Super Bug From Space

You'd Think It Was Sci-Fi

Bacteria sent out to outer space come back strong.
Yep. It's like a B- Movie Plot, but here it is.

The germ: Salmonella, best known as a culprit of food poisoning. The trip: Space Shuttle STS-115, September 2006. The reason: Scientists wanted to see how space travel affects germs, so they took some along — carefully wrapped — for the ride. The result: Mice fed the space germs were three times more likely to get sick and died quicker than others fed identical germs that had remained behind on Earth.

"Wherever humans go, microbes go, you can't sterilize humans. Wherever we go, under the oceans or orbiting the earth, the microbes go with us, and it's important that we understand ... how they're going to change," explained Cheryl Nickerson, an associate professor at the Center for Infectious Diseases and Vaccinology at Arizona State University.

Nickerson added, in a telephone interview, that learning more about changes in germs has the potential to lead to novel new countermeasures for infectious disease.

She reports the results of the salmonella study in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The researchers placed identical strains of salmonella in containers and sent one into space aboard the shuttle, while the second was kept on Earth, under similar temperature conditions to the one in space.

After the shuttle returned, mice were given varying oral doses of the salmonella and then were watched.

After 25 days, 40 percent of the mice given the Earth-bound salmonella were still alive, compared with just 10 percent of those dosed with the germs from space. And the researchers found it took about one-third as much of the space germs to kill half the mice, compared with the germs that had been on Earth.

The researchers found 167 genes had changed in the salmonella that went to space.

Why?

"That's the 64 million dollar question," Nickerson said. "We do not know with 100 percent certainty what the mechanism is of space flight that's inducing these changes."

However, they think it's a force called fluid shear.

"Being cultured in microgravity means the force of the liquid passing over the cells is low." The cells "are responding not to microgravity, but indirectly to microgravity in the low fluid shear effects."

"There are areas in the body which are low shear, such as the gastrointestinal tract, where, obviously, salmonella finds itself," she went on. "So, it's clear this is an environment not just relevant to space flight, but to conditions here on Earth, including in the infected host."

She said it is an example of a response to a changed environment.

"These bugs can sense where they are by changes in their environment. The minute they sense a different environment, they change their genetic machinery so they can survive," she said.

Worse the devil you know if it goes and come back from Space, then.

North West Passage Opens Up

A Strange Moment In History

The search for the North West Passage claimed many an explorer. Now, thanks to global warming, it's going to be relatively easy to navigate.

The European Space Agency said nearly 200 satellite photos this month taken together showed an ice-free passage along northern Canada, Alaska and Greenland, and ice retreating to its lowest level since such images were first taken in 1978.

The waters are exposing unexplored resources, and vessels could trim thousands of miles from Europe to Asia by bypassing the Panama Canal. The seasonal ebb and flow of ice levels has already opened up a slim summer window for ships.

Leif Toudal Pedersen, of the Danish National Space Center, said that Arctic ice has shrunk to some 1 million square miles. The previous low was 1.5 million square miles, in 2005.

"The strong reduction in just one year certainly raises flags that the ice (in summer) may disappear much sooner than expected," Pedersen said in an ESA statement posted on its Web site Friday.

Pedersen said the extreme retreat this year suggested the passage could fully open sooner than expected — but ESA did not say when that might be. Efforts to contact ESA officials in Paris and Noordwik, the Netherlands, were unsuccessful Saturday.

A U.N. panel on climate change has predicted that polar regions could be virtually free of ice by the summer of 2070 because of rising temperatures and sea ice decline, ESA noted.

Russia, Norway, Denmark, Canada and the United States are among countries in a race to secure rights to the Arctic that heated up last month when Russia sent two small submarines to plant its national flag under the North Pole. A U.S. study has suggested as much as 25 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and gas could be hidden in the area.

Environmentalists fear increased maritime traffic and efforts to tap natural resources in the area could one day lead to oil spills and harm regional wildlife.

Until now, the passage has been expected to remain closed even during reduced ice cover by multiyear ice pack — sea ice that remains through one or more summers, ESA said.

Researcher Claes Ragner of Norway's Fridtjof Nansen Institute, which works on Arctic environmental and political issues, said for now, the new opening has only symbolic meaning for the future of sea transport.

"Routes between Scandinavia and Japan could be almost halved, and a stable and reliable route would mean a lot to certain regions," he said by phone. But even if the passage is opening up and polar ice continues to melt, it will take years for such routes to be regular, he said.

"It won't be ice-free all year around and it won't be a stable route all year," Ragner said. "The greatest wish for sea transportation is streamlined and stable routes."

"Shorter transport routes means less pollution if you can ship products from A to B on the shortest route," he said, "but the fact that the polar ice is melting away is not good for the world in that we're losing the Arctic and the animal life there."

The opening observed this week was not the most direct waterway, ESA said. That would be through northern Canada along the coast of Siberia, which remains partially blocked.

Well, yeah. Aspirational targets for carbon emissions are nice, but I doubt the government would let me fill an Aspirational Tax Return, so I don't know why we have to be subjected to that kind of bullshit.

More Astronaughty

NASA In Yet More PR Trouble

I know it's been a little while since I posted but hey, life is busy. Anyway, here's today's headline:

America's space agency was shaken Thursday by two startling and unrelated reports: One involved claims that astronauts were drunk before flying. The other was news from NASA itself that a worker had sabotaged a computer set for delivery to the international space station.

It was just another jolt for an operation that has had a rocky year from the start, beginning with the arrest of an astronaut accused of attacking a rival in a love triangle.

"It's going to shake up the world, I'll tell you that," retired NASA executive Seymour Himmel said of the latest news. "There will be congressional hearings that you will not be able to avoid."

News of the two latest bombshells broke within just a few hours of each other Thursday afternoon.

Aviation Week & Space Technology reported on its Web site that a special panel studying astronaut health found that on two occasions, astronauts were allowed to fly after flight surgeons and other astronauts warned they were so drunk they posed a safety risk.

The independent panel also found "heavy use of alcohol" before launch — within the standard 12-hour "bottle-to-throttle" rule, the magazine reported.

A NASA official confirmed the report contains such details, but said they were from anonymous interviews and not substantiated. The official asked that his name not be used because NASA will discuss the health report on Friday.

The Aviation Week story did not say how long ago the alleged incidents took place, nor did it say whether it involved pilots or other crew members.

At a news conference to discuss the upcoming space shuttle launch set for Aug. 7, NASA's space operations chief was asked repeatedly about the drunken astronaut report.

The manager, Bill Gerstenmaier, would only say that he had never seen an intoxicated astronaut before flight or been involved in any disciplinary action related to that.

But Gerstenmaier had more news. He revealed that an employee for a NASA subcontractor had cut the wires in a computer that was about to be loaded into the shuttle Endeavour for launch.

The subcontractor, which he wouldn't name, contacted NASA 1 1/2 weeks ago, as soon as it learned that another computer had been damaged deliberately, Gerstenmaier said. Had the contractor not discovered the problem, NASA would have uncovered it by testing the computer before launch, Gerstenmaier said. Safety was not an issue, he added.

He refused to speculate on the worker's motive. He also wouldn't say where the sabotage occurred. He said it did not happen in Florida and had nothing to do with an ongoing strike at the Kennedy Space Center by a machinists' union.

NASA hopes to fix the computer in time for launch next month. It's intended to be installed inside the space station to collect data from strain gauges on a major outside beam.

Former shuttle commander Eileen Collins was as stunned as anyone to learn of the astronaut alcohol claims in the upcoming health report.

"I'm anxious to hear more details because this is very out of character from anything I have ever experienced," she said.

Collins worries this will hurt the image of the astronauts, at least in the short term. "I hope people can really look at the good things astronauts do," she said.

Astronaut Jeffrey Williams, who spent six months on the space station last year, said he's never seen or heard of anything like this. As for the effect this may have on astronaut morale, especially so close to a shuttle flight, he said, "We're trained to deal with things so we deal with them without much emotion."

Himmel, who retired in 1981 as associate director for what is now Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, wasn't surprised to learn the information was anonymous.

Oh how these stories keep coming out. So much for 'The Right Stuff' myth.

One Last Shot

Mars Rover Opportunity


I know it's been a while.
Here's the latest on the Opportunity craft on Mars.

Opportunity, one of NASA's two robot rovers that have been exploring Mars for more than three years, is about to be driven inside a gaping hole, blasted out millions of years ago by a meteorite.

The ragged Victoria Crater, named after the ship Magellan took on his circumnavigation of the world, is 730 metres wide and 70 metres deep and surrounded on almost all sides by sheer cliffs.

Scientists believe rocks exposed at the bottom of the crater could reveal clues to what lies below the surface of the red planet, and possibly even find evidence of underground water.

NASA officials admit that even if the US$400 million rover can safely negotiate its way into the crater without toppling over, there is no guarantee it will be able to drive out again.

Only designed to last 90 days on the Martian surface, the six-wheeled Opportunity is showing signs of wear. Its sister rover, Spirit, on the opposite side of the
planet, has already lost the use of one wheel, which it now has to drag along.

"While we take seriously the uncertainty about whether Opportunity will climb back out, the potential value of investigations that appear possible inside the crater convinced me to authorise the team to move forward into Victoria Crater," Alan Stern, NASA's science chief and a member of the rover mission team, said.

"It is a calculated risk worth taking.We don't want this to be a one-way trip ... but if Opportunity becomes trapped there, it will be worth the knowledge gained."
Scientists plan to drive Opportunity into the crater at a spot they have dubbed Duck Bay, which has relatively gently slopes of 15 to 20 degrees and a surface covered in rock that should help the wheels grip the slippery slopes.

Well, we can only hope it works and survives to get out again.

TileFile

A Bit OF Fun
I have been playing around with this site a bit. I think it's quite innovative and different to the chaos of MySpace or the narrow focuses of specialist sites. It's still new, but it looks like it could be real fun.

Dark Matter

Strongest Evidence Yet


Long disputed, the evidence for Dark Matter has been gatherin steadily.

"This is the strongest evidence yet for the existence of dark matter," astronomer Myungkook James Jee of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore told reporters.

Astronomers believe dark matter - as opposed to ordinary matter making up the stars, planets and the like - comprises about 85 per cent of the universe's material, but evidence of it has been difficult to come by.

Dark matter cannot be directly seen. It does not shine or reflect light, but astronomers infer its existence in galaxy clusters by observing how its gravity
bends the light given off by even more faraway galaxies. They do not know what
it is made of, but think it could be a kind of particle.

Astronomer Richard Massey of the California Institute of Technology, not involved in the research, said the findings are facing scepticism within the astronomical community.

"It's really exciting if it's right. But to be sort of convinced of the ring, astronomers would really want to see some independent observations verifying it," Massey said.

Here's the article.

Space As A Lifestyle Choice...

Don't Wanna Go Home


Here's an interesting article on what Cosmonauts say about working in Space.

The best, the most beautiful part, is after the start when you look at Earth
straight away," Cosmonaut Vladimir Dezhurov said.
"Earth is like a big, blue balloon and this beautiful balloon is flying, all around it is solid blackness."

Dezhurov has lived in Star City – a formerly top-secret training base for cosmonauts near Moscow – for 21 years and has done two four-month stints aboard the International Space Station, 350 km above Earth. He can think of no other profession he'd like better, despite the fact that after the launch, and that glimpse of his home planet, "it's all work, work, work up there, night and day".

But his main gripe is not the long hours, or missing his family and friends. "The hardest thing is coming back to Earth," he said. The problem is not so much the mundanity of earthly existence – bills to pay, food to buy, chores to complete.

"The muscle fabric degrades very much. It's hard to walk. You have to learn how to walk again, like a small child."

Astronauts train daily aboard the orbiting space station to prevent the atrophy of their legs and feet which are under-used in weightlessness. It takes several weeks under medical supervision to recover from a long stay in space.

The things we learn, every day. :)

More on Schirra

Pretty Cool
If you thought the Right Stuff was a bit too macho, you should check this out here from Time Magazine:

Wally Schirra once told Chris Kraft to go to hell. Remember the astronaut, who died this week at 84, for a lot of things, but put that particular bit of courage near the top of your list. Nobody, up until that moment, had ever told Kraft to go to hell, and the fact is, Schirra didn't tell him directly either. What he did do was tell Deke Slayton, the head of the astronaut corps, and he knew Slayton would tell Kraft, the director of all of the manned missions. Even when you're calling down your imprecation from the safe remove of the Apollo 7 command module high in Earth orbit, that took brass.

Apollo 7 was Schirra's third and last mission. Having joined the space agency as one of the original seven astronauts in 1959, the former Korean war combat pilot became the fifth American in space, orbiting the Earth in his tiny Mercury spacecraft in 1962. In 1965, he returned to space aboard Gemini 6 with co-pilot Tom Stafford, rendezvousing with Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, already waiting in orbit in Gemini 7. After those two trips, there wasn't much that rattled Schirra, but agreeing to fly Apollo 7 at all still took some spine.

On January 27, 1967, just 21 months before Schirra's mission took off, the Apollo command module had killed three of his colleagues, when a spark ignited its pure oxygen atmosphere, immolating Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee during a lockdown rehearsal on the pad. Everyone at NASA already knew that the so-far unflown Apollo was a lemon. Not long before the three men died, they sat for a photo session with a model of the command module resting on a table in front of them it. In one of the outtakes never released to the press, they dropped the grins, bowed their heads and brought their hands together prayerfully. They inscribed the picture to Harrison Storms, the head of North American Aviation, the spacecraft's lead contractor: "Stormy," the inscription read, "this time we are not calling Houston!"

After the fire, it was left to Schirra, the commander of the three-man back-up crew that included space rookies Walt Cunningham and Donn Eisele, to help oversee the gutting and redesign of the ship. Schirra was a bear about the job, stalking the factory floor, poking his nose into whatever the engineers were doing and making it clear when he did not like what he saw. If he wasn't satisfied with the answers he got, he'd go up to the executive suites and buttonhole Storms himself. "You guys want to fix this ship or not?" he'd challenge. "If so let me see you down on the factory floor with the rest of us."

After all this, it was no surprise that when the spacecraft finally took off for its 11-day trip, Schirra would be just as much of a pit bull about how the ship would be flown. NASA scientists had stuffed the flight plan with experiments and astronomical observations, but Schirra didn't want any part of them. This was an engineering mission, as the test pilots liked to call it, meaning that it was a shakedown flight for the ship itself, not a working trip for the men in lab coats.
Whenever an experiment crowded an engineering exercise, he'd jettison the experiment. When a prime-time broadcast was scheduled for shortly before the crew was to execute a tricky rendezvous, he scrubbed the TV show. "No TV until after the rendezvous," he pronounced. The ground objected but Schirra held firm. "TV will be delayed without any further discussion."

Things got more contentious still when all three men developed head colds, something that can be uncomfortable enough on Earth and is exponentially worse in the unfamiliar pressure of a sealed spacecraft. Reporters noticed the sparring between mission control and the ship and began writing about the "snappishness" of the astronauts. The Russian press weighed in too, pointing out the crew's "increased irritation due to the monotony of the spaceflight and the imperfect design of the systems for controlling the vital functions of the spacemen."
Finally, Kraft broke all protocol and proposed to speak to Schirra directly. Slayton offered to do it himself, figuring that as one astronaut to another he could communicate more candidly. Slayton did just that and later reported back to Kraft.
"I told him that the whole world was following this flight and that he and his crew were not coming across well," Slayton said. "I told him he was trained to do a job and that he'd better get busy doing it."
"And?" Kraft asked.
"And he told me to go to hell."

As Slayton must have known, however, doing his job was precisely what Schirra was engaged in for the entire 11 days aloft. Astronauts were pilots first and showmen second. And while the silver flight suits and the smiling press events and the ticker-tape parades belied that, they were hired for their unique understanding of the machines they flew and their hardheaded ability to coax the most from them. That was Schirra's gift. And if flipping off his boss was necessary to get his work done, well, he was happy to do that too. Kraft, 83, wound up respecting Schirra for that act of defiance. Schirra was happy to get that nod. But the fact was, the pilot in him really didn't need it.

An interestng read and a peep in to the world of '60s-'70s NASA.

The Passing Of Wally Schirra

All Hail The Mercury Seven


Wally Schirra, he of the Mercury Seven with 'the Right Stuff' passed away.

Schirra was one of the seven young men selected in 1959 to lead the Cold War
space race against the Soviet Union. Only John Glenn and Scott Carpenter remain
from the project. He was born in March 1923 into an aviation family, Schirra
was one of the seven Mercury astronauts named by NASA in April 1959. He then
piloted the Sigma 7 Mercury flight in late 1962, which orbited Earth six
times.

That flight lasted 9 hours, 15 minutes and attained a speed of 28,091km/h at an altitude of 280 km. It travelled almost 230,400 km before re-entry.
Schirra was the command pilot on the historic 1965 Gemini 6 flight. The highlight was a successful rendezvous of Gemini 6 with the already orbiting Gemini 7 spacecraft. This was the first rendezvous of two manned manoeuvrable spacecraft and established another space first for the United States.

In 1968 he was the command pilot on Apollo VII. Schirra had logged a total of 295 hours and 15 minutes in space. He was the only astronaut to have flown Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo missions.

In 1969 Schirra retired from the US Navy and NASA. According to his family, Schirra died of natural causes.

Farewell, and godspeed, Wally.

Art's Art Book

Amazingly, I Have A Book Coming Out
To be specific, it's not really 'my' book. I only translated it. But it's coming out over at Amazon.com so check it out here. It officially launches on 1 June 2007, but if you pre-order now, you get a 34% Discount.
I've received my copy and true to all things printed in Japan, it's a gorgeous book.
The Amazon Editorial Book Review says:

Book Description
Recently the West has been inundated by a steady flow of images from manga, anime, and the video games that are a key part of today's Japanese visual culture. At the same time, Japanese contemporary artists are gaining a higher profile overseas: many Westerners are already familiar with
Takashi Murakami's brightly colored, cartoonlike characters, or with Junko Mizuno's "grotes-cute" Lolita-style girls. Perhaps less familiar are the absurd fighting machines of Kenji Yanobe, the many disguises of Tomoko Sawada, or the bizarre fairytale landscapes of Tomoko Konoike. Warriors of Art
features the work of forty of the latest and most relevant contemporary Japanese artists, from painters and sculptors, to photographers and performance artists, with lavish full-color spreads of their key works. Author Yumi Yamaguchi offers an insightful introduction to the main themes of each
artist, and builds up a fascinating portrait of the society that has given birth to them: a Japan that still bears the scars of atomic destruction, a Japan with a penchant for the cute and the childish, a Japan whose manga and anime industries have come to dominate the world.

Warriors of Art takes its title from a phrase used to describe Taro Okamoto (1911-1996), perhaps the first truly influential contemporary artist to emerge in postwar Japan, who fought to bring modern art to a wider audience. Following in Okamoto's footsteps, the forty artists featured in this
book are a new generation of warriors, attacking our senses with a shocking mix of the cute, the grotesque, the sexy, and the violent, forcing us to sit up and take notice of their vision of Japan.

About the Author
Yumi Yamaguchi is a Tokyo-based art critic who writes on art for a wide variety of Japanese magazines, and is the author of several books on the subject. This is the first time she has been published in English.

No mention of me, the translator, but hey, what do you expect? :)
If you're even remotely interested in art, this book is worth it's weight in US Dollars!

H-II-A Flight 12

Going Strong



It's been a year since I was over in Japan to watch Flight 9 take off into the dark clouds. Roughly a year on, JAXA have launched Flight 12 successfully after some delays.

宇宙航空研究開発機構は２４日午後１時４０分すぎ、政府の情報収集衛星レーダー２号機と、光学３号機の実証機を載せたＨ２Ａロケット１２号機を、種子島宇宙センター（鹿児島県南種子町）から打ち上げた。ロケットは衛星２基を予定の軌道に放出し、打ち上げは成功した。

　情報収集衛星は光学とレーダーの２基１組で、既に光学１、２号機とレーダー１号機が打ち上げられている。内閣衛星情報センターによると、レーダー２号機が予定通り運用されれば、政府が目指す全４基の体制が整い、地球上のあらゆる地点を１日１回撮影できるという。

　現在の光学１、２号機は、地上の約１メートルのものを見分ける能力があるとされる。光学３号機では能力を５０センチ程度に上げることを目指しており、実証機で機器の性能確認などをする。

　当初１５日に打ち上げ予定だったが、落雷の恐れなどで３度延期されていた。

　開発費はレーダー２号機が約３００億円、実証機が約１１５億円。

The rocket was launched at 1:40pm local time. It was carrying a double-payload of optical satellites no. 2 & 3. Both satellites got into orbit safely.
The development of the satellite is estimated at AUD$300Million, an No.3 itslf cost AUD$115Million.
And so it goes!

Violent Chimps

Chimp Watch

I know lateley I've been slack and if anything, tend to gravitate ot chimp stories than space, but this is quite extraordinary.

Chimpanzees in Senegal have been observed making and using wooden spears to hunt other primates, according to a study in the journal Current Biology.
Researchers documented 22 cases of chimps fashioning tools to jab at smaller primates sheltering in cavities of hollow branches or tree trunks.

The report's authors, Jill Pruetz and Paco Bertolani, said the finding could have implications for human evolution.

Chimps had not been previously observed hunting other animals with tools.

Pruetz and Bertolani made the discovery at their research site in Fongoli, Senegal, between March 2005 and July 2006.

"There were hints that this behavior might occur, but it was one time at a different site," said Jill Pruetz, assistant professor of anthropology at Iowa State University, US.

"While in Senegal for the spring semester, I saw about 13 different hunting bouts. So it really is habitual."

Chimpanzees were observed jabbing the spears into hollow trunks or branches, over and over again. After the chimp removed the tool, it would frequently smell or lick it.

In the vast majority of cases, the chimps used the tools in the manner of a spear, not as probes. The researchers say they were using enough force to injure an animal that may have been hiding inside.

So much for the notion that humans are the only apes to use tools as weapons.

Hammer Of The Chimps

New Chimp Finds

It turns out that chimps might have learned tool use at least 4200 years, putting paid to the theory that only humans use tools. Here's the Article:

The research pushes back chimpanzee tool use thousands of years. It casts into doubt the long-standing theory that direct human ancestors were the only animals to independently develop tools—and that chimps learned to use stone tools by watching humans.

Instead both humans and chimps could have inherited the ability to crack nuts with rocks from a common ancestor, Julio Mercader of the University of Calgary in Canada and co-authors report in today's issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Or chimps may have developed the behavior on their own. In either case, it's no longer likely that chimps learned to use stones as tools only by imitating humans.

At 4,300 years old, the chimps' tools correspond to the late Stone Age of human history—before the advent of agriculture in West Africa.

"Until recently people used to say that among modern-day chimpanzees the behavior came from imitation of farmers," Mercader said. "That assumption is no longer valid. What we present predates the presence of farming."

Of course some animals do use tools. For instance Sea Otters use a flat rock to break open sea shells. Doesn't make them exactly 'sapient', though. :)

Space Sickness

Look Back And Ponder

The jokes about Capt. Nowak aside, the incident has brought about a hightenned interest in the psychological screening of astronauts. Space Sickness is the stuff of fiction; except there's always the spectre of cabin fever. After all, one could argue, not so much "how this came to pass", but more "why doesn't it happen more often?"
They are highly stresses professionals under immense scrutiny. It's amazing they don't sort of crack up more often.

The recent meltdown of captain Nowak has brought about this article, which I think is interesting.

The bizarre case of Lisa Marie Nowak, a Naval officer and NASA astronaut who was arrested on Monday and formally charged yesterday with attempted kidnapping and murder, continues to animate online discussions (including in our own forums). Much of the chatter centers on NASA’s psychological screening process, as well as the degree to which Ms. Nowak’s conduct falls under the jurisdiction of civilian authorities, Naval rules and NASA regulations.

At least a few people associated with the nation’s space program have emerged in news reports suggesting that psychological testing for astronauts is not quite up to snuff. The Associated Press quotes retired astronaut Jerry Linenger, for example, who suggested that NASA needed to review its psychological screening process:

With NASA talking about a 2 1/2-year trip to Mars, it would be dangerous for someone to “snap like this” during the mission, he said.

“An astronaut is probably the most studied human being by the time you go through your testing, your training,” Linenger said. “I think there’s still a lot of unknowns out there.”

No screening, of course, is foolproof. Writing more than a decade ago in New Scientist magazine, Ian Mundell noted the problems that Soviet cosmonauts have encountered during long term space flight. He includes a telling quote from Cosmonaut Valery Ryumin:

Cosmonaut Valery Ryumin wrote in his personal diary in 1980, “All the necessary conditions to perpetrate a murder are met by locking two men in a cabin of 18 by 20 feet … for two months.” As far as the Western world knows Soviet space missions never went that far, despite missions lasting more than a year in the 90 cubic meters of the Mir orbital station. And even that space became increasingly constricted because used equipment was stored inside, rather than ejected.

NASA itself, in exploring the risks associated with an extremely long manned flight to Mars, should it ever be undertaken, has noted on occasion that psychological and psychosocial issues crop up periodically — perhaps inevitably — among astronauts:

The bits in italics are quotes within quotes. You get the idea that spending time in a tin-can isn't exactly like relaxing in the lounge-like atmosphere of a Star Trek spaceship bridge or even the main section of the Millennium Falcon. People are going to get a form of cabin fever up there.

Megafauna Find

Scary Pre-historic Monsters

There are lots of those that fit that moniker, but for the moment consider this: the most frightening, land mammalian carnivore may not have been the lion, but the marsupial lion.

The largest creatures to fall into the caves were giant wombats weighing about 200 kilograms and similar-sized giant kangaroos. This may have been the maximum size of creature that could fit down the small chimney holes.

From the pristine condition of the remains it is thought the holes must have been sealed for hundreds of thousands of years.

Nonetheless, the bones the scientists found were extremely fragile and had to be hardened using a chemical process before being wrapped and removed from the site in hard plastic cases.

All but one of the species of lizards that fell into the caves still scurry around the plain today.

Most of the small mammals - which included possums, dunnarts, antechinuses, bandicoots and bilbies - are also still alive, but do not all live on the now-denuded Nullarbor.

Two species of parrots were also found. This "suggests the presence of hollow-forming trees useful for nesting", Prideaux says.

Altogether, the remains of 11 marsupial lions, Thylacoleo carnifex, were found in the caves, which have been named the Thylacoleo Caves in their honour.

These 100-kilogram creatures were Australia's fiercest predators, with the most powerful bite of any known animal, including the sabre-toothed tiger, hyena and Tasmanian devil.

Interesting find. Let'ds call it a' landshark' instead... only kidding! :)

Fall Out

Here's the latest on the Chinese satellite-missile test.

Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Hill raised the issue with Chinese Foreign Ministry officials during a weekend visit to Beijing, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters in Washington.

Hill was told the Jan. 11 test was ``not meant as a threat against anybody and it's not meant to spark a race to militarize space,'' said McCormack, who urged China to be more ``transparent'' about its space program.

The U.S., U.K. and Australia raised concerns with China following the test and said debris from the destroyed satellite could be dangerous to other space installations. Japan called on the government in Beijing to explain its actions.

``We would encourage greater transparency as to exactly the specifics of this test, the intent behind it,'' said McCormack yesterday, according to a transcript. ``It has been a continuing topic for us as well as others in the region to encourage the Chinese to become more transparent in terms of their military spending and their military programs.''

U.S. officials have expressed concern that other countries may be acquiring capabilities to attack civilian and military space systems.

Well, presumably, they would. After all, who likes knowing that America is peeping in on them 24/7? It's th kind of capability that one would expect to be developed by somebody out there.

ISRO Space Capsule

Strange But True

Indian scientists are working on a return capsule.

Indian scientists for the first time have safely guided a space capsule back to Earth.
Indian space agency ISRO said the capsule splashed down in the Bay of Bengal. It added, efforts are underway to locate it and bring it ashore.

Scientists will see if all experiments have gone as planned and most importantly if the ceramic tiles served their purpose.

Only three other countries, Russia, America and China have mastered this complex technology.

It is seen as India's first steps towards undertaking a manned mission.
The 550 kg capsule was planned to land 140 km east off the coast of Sriharikota.

On splashdown, a giant balloon keeps it afloat, while a green dye and a homing beacon will help Coast Guard ships and scientists from ISRO locate the capsule.

The capsule re-orients and four tiny rockets on it will help de-boost it. Upon re-entry the capsule faces temperatures as high as 1200 degrees.

Three parachutes were planned to slow down its speed five km above sea level. Finally, when the capsule splashes down it travels at 36 km per hour.

The spindle shaped space capsule that was launched on top of the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle or the PSLV is India's first attempt to see if orbiting objects can be safely brought back to earth.

The space capsule has been orbiting the earth at a height of 625 km.
When it re-enters the earth's atmosphere it will be traveling at over 28,000 km per hour.

There you go. It has in fact splashed down safely.

The Space Recovery Experiment-1 (SRE-1) splashed down in the waters of the Bay of Bengal at 9.45 a.m., about 140 km from where it had taken off into space at the Sriharikota launch station in Andhra Pradesh.

'Its speed at the time was about 40 km per hour, the speed of a car,' said an official of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), adding that it was located by a Coast Guard helicopter and recovery efforts were in full swing.
The satellite will be towed first to an area off the Ennore harbour, north of Chennai. The Coast Guard vessel will then slowly navigate northward to Sriharikota and reach the station by night.

The space industry just keeps on changing.

Chinese Star Wars

Blowing Up Satellites
China managed to destroy a satellite with a medium ballistic missile. The immediate ramifications of that are obvious: they can knock out the aerospace intelligence capability of her enemies.

The satellite was some 500 miles (800km) above the earth.

At the very least, it represents the first significant escalation in the space weapons race in 20 years.

Only the United States and the former Soviet Union have previously destroyed targets in space and that was back in the 1980s.

Although this time China used a relatively old-fashioned ballistic missile to target the satellite, it is also thought to be working on far more sophisticated laser technology to do the job.

US officials have been alarmed by the test itself and the failure of China to announce what it was doing either publicly or privately.

A White House spokesman said the "development and testing of such weapons is inconsistent with the spirit of co-operation that both countries aspire to in the civil space area".

He said both the US and other countries were concerned.

Talk about setting cats amongst the pigeons.

Space Elevator Rationale

Some Reasons Why We Should
Here's a link.

I think the argument that continuing our civilization's current carbon based energy regime cannot meet the environmental restrictions even if (and it is a big if) we can wring another few decades or a century out of it by using forms such as oil shale, tar sand etc (see Bjorn Lomborg on how that can be done). It is equally clear that while the dire predictions of the Club of Rome have not come true as predicted, we must sooner or later face sever shortages of minerals - raising the price of some of them beyond what our societies energy regime can afford - eventually threatening even out globalised society with collapse (as laid out by Jarred Diamond in his seminal work 'Collapse: How Societies choose to succeed or fail').

If our society did collapse, we would have to expect this to occur globally as our now world spanning economy and political structures fight it out for the resources they need to sustain themselves just the same way the chiefs did on Easter Island or the Aztec Nobles and Kings did in Central America. The trouble would be that with this occurring globally we could expect the collapse to be world wide as well and our heirs to be unable to rebuild a society like ours for many centuries (if ever) because we had already exploited all the easily recovered mineral resources and they would lack the technology or global organisation or both, to go after the scraps we leave them. The scraps we are increasingly turning to now ourselves (as recommended by Lomborg). We therefore should equate such a potential collapse with near extinction of our species (& many others) for planning purposes. I believe we must plan to avoid it at all costs.

So we have a knotty problem, or at least a major crisis of how our society works and collapse within 100 years is a very real possibility, however high on the hog we may seem to be riding as the West sees it. Part of the solution will surely be utilizing every 'alternative' clean energy source we can. Part or it will be new technologies to replace minerals we lack with alternatives and better extraction to go after reserves no-one would have touched previously but this only buys us time as we tighten our belts and still consume more of the geological legacy the Earths past has left us - and which can never be replenished (except over Millions of years) and which we therefore CANNOT use *sustainably*.

This of course leads us back to my original assertion that we need resources beyond those of the Earth in order not to face near extinction. We also need energy to be sufficiently environmentally clean (including greenhouse neutral) plentiful and affordable to run our ongoing civilization on it. This will be hard enough if we keep the high standard of living for the current developed West only but China and India are determined that that will not be how it goes.

I do recommend you read on.

5 Minutes To Midnight

The End Is Closer

Thanks to the efforts of Iran and North Korea, the world is closer to nuclear holocaust.

We stand at the brink of a second nuclear age. Not since the first atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has the world faced such perilous choices. North Korea’s recent test of a nuclear weapon, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, a renewed U.S. emphasis on the military utility of nuclear weapons, the failure to adequately secure nuclear materials, and the continued presence of some 26,000 nuclear weapons in the United States and Russia are symptomatic of a larger failure to solve the problems posed by the most destructive technology on Earth.

As in past deliberations, we have examined other human-made threats to civilization. We have concluded that the dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons. The effects may be less dramatic in the short term than the destruction that could be wrought by nuclear explosions, but over the next three to four decades climate change could cause drastic harm to the habitats upon which human societies depend for survival.

This deteriorating state of global affairs leads the Board of Directors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists — in consultation with a Board of Sponsors that includes 18 Nobel laureates — to move the minute hand of the “Doomsday Clock” from seven to five minutes to midnight.

Thank you Kim Jong-Il and Ahmedinejad.