December 4, 2007
Findings
In the Future, Smart People Will Let Cars Take Control
By JOHN TIERNEY
As the baby boomers cruise into their golden years, I have good news for them — and for everyone else in danger of being run over by these aging drivers. The boomers will not be driving like Mr. Magoo. An electronic chauffeur will conduct them on expressways, drop them at the mall entrance and then go park their cars.
If you doubt this prediction, I don’t blame you. The self-driving car ranks right up there with the personal hovercraft as the futurist vision that never comes true. In 1969, Disney unveiled Herbie the Love Bug; in 1940, Popular Mechanics promised a car that would chauffeur you across America in a single day to visit Aunt Lillian.
At the 1939 World’s Fair, the crowds at the General Motors Futurama exhibit saw traffic speeding 100 miles per hour thanks to electronic help. “Safe distance between cars is maintained by automatic radio control,” a voice explained as visitors looked down on the vast diorama of the World of Tomorrow, complete with hangars for dirigibles and landing decks for autogyros.
“Does it seem strange? Unbelievable?” the announcer intoned. “Remember, this is the world of 1960!”
O.K., so they were a little off on the date. But today, finally, those electronically spaced cars are on the highway. You can buy cars with “adaptive cruise-control” that automatically slow down if the radar or laser detects you tailgating. Your car can warn you when you stray across lane markings, and these kinds of sensors are already being used experimentally in cars that drive themselves.
These smart cars still have their bugs, but engineers have made amazing progress the past several years. In 2004, when the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency held its first Grand Challenge for driverless cars, none made it more than seven miles. At Darpa’s next Grand Challenge, in 2005, five cars made it 132 miles to the finish. And then, last month, six cars completed a 60-mile course that was the grandest challenge yet because they had to deal with traffic along the way.
These empty cars drove themselves around an Air Force base in Southern California, finding parking spots, obeying stop signs, idling in traffic, yielding to other cars at intersections and merging into traffic at 30 m.p.h. There was one accident and a few near misses, but the cars’ engineers are so buoyed by the results that they’re hoping the next competition will be a high-speed race on a Grand Prix course.
“Within five years, it’s totally feasible to build an autonomous car that will work reliably in several limited domains,” says Sebastian Thrun, a computer scientist at Stanford and head of its racing team, which won the 2005 Darpa competition and finished second in last month’s. In five years he expects a car that could take over simple chores like breezing along an expressway, inching along in stop-and-go traffic, or parking in the lot at a mall or airport after dropping off the driver. In 20 years, Dr. Thrun figures half of new cars sold will offer drivers the option of turning over these chores to a computer, but he acknowledges that’s just an educated guess. While he doesn’t doubt cars will be able to drive themselves, he’s not sure how many humans will let them.
Some people won’t ever want to yield control; others will worry that the first smart cars will be like the early versions of Windows. There will be many, many car-computer jokes involving the word “crash.”
But cars, unlike humans, will keep getting smarter. They will learn from their mistakes. They will not get distracted by cellphone calls. They will not drive drunk. Smart cars will never be infallible, but they don’t have to be. They just have to be better than the drivers who now cause more than 90 percent of traffic accidents and kill a million of their fellow humans per year. Smart cars might make their debut in special lanes where each car has to enter through a checkpoint (at highway speeds) to make sure its systems are working properly. Drivers would be enticed with another promise of smart cars: no traffic jams.
When a freeway filled with human drivers is operating at full capacity, Dr. Thrun notes, the cars actually occupy less than 10 percent of the road’s surface area. The rest is empty space between cars. Smart cars could be grouped more closely together, doubling or tripling the road’s capacity, as engineers have demonstrated by running a platoon of driverless Buicks, spaced just 15 feet apart, at 65 m.p.h. down Interstate 15 near San Diego.
When that experiment was done, in 1997, it seemed an impractical idea because the cars were guided by magnets embedded in the road, and it was hard to imagine building such “smart roads” across the country. But since then, cars have gotten so much smarter that they can navigate old-fashioned dumb roads.
In the near future, guided not just by G.P.S. satellites but by high-precision internal maps and inertial sensors, they’ll know their position so precisely that they won’t even need lane markings for guidance. They’ll communicate with other smart cars on the road, enabling a swarm of closely spaced cars to move in unison (and react more quickly to problems than humans drivers could). A road system filled with these cars wouldn’t even need traffic lights — the cars could just talk among themselves.
