. Recent studies of milkweed plants in and around the cornfields of Maryland, Nebraska and Ontario report far lower levels of Bt pollen, ranging from just six to 78 grains of Bt corn pollen per square centimeter of milkweed leaf surface. “The weight of the evidence suggests Bt corn pollen in the field does not pose a hazard to monarch larvae,” concludes EPA scientist Zigfridas Vaituzis, who heads the agency's team studying the ecological effects of Bt crops. 　　But the jury is still out. “There's not much evidence to weigh,” notes Jane Rissler of the Union of Concerned Scientists. “This issue of nontarget effects is just a black hole, and EPA has very little good data at this point to conclude whether the monarch butterfly problem is real, particularly in the long term.” 　　In an EPA meeting on GM crops last fall, Vaituzis acknowledged the lack of long-term data on Bt crops and insect populations. Such studies “require more time than has been available since the registration of Bt crops,” Vaituzis remarked. The EPA, he added, continues to collect Bt crop data－but so far without evidence of “unreasonable adverse effects” on insects in the field.

Seeding Superweeds?

Worries about the flow of genes from the original plant to others also surround GM crops. Unwitting insects or the right wind might carry GM crop pollen to weedy plant relatives, fertilizing them. And if that happens, the newly endowed plants could break ecological rank, becoming “superweeds” that are unusually resistant to eradication by natural predators or pesticides. Scientists have stopped asking if such gene flow is possible. “In many cases,” says Cornell ecologist Allison Power, “we know gene flow will occur. The question now is, What will the consequences be?” 　　So far no scientific studies have found evidence of GM crops causing superweeds, and a 10-year study reported in Nature in February found no weedlike behavior by GM potatoes, beets, corn or canola planted in England. But worrisome anecdotes have appeared. Canadian farmers, in particular, have described GM canola escaping from farm fields and invading wheat crops like a weed. This canola also resisted pesticide sprays. 　　Power's studies of gene flow from virus-resistant GM plants give further reason for precaution. For now, virus-resistant crops stake a small share of the GM landscape, but they are likely to become more prevalent, particularly in the developing world. Power investigates gene flow in cultivated grain crops－ wheat, barley and oats－engineered to contain genes that make the plants resistant to the barley yellow dwarf virus (which damages some 100 grass species). These GM grain crops could be on the market within the next decade. 　　Power's work, carried out in the laboratory, indicates that wild oats－a weedy relative of cultivated oats－can “catch” the genes conferring resistance to barley yellow dwarf virus. If that happened in the field, she says, wild oats might run amok in the western U.S., outcompeting native grasses with kudzu-like intensity. Every GM crop, Power cautions, brings its own environmental personality and its own risks. 　　In the U.S., at least, landscape logistics make it rather unlikely that herbicide-tolerant or Bt crops will spread their biotech genes to weeds. That's because the GM crops sown in this country have no close relatives in the regions where they grow; most plants can pollinate others only if the recipients and the donors have certain features in common, such as the same chromosome number, life cycle or preferred habitat. A known exception to the “no relatives” rule in the U.S. is wild cotton growing in Hawaii and southern Florida, which, by virtue of its unusual similarity to GM cotton, can accept the GM pollen. To separate the wild and biotech plants from each other, the EPA has ordered companies not to sell GM cotton south of Florida's Interstate 60 or in Hawaii. 　　But it may prove harder to avoid creating superweeds outside North America, where weedy relatives of cultivated crops are common. Wild cotton, for instance, creeps past the Florida Keys, across the Gulf of Mexico and into Mexico. In South America, a weedy corn relative, teosinte, dresses the edges of domesticated cornfields. Either plant would readily accept the pollen from a GM relative. Indeed, scientists say, GM crops in many countries could end up growing near their ancestral plants－and sharing more than the sunshine overhead. “Almost every crop has weedy relatives somewhere in the world,” says Stephen Duke, a USDA plant physiologist in Oxford, Miss. “How do you keep GM crops out of places where they're not supposed to be?”

Taking Refuge

Finally, one risk follows GM crops wherever they're planted: evolution. Over time, insect pests and weeds can become resistant to killing by routine chemical sprays. The same is bound to happen in the biotech age: eventually, impervious insects will munch away on GM insect-resistant plants, and the weeds surrounding herbicide-tolerant crops will shrug off the herbicide of choice. “Agriculture is an evolutionary arms race between plant protections and pests,” comments botanist Jonathan Wendel of Iowa State University. “And GM crops are just one more way that we're trying to outsmart pests－temporarily.” 　 　To keep weeds vulnerable to herbicides, Monsanto and other companies urge growers to use the sprays responsibly, only when necessary. To slow insect resistance to the Bt toxin, the EPA requires Bt crop growers to set aside some part of their farmland for crops that have not been genetically modified. These “refuges” may be a corner of a field outside a Bt crop, for instance, or rows of standard plants that break up a Bt plot. Inside the refuges, insects that have acquired some Bt resistance breed with those that have not, diluting the resistance trait. 　　After five years of commercial Bt crop use, no reports of insect resistance to the crops have emerged, according to Monsanto. The company contends that roughly 90 percent of Bt corn and cotton growers comply with refuge requirements. 　　But some environmentalists question that rosy scenario and also argue that non-Bt refuges are either too small or too poorly designed to keep insect resistance at bay for long. “At the EPA meeting last fall, scientists seemed to agree that bigger, better refuges were the way to go but that cotton farmers would never agree to big refuges,” says Rebecca Goldburg, a senior scientist at Environmental Defense, a nonprofit organization based in New York City. More broadly, Goldburg questions how much GM crops really do for the environment. “In however many years,” she says, “we'll lose Bt as an effective control against insects, and then we'll be on to another chemical control. Many of us view this current generation of biotech crops as a kind of diversion, rather than a substantive gain for agriculture.” She favors sustainable agriculture alternatives, including careful crop rotation and organic farming methods, over pesticides sprayed on or engineered into plants. 　　 Virus-resistant GM crops have escaped widespread public concern, but they, too, pose some of the same risks as other GM crops. Some scientists worry that viruses will pick up resistance traits from virus-fighting GM crops and evolve into hard-tobeat strains that infect a newly expanded repertoire of plants. Some critics also question the ecological safety of emerging crops designed to resist drought, tolerate salt or deliver an extra nutritional punch. For example, Margaret Mellon of the Union of Concerned Scientists notes that salt-tolerant rice could potentially behave like a disruptive weed if it found its way into vulnerable wetlands. 　　“I don't think it's fair to say that every single GM crop is going to be a problem,” Rissler remarks. “But we need to devote the research to risks now, rather than deal with repercussions later.” Still, some farmers are confident that GM technology can revolutionize agriculture for the better. For 30 years, Ryland Utlaut of Grand Pass, Mo., has been sowing and reaping 3,500 acres along the Missouri River. Last year, for the first time, he planted only herbicide-tolerant corn and soybeans across his entire, soil-friendly, no-till farm. As a result, he claims, he sprayed the crops half as often as he did before and got bigger yields. “If even the strongest environmentalist could see my farming practices now, I think they'd understand the benefits,” Utlaut says. “I'm a fervent believer in this technology.” Now he has to wait and see whether science confirms that belief.

The Cool History of the Air Conditioner

Temperatures in some parts of the country have eased a bit over the weekend. But there is no risk that throngs of people are suddenly going to turn their backs on air-conditioning. The air-conditioner has established itself well in the hearts of Americans. The first widespread use of air-conditioners came during the 1920 when movie theaters used what they called man-made weather to lure customers to the silver scream. After World War 2, the cost for air-conditioners started to come down and manufactures advertised them as for the millions not just for millionaires. Deborah Hawkins, knows how to keep cool. She is chairman of the Air-conditioner and Refrigeration Institute. We called her in her office in Fort Worth. Texas where the temperature this is a balmy, low-100s. Welcome to the program.
Well Thank you.
I assume you've got your air-conditioner going great guns.
Yes, we do, Full blast in fact.
All right, take us back, where was the first air-conditioned movie theater in the United States.
Well, it's probably in the Central Park theater in Chicago, Illinois. Willis Carrier considered the king of cool and the founder of air-conditioning actually sold his inventions to movie theater operators during the late 19th and early 20th. And this was one of the first one to have received it. And they actually had some of the largest audiences than anywhere else in the country as you can imagine.
So does the air-conditioner get credit or maybe the blame for the additament of summer blockbusters.
Err, both, Thank you give both. Definitely the term was coin because people were trying to get away from the heat during the summer months and they came in and drove to get out of that into the cool air and watched movies, cause that was probably the only event that allowed them to do that at that time.
And also I assume that the theater just stayed open during the summer.
Well, yearlong, yearlong, Well before they were primarily just open from November to May.
Well, what are some of the other early places to be cooled down by air-conditioning.
Well, right after the movie theaters, the government buildings in Washington D.C were air-conditioned, started with the US House of Representatives building, the Senate building, even the White House and it's funny too becaue prior to that, the lawmakers only worked from November to May, and then they dispersed, you know, went home. And it's funny because most people say this may or may not have been a good idea to allow them to work 12 months all over the year.
When did air-conditioning become a stable of the Middle Class.
Well, actually it started in the 50s when sales exceeded over one million units. And then at each decade, it increased enormously. To where now today, probably 82% of all homes either have room air-conditioning units or central air-conditioning units in America.
Deborah Hawkins, is chairman of the Air-conditioner and Refrigeration Institutions. Thanks a lot, keep cool.

A future vehicle

A future vehicle

While many technological advances occur in an evolutionary manner, occasionally a revolutionary technological appears on the horizon that creates startling new conditions and profound changes. Such is the case with the privately developed Moller Skycar, which is named after its inventor. With his permission, I would like to discuss the military potential of this vehicle. The ruggedized Moller Skycar variant the military is evaluating is called the light aerial multipurpose vehicle, or LAMV (pronounced "lam-vee").

The LAMV is a vertical take-off and landing aircraft that can fly in a quick, quiet, and agile manner. It is a new type of vehicle that combines the speed of an airplane and the vertical take-off capability of a helicopter with some characteristics of a ground vehicle, but without the limitations of any of those existing modes of transportation.
The LAMV is not operated like traditional fixed -- or rotary-wing aircraft. It has only two hand-operator uses to direct the redundant computer control twists to select the desired operating altitude and moves fore and aft to select the rate of climb. The right-hand control twists to select the vehicle's direction and moves side-to-side to provide transverse (crosswise) movement during the hover and early-transition-to-flight phases of operation; it also moves fore and aft to control speed and braking. Simply put, the LAMV is user friendly.

The LAMV of the future will be 18 feet long, 10 feet wide, and 6 feet high and weight 2,200 pounds. It will hold four passengers and a payload of 875 pounds (including fuel). The vehicle will have a maximum rate of climb of 6,400 feet per minute and an operational ceiling of 30,000 feet. It will attain a top speed of 390 miles per hour at an altitude of 6,000feet and a cruising speed of 350 miles per hour at 25,000 feet, and it will have a maximum range of 900 miles at 80 passenger miles per gallon. The LAMV also will be quiet enough to function as an acoustic "stealth" plane at 500 feet. It will have a vertical take-off and landing capability and emergency airframe parachutes, and it will be capable of using various fuels.
Safety, of course, is most important. The LAMV design incorporates a number of safety features. For starters, the LAMV has multiple engines. Unlike any light helicopter or airplane, the LAMV has multiple engine nacelles, each with two computer-controlled Rotapower engines. These engines operate independently and allow for a vertical controlled landing should either fail.

The LAMV features redundant, independent computer systems for flight management, stability, and control. Two airframe parachutes can be deployed in the event of the vehicle's catastrophic failure. These parachutes ensure that the LAMV and the operator and soldiers it carries can land safely. The Wankel-type rotary engines are very reliable because of their simplicity. The three moving parts in a two-rotor Rotapower engines are approximately seven percent of the number of parts in a four-cylinder piston engine. Each nacelle fully encloses the engines and fans, greatly reducing the possibility of injury to soldiers who might be near the vehicle in the event of an engine fire or explosion. Multiple systems check fuel for quality and quantity and provide appropriate warnings. The LAMV can land on virtually any solid surface.

The LAMV is aerodynamically stable. In the unlikely event that sufficient power is not available to land vertically, the LAMV's stability and good glide slope allow the operator to maneuver to a safe area before using the airframe parachutes. Since computers control the LAMV's flight during hover and transition, the only operator input is to control speed and direction. Undesirable movements caused by wind gusts are prevented automatically.

The potential economic advantages of the LAMV are worth mentioning. Its fuel-efficient engines and ability to operate on various fuels will low fuel costs. The LAMV uses one-fourth of the fuel per passenger mile used by the tilt-rotor V-22 Osprey or high performance helicopters. The LAMV's acquisition cost also will be a significant factor in its favor. The LAMV's purchase price per passenger seat is projected to be approximately eight percent of that for the 30-passenger Osprey.

The LAMV's potential military uses will be numerous. They include aerial medical evacuation, aerial reconnaissance, command and control, search and rescue, insertion of special operations forces, air assault operations, airborne operations, forcible-entry operations, military police mobility and maneuver support, communications retransmission, battlefield distribution for unit resupply, transport of individual and crew replacements, weapons platform, noncombatant evacuation operations, battlefield contractor transport, and battle damage assessment.

Consider the LAMV's use in contingency operations. An adversary observing a LAMV would have great difficult determining the type of force approaching and that force's destination and intention. If the adversary did realize our intentions, the senior enemy commander would not have time to react. Imagine a forcible entry and early entry force package based in the continental United States that self-deployed overseas in LAMV's. With short halts along the way at seaborne resupply vessels or land-based refueling sites, the force package would reach its objective within hours. This concept would reduce dramatically the Army's dependence on the US Transportation Command for strategic airlift and on the geographical commander in chief for intratheater airlift support. The overall speed of force closure would improve greatly. This would enhance the senior commander's ability to conduct multiple, simultaneous operations in his battle space with an accelerated operational tempo that precludes the adversary from achieving his goals. Dependence on air and sea ports of debarkation would be reduced.
LAMV will benefit the Army's battlefield distribution concepts tremendously because it will be able to move commodities rapidly when and where they are needed across a widely dispersed battle space. Both air and ground main supply routes (MSR's) would exist throughout the battle space. The MSR's in the air would change as missions and situations dictate. Eventually, small, multi-commodity shipping containers could be designed for transport by either a LAMV or an even more futuristic medium or heavy aerial distribution; many types of land mines used to block convoy movements today would become less of a concern for logisticians and engineers since they could use MSR's in the sky. Or consider moving contractors around the battle space in LAMV's to perform their tasks. Basically, the LAMV concept promotes a smaller, more agile, and more effective sustainment presence within a supported battle space.

Consider the LAMV working in unison with the Army's Future Combat System (FCS). The LAMV could become an integral component of the overall concept for employing the FCS. The operator of thee LAMV actually could be a member of the FCS crew or unit. In this role, the LAMV would provide multiple benefits – reconnaissance, resupply, medical evacuation, and maintenance supply. Perhaps the AMV itself could become a future combat weapon system platform. Perhaps this innovative technology could force major changes in joint and Army doctrine, training, leader development, organizations, material, and soldier programs.

Of course, the LAMV brings with it some obvious challenges. Its limited payload will be a negative factor. Its use will complicate Army airspace command and control. How the LAMV will be used in conjunction with forces under the joint force air component commander will have to be determined. LAMV support issues also require resolution. For example, operator selection and training, leader training, employment doctrine, LAMV basis-of-issue plans, and LAMV life-cycle management all require the Army's attention.

However, once the LAMV technology matures, its military possibilities are startling. We in the Army combat service support "futures" arena are encouraged by the developments so far and hope that the LAMV will be ready for Army fielding around 2010. The LAMV can become a reality in our Army and possibility in the other armed services as well. Without any doubt, this technological innovation will succeed internationally inn the private, commercial, and military sectors. I hope that the US Army will be the first army in the world to embrace and exploit this technology. But sooner rather than later, this aerial vehicle technology will affect all of our lives. It is just over the horizon.

On Mars, No One Can Hear You Screa

On Mars, No One Can Hear You Scream

By Kim Krieger
ScienceNOW Daily News
12 June 2006

Sound dies quickly in the cold, thin air of Mars. Researchers have modeled a sound wave traveling through the Martian atmosphere and report that it doesn't go far--even a lawn mower's roar dies after a hundred meters or so. The model presents an unusually detailed picture of how sound travels in an alien atmosphere and hints at what it would take to communicate on the Red Planet.

The shriek of a baby, an ambulance's siren, or a violin sonata are all essentially the same thing: waves of pressure traveling through the air. Sound can also travel through water, or a solid like the ground, but because molecules must bump into each other to propagate the pressure wave, the denser the medium the better. Hoofbeats or footsteps travel farther through the ground than through the air, for example, because the molecules in air have to travel further to bump into one another than those in soil, thus losing energy more quickly.

The Martian atmosphere is mostly carbon dioxide and only 0.7% as dense as Earth's is, so sound should fade more quickly. But the details of how sound waves travel in the Martian atmosphere were unclear and could be important to future Mars missions.

Now, a computer model has given a molecule-by-molecule map of how sound moves on Mars. Graduate student Amanda Hanford and physicist Lyle Long of Pennsylvania State University in State College presented the model last week at a meeting of the Acoustical Society of America meeting in Providence, Rhode Island. The model is unusual in its molecular approach; most acoustical models of sound treat the medium it travels through as a continuous block with average properties. Such models are fine for dense atmospheres like Earth's, but treating the air like a loose bunch of freewheeling molecules is more realistic for Mars' rarefied atmosphere, say the researchers.

Hanford and Long first set up a virtual "box" filled with about 10 million carbon dioxide molecules floating about randomly, at the same density as the Martian atmosphere. A sound wave then appeared on one side of the box, and the model calculated its progress across to the other side, computing nanosecond by nanosecond exactly how the carbon dioxide molecules bumped and moved. The results show that a noise that would travel several kilometers on Earth would die after a few tens of meters on Mars. Quieter sounds would travel far shorter distances, making eavesdropping on a quiet conversation nearly impossible.

Henry Bass, a physicist at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, notes that if people ever go to Mars and want to communicate audibly, they'll need to design devices that can work with the lower frequencies transmitted by the Martian atmosphere.

Virtuoso--Vanessa-Mae

1. Vanessa-Mae has been called a Paganini in 1)hot pants. Or, to put it another way: she dresses to kill, but you ain't seen nothing yet till you see her pick up a 2)violin.


2. Half Thai and half Chinese, Vanessa-Mae Vanakom Nicholson was born in Singapore and grew up in London. She 1)took up the violin at the age of five. By the time she was eleven, the Director of the 2)Royal College of Music was calling her a "true child 3)prodigy--like Mozart and Mendelssohn."

3. She was a rising star in the world of classical music, but Vanessa-Mae also had some ideas of her own about music. As a teenager, she began experimenting with her 1)talent, and 2)released The Violin Player, which she called a "techno-3)acoustic 4)fusion" 5)album. It 6)featured both traditional and electric violin, hit the U.K. 7)pop charts, and went 8)multi-9)platinum.

4. Some critics objected to the video of Vanessa-Mae playing a techno-pop 1)version of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in a wet T-shirt, and 2)scratched their heads when they heard that she would be playing a violin solo on Janet Jackson's The 3)Velvet Rope album. Vanessa-Mae responded: "When you're brave enough to do something new, people are always threatened by it."

5. Few audiences that see Vanessa-Mae give a 1)live performance have any objections. More often they are left 2)awestruck, 3)roaring for an 4)encore.

Chemist Leo Baekeland

[1] In the opening scene of The Graduate, Benjamin Braddock (played by a young Dustin Hoffman) is awkwardly working an affluent Southern California crowd at a graduation party arranged for him by his parents when a family friend offers one of the century's most famous pieces of cine-matic advice: "I just want to say one word to you. Just one word: plastics."

[2] Millions of moviegoers winced and smiled. The scene neatly captured their own late '60s ambivalence toward the ever more synthetic landscape of their times. They loved their cheap, easy- to-clean Formica countertops, but envied-and longed for-the authentic touch and time-lessness of marble and wood. The chord struck by that line in The Graduate under-scored how much had happened in the six decades since the summer of 1907, when Leo Baekeland made the laboratory break-through that would change the stuff our world is made of.

[3] A Belgian-horn chemist-entrepreneur, Baekeland had a knack for spotting profitable opportunities. He scored his first success in the 1890s with his invention of Velox, an improved photographic paper that freed photographers from having to use sunlight for developing images. With Velox, they could rely on artificial light, which at the time usually meant gaslight but soon came to mean electric. It was a far more dependable and convenient way to work. In 1899 George Eastman, whose cameras and developing services would make photogra-phy a household activity, bought full rights to Velox for the then astonishing sum of $ 1 million.

[4] With that windfall, Baekeland, his wife Celina(known as "Bonbon") and two children moved to Snug Rock, a pala-tial estate north of Yonkers, N.Y., over-looking the Hudson River. There, in a barn be converted into a lab, he began foraging for his next big hit. It wasn't long before the burgeoning electrical industry seemed to say just one word to him: insulators.

[5] The initial tease for Baekeland----"Doc Baekeland" to many-was the rising cost of shellac. For centuries, the resinous secretions that Laccifer lacca beetles de-posited on trees had provided a cottage in-dustry in southern Asia, where peasants heated and filtered it to produce a varnish for coating and preserving wood products. Shellac also happened to be an effective electrical insulator. Early electrical workers used it as a coating to insulate coils, and molded it into stand-alone insulators by pressing together layers of shellac-impreg-nated paper.

[6] When electrification began in earnest in the first years of the century, de-mand for shellac soon outstripped supply. Baekeland recognized a killer ap when he saw one. If only he could come up with a synthetic substitute for shellac.

[7] Others nearly beat him to it. As early as 1872, German chemist Adolf Von Baeyer was investigating the recalcitrant residue that gathered in the bottom of glass-ware that had been host to reactions be-tween phenol (a turpentine-like solvent dis-tilled from coal tar, which the gas-lighting industry produced in bulk) and formalde-hyde (an embalming fluid distilled from wood alcohol). Von Baeyer set his sights on new synthetic dyes, however, not insulators. To him, the ugly, insoluble gunk in his glassware was a sign of a dead end.

[8] To Baekeland and others aiming to find commercial opportunities in the nascent electrical industry, that gunk was a signpost pointing toward something great. The chal-lenge for Baekeland and his rivals was to find some set of conditions----some slippery ratio of ingredients and heat and pressure that would yield a more workable, shellac-like substance. Ideally it would be some-thing that would dissolve in solvents to make insulating varnishes and yet be as moldable as rubber.

Walter Macken

Walter Macken， the famous novelist， playwright and actor， was born in Galway in 1915. He first began to write at the age of eight. He joined the Taibhdhearc in 1934， while still attending school. It was there he met his wife， Peggy Kenny； who was then news editor. She was six years older than he was. They fell in love， but her father， Tom Cork Kenny didn't approve of Peggy's choice， so they had to elope and were married in Fairview Church in Dublin on February 9th 1937. They went to London where he worked as an insurance agent， selling insurance door to door， as he later wrote about in I Am Alone.

　　Returning to Galway in 1939， Walter took up the post of theatre manager with the Taibhdhearc. At this time， he began to write both in Irish and English. By 1946 his first play in English， Mungo's Mansion， had been successfully staged at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin， and his first novel， Quench the Moon， had been accepted for publication.

　　In 1948 he joined the Abbey for three years. A year later his second novel， I Am Alone， was published， and in 1950 his third novel， Rain on the Wind， brought him international recognition， winning the Book of the Month Club and the Literary Guild award. A successful US theatre tour gave him the impetus to return home to Galway to establish a career for himself as a full-time writer.

　　In 1957 he embarked on his most ambitious writing project： the three historical novels， Seek the Fair Land， The Silent People and The Scorching Wind， and in 1964 his first children's novel， Island of the Great Yellow Ox， proved to be one of his most popular books. In all， he produced a body of work which finally came to ten novels， seven plays， three books of short stories and two children's books； most of his novels have been translated into many languages. His last novel， Brown Lord of the Mountain， was published just before his death on 22 April 1967. Brandon published two posthumous collections of his short stories in the 1990s.

RoddyDoyle

Roddy Doyle was born in Dublin in 1958. He attended St. Fintan's Christian Brothers School in Sutton and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts and continued his education at University College， Dublin. He worked for fourteen years as an English and Geography teacher in North Dublin. Since 1993 he has been dedicated to writing full-time.

　　His novels are The Commitments （1987）； The Snapper （1990）； The Van （1991）， which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize； The Barrytown Trilogy [The Commitments， The Snapper， and The Van] （1992）； Paddy Clarke， Ha Ha Ha （1993）， which won the 1993 Booker Prize； The Woman Who Walked Into Doors （1996）； A Star Called Henry （1999）； His drama includes War （1989） ， as well as The Family， written for TV. He has written the scripts for films based on his novels， including The Commitments， The Snapper and The Van. He lives in Dublin.