If, according to Moore’s Law, computing power keeps doubling every couple years, human drivers will soon be outclassed by computers just as chess players were. The only question will be how long it takes humans to adapt to these new chauffeurs. Some experts think smart cars won’t become common before 2050, but I’d bet on it happening sooner.
And even if humans stubbornly cling to the steering wheel, they could still end up sharing the road with smart cars. By around 2030, according to some believers in Moore’s Law, there will be computers more powerful than the human brain, leading to the emergence of superintelligent “post-humans.” If these beings do appear, I have no doubt how they’ll get around. They’d never be stupid enough to get in a car driven by a member of Mr. Magoo’s species.
Interesting photos and links at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/scien ... ?th&emc=th
*****
December 4, 2007
One Last Ride to the Hubble
By DENNIS OVERBYE
GREENBELT, Md. — It’s the last roundup for the People’s Telescope.
Next August, after 20 years of hype, disappointment, blunders, triumphs and peerless glittering vistas of space and time, and four years after NASA decided to leave the Hubble Space Telescope to die in orbit, setting off public and Congressional outrage, a group of astronauts will ride to the telescope aboard the space shuttle Atlantis with wrenches in hand.
That, at least, is the plan.
“It’s been a roller coaster ride from hell,” Preston Burch, the space telescope’s project manager, said in his office here at the Goddard Space Flight Center of the controversy and uncertainty.
In a nearby building, the Hubble’s astronaut knights — dressed as if for surgery, in white gowns, hoods and masks —swarmed through a giant clean room to kick the tires, so to speak, of new instruments destined for the Hubble and to try out techniques and tools under the watchful eye of the Goddard engineers. They practiced sliding a new wide-field camera 3, suspended in air like a magician’s grand piano, in and out of its slot on a replica of the telescope that is mechanically and electrically exact down to the tape around the doors. “We have to train their minds and bodies,” said Michael Weiss, the deputy project manager of Hubble, adding that when the astronauts see the real telescope in orbit, “they say they’ve seen it before.”
Spacewalking astronauts have refurbished the Hubble four times in the last two decades; but the trip planned for August, almost everybody agrees, really will be the last service call. The shuttles are scheduled to stop flying in 2010, and without periodic maintenance, the telescope’s gyroscopes and batteries are expected die within about five years.
Astronauts, engineers and scientists here say they are resolved to pull off the most spectacular rejuvenation of the telescope yet, one, they say, that will leave it operating at the apex of its abilities well into the next decade so that it can go out in a blaze of glory.
“It will be a brand new telescope, practically,” said Matt Mountain, director of the Space Telescope Science Institute on the Johns Hopkins campus in Baltimore. He added, “We want to return crackerjack science we can be proud of.”
The last visit, Dr. Mountain explained, is unique. “You don’t have to do routine maintenance,” he said. “It’s like a car you’re only going to keep another 20,000 miles. You don’t buy new tires.”
Engineers and project managers are busy mapping out five days of spacewalks.
If all goes well — never a given 350 miles above Earth — the astronauts will install a new camera and spectrograph and change out all the gyroscopes that keep it properly pointed and the batteries that keep it running. They are also planning to repair a broken spectrograph and the Hubble’s workhorse, the Advanced Camera for Surveys, which had a severe short-circuit last winter and was pronounced at the time probably beyond repair.
Dramatic turnabouts have characterized the history of the Hubble telescope, which was hailed before its launching in April 1990 as the greatest advance in astronomy since Galileo invented the telescope.
In space, the Hubble would be able to discern details blurred by the turbulent murky atmosphere. But its 94-inch diameter mirror turned out to have been polished to the wrong shape, leaving it with what astronomers call a spherical aberration. The Hubble became branded as a “technoturkey.”
In 1993, astronauts fitted the telescope with corrective lenses (at the cost of removing one of its five main instruments, a photometer), and the cosmos snapped into razorlike focus.
Three more visits by astronauts kept the Hubble running and, by replacing old instruments, actually made it more powerful. Along the way, the astronauts graduated from yanking equipment fitted with large astronaut-friendly handles to operating on instruments never meant to be repaired by people wearing the equivalent of boxing gloves in space.
In 2002, after an infrared camera named Nicmos unexpectedly ran out of coolant, the astronauts attached a mechanical refrigerator to run coolant through its pipes. A year later, the Hubble’s astronomers used the rejuvenated camera along with the advanced survey camera to record the deepest telescopic views ever obtained of the universe. The images captured galaxies as they existed a few hundred million years after the beginning of time.
“When you have an instrument that reaches so far beyond what you’ve ever had before, you make discoveries that nobody ever thought of before,” said John Grunsfeld, who will be the payload commander on the Atlantis mission. “And we see things that nobody ever saw before. As a result, you know, Hubble became not just an observatory, but an icon for all of science. And Hubble has become part of our culture.”
That status did not come cheaply.
Edward Weiler, director of the Goddard center and formerly associate administrator for science at NASA, estimated that over the years the Hubble had cost $9 billion. “There are few people, especially Americans, who won’t say it was worth it,” he said.
All this seemed doomed to a premature end after the shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003 that killed its crew of seven. Sean O’Keefe, who was then the NASA administrator, declared that a shuttle flight to the telescope was too risky because, unlike the space station, it offered no safe haven if anything went wrong with the shuttle. The public was appalled. Schoolchildren even offered to send their pennies to NASA to keep the telescope going.
Some astronomers and engineers challenged the reasoning of Mr. O’Keefe, whose background was in public administration, and not engineering. Others in the space science community, noting that the science budget was being squeezed by President Bush’s Moon-Mars initiative, suggested that it was time to move on and that the Hubble repair money might be better spent on other science projects.
“Everybody could see where he was coming from,” David Leckrone of Goddard, the Hubble’s project scientist, said, referring to Mr. O’Keefe’s distress about the Columbia and a mandate for increased emphasis on safety. But, he added, “It seemed so un-NASA-like. We would never have sent anybody to the Moon if we were so risk averse.”
“I thought we were dead,” Dr. Leckrone said. “As long as he was administrator, it stuck.”
In February 2005, however, Mr. O’Keefe resigned to become chancellor at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. His successor, Michael Griffin, who has a Ph.D. in aerospace engineering, instituted a rigorous risk analysis, culminating in a two-day meeting of experts that concluded it was no riskier to fly to the telescope than to go to the space station. In fall 2006, after the shuttles had begun flying again, Dr. Griffin approved the Hubble mission to a standing ovation from scientists and engineers.
“We all agree the risks are acceptable,” Dr. Leckrone said. “Griffin led us through that process with a good deal of intellectual vigor. He didn’t fake it.”
As a backup, NASA will have the shuttle Endeavor, which is scheduled for a September mission to the space station, prepped for a quick launching if a rescue is needed.
In the meantime, engineers, challenged by Mr. O’Keefe to keep the Hubble going as long as possible, learned to run it on a kind of austerity program, using two gyroscopes to keep the telescope pointed instead of the usual three (one for each dimension in space). They also learned how to preserve the batteries, which derive power from solar panels in the sunlit part of each orbit and provide electricity in the dark part. As a result, the batteries, which degraded rapidly for years, are now actually slightly stronger than before, the engineers say, and the Hubble has a healthy gyroscope in reserve in case one fails.
“If it weren’t for two-gyro science,” Mr. Weiss, the deputy project manager, said, “the next gyro failure would take us out of science.”
Besides Dr. Grunsfeld, who has been to Hubble twice, the crew includes Cmdr. Scott Altman, who led a Hubble mission in 2002; the pilot, Gregory Johnson; and the mission specialists, Andrew J. Feustel, Megan McArthur, Col. Mike T. Good and Michael J. Massimino, who also worked on the Hubble in 2002 and performed two spacewalks.
The new wide-field camera was designed to extend the Hubble’s vision into the ultraviolet wavelengths characteristic of the hottest stars and into the longer infrared wavelengths characteristic of cool stars, complementing the abilities of the advanced survey camera. It will replace the wide-field planetary camera 2, which has been in the telescope since 1993 and has been its only visible-light camera for the last year.
When the old camera is slid out, perhaps as early as the first spacewalk, will be “a heart-stopping moment,” Dr. Mountain said.
Dr. Grunsfeld’s crew will install another new instrument, the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph, into the slot now occupied by an old corrective optics package known as Costar that is no longer needed.
The instruments installed on the Hubble since the 1993 repair were built taking the mirror’s aberration into account. The new spectrograph is also designed to be sensitive to invisible ultraviolet light. Astronomers hope to use it to map a so-called “cosmic web,” stretching through intergalactic space, in which two-thirds of atoms in the universe are thought to be drifting and hiding.
Those tasks will be the easier parts.
One of the bigger challenges of the mission will be surgery on the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph, which can take pictures of things and break down their light to analyze their composition. The spectrograph had an electrical failure in 2004. To get inside the spectrograph, 111 screws that were never meant to be removed in space have to be unscrewed and kept from floating off. The plan is to clamp a plate over them beforehand and unscrew them through tiny holes.
No such option exists for the Advanced Camera, the choice for 70 percent of Hubble’s prospective users and the chief dark-energy-hunting instrument on or off the planet. It suffered a huge short-circuit in its power supply last winter.
In a task that could be spread over two spacewalks, the astronauts will clamp a new power supply to the outside of the camera. From there, according to ground tests, power can be fed back inside to the other parts of the camera through existing wires, unless they were damaged in the short-circuit.
In one additional piece of business, the astronauts will attach a grapple fixture to the bottom of the telescope so that a robot spacecraft could grab it and attach a rocket module in the future. The rocket would then drop the telescope into the ocean.
But that time is not yet. The telescope’s orbit will be stable through 2024, according to recent calculations.
All of this work could, in principle, be performed in the allotted five days of spacewalks. In that case, when the Atlantis pulls away and human eyes glimpse the Hubble for the last time in person, the telescope would have its full complement of instruments to dissect the light from the cosmos for the first time since 1993.
Running down a list of subjects like planets around other stars, dark energy and the structure of the universe, Dr. Leckrone called the telescope a toolkit for discovery. Noting that any astronomer in the world could propose to use it, he said: “A lot of brain power comes to Hubble. It’s mouthwatering to think of what they will do with it.”
Asked whether the astronomers were tempted to run the rejuvenated instrument frugally to prolong its life beyond its anticipated 2013 demise, Dr. Mountain said the idea was to go for broke.
“We don’t want to trade science for false longevity,” he said.
There are interesting multimedias and links at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/04/scien ... ref=slogin
TECHNOLOGY AND DEVELOPMENT
Real and virtual worlds
Better together
Dec 6th 2007
From The Economist print edition
The internet, supposedly a new realm, is most useful when coupled to the real world
Illustration by David Simonds
IN THE early days of the internet, the idea that it represented an entirely new and separate realm, distinct from the real world, was seized upon by both advocates and critics of the new technology. Advocates liked the idea that the virtual world was a placeless datasphere, liberated from constraints and restrictions of the real world, and an opportunity for a fresh start. This view was expressed most clearly in the “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” issued by John Perry Barlow, an internet activist, in February 1996. “Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace, the new home of mind,” he thundered. “Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Our world is different. We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.”
Where Mr Barlow and other cyber-Utopians found the separation between the real and virtual worlds exciting, however, critics regarded it as a cause for concern. They worried that people were spending too much time online, communing with people they had never even met in person in chat rooms, virtual game worlds and, more recently, on social-networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. A study carried out by the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society in 2000, for example, found that heavy internet users spent less time talking to friends and family, and warned that the internet could be “the ultimate isolating technology”.
Both groups were wrong, of course. The internet has not turned out to be a thing apart. Unpleasant aspects of the real world, such as taxes, censorship, crime and fraud are now features of the virtual world, too (see Technology Quarterly, in this issue). Gamers who make real money selling swords, gold and other items in virtual game worlds may now find that the tax man wants to know about it. Designers of virtual objects in Second Life, an online virtual world, are resorting to real-world lawsuits in order to protect their intellectual property. And several countries have managed to impose physical borders on the internet to enforce local laws, from censorship in China to France's ban on the sale of Nazi memorabilia.
Mind meld
At the same time, however, some of the most exciting uses of the internet rely on coupling it with the real world. Social networking allows people to stay in touch with their friends online, and plan social activities in the real world. The distinction between online and offline chatter ceases to matter. Or consider Google Earth, which puts satellite images of the whole world on your desktop and allows users to link online data with specific physical locations. The next step is to call up information about your surroundings using mobile devices—something that is starting to become possible. Beyond that, “augmented reality” technology blends virtual objects seamlessly into views of the real world, making it possible to compare real buildings with their virtual blueprints, or tag real-world locations with virtual messages.
All these approaches treat the internet as an overlay or an adjunct to the physical world, not a separate space. Rather than seeing the real and virtual realms as distinct and conflicting, in short, it makes sense to see them as complementary and connected. The resulting fusion is not what the Utopians or the critics foresaw, but it suits the rest of us just fine.
Better together
Dec 6th 2007
From The Economist print edition
The internet, supposedly a new realm, is most useful when coupled to the real world
Illustration by David Simonds
IN THE early days of the internet, the idea that it represented an entirely new and separate realm, distinct from the real world, was seized upon by both advocates and critics of the new technology. Advocates liked the idea that the virtual world was a placeless datasphere, liberated from constraints and restrictions of the real world, and an opportunity for a fresh start. This view was expressed most clearly in the “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace” issued by John Perry Barlow, an internet activist, in February 1996. “Governments of the industrial world, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from cyberspace, the new home of mind,” he thundered. “Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Our world is different. We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.”
Where Mr Barlow and other cyber-Utopians found the separation between the real and virtual worlds exciting, however, critics regarded it as a cause for concern. They worried that people were spending too much time online, communing with people they had never even met in person in chat rooms, virtual game worlds and, more recently, on social-networking sites such as MySpace and Facebook. A study carried out by the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society in 2000, for example, found that heavy internet users spent less time talking to friends and family, and warned that the internet could be “the ultimate isolating technology”.
Both groups were wrong, of course. The internet has not turned out to be a thing apart. Unpleasant aspects of the real world, such as taxes, censorship, crime and fraud are now features of the virtual world, too (see Technology Quarterly, in this issue). Gamers who make real money selling swords, gold and other items in virtual game worlds may now find that the tax man wants to know about it. Designers of virtual objects in Second Life, an online virtual world, are resorting to real-world lawsuits in order to protect their intellectual property. And several countries have managed to impose physical borders on the internet to enforce local laws, from censorship in China to France's ban on the sale of Nazi memorabilia.
Mind meld
At the same time, however, some of the most exciting uses of the internet rely on coupling it with the real world. Social networking allows people to stay in touch with their friends online, and plan social activities in the real world. The distinction between online and offline chatter ceases to matter. Or consider Google Earth, which puts satellite images of the whole world on your desktop and allows users to link online data with specific physical locations. The next step is to call up information about your surroundings using mobile devices—something that is starting to become possible. Beyond that, “augmented reality” technology blends virtual objects seamlessly into views of the real world, making it possible to compare real buildings with their virtual blueprints, or tag real-world locations with virtual messages.
All these approaches treat the internet as an overlay or an adjunct to the physical world, not a separate space. Rather than seeing the real and virtual realms as distinct and conflicting, in short, it makes sense to see them as complementary and connected. The resulting fusion is not what the Utopians or the critics foresaw, but it suits the rest of us just fine.
New stem cells used in treatment
Julie Steenhuysen
Reuters
Friday, December 07, 2007
Using a new type of stem cells made from ordinary skin cells, U.S. researchers said Thursday they treated mice with sickle cell anemia, proving in principle that such cells could be used as a therapy.
U.S. and Japanese researchers last month reported they had reprogrammed human skin cells into behaving like embryonic stem cells, the body's master cells. They call the cells induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells for short.
The Japanese team had previously done the reprogramming work in mouse skin cells.
A team at the Whitehead Institute of Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass., has now used the new cells to treat mice engineered to have sickle cell anemia, a disease of the blood caused by a defect in a single gene.
"This is the first evaluation of these cells for therapy," said Dr. Jacob Hanna, who worked on the study.
"The field has been working for years on strategies to generate customized stem cells," he added in an interview.
Creating stem cell therapies from a person's own cells would make them genetically identical, eliminating the need for immune suppression or donor matching, Hanna said.
"Now, with the breakthrough of this new method for generating stem cell-like cells, can we try to substitute a diseased tissue in a living animal?"
Hanna and colleagues working in Rudolf Jaenisch's lab at Whitehead Institute took skin cells from diseased mice and inserted four genes that reprogram the cells into becoming iPS cells.
"We call it the magic four factor," Hannah said.
Pluripotent or multipurpose cells, such as embryonic stem cells and the new cells, can morph into any type of cell in the human body.
The researchers then coaxed these mouse master cells into becoming blood-forming stem cells and substituted the faulty gene that causes sickle cell anemia with a working one. When they transplanted these cells into the diseased mice, tests showed normal blood and kidney function, they report in today's issue of the journal Science.
"This demonstrates that iPS cells have the same potential for therapy as embryonic stem cells, without the ethical and practical issues raised in creating embryonic stem cells," Jaenisch said in a statement.
But the technique is far from perfected. The four genes needed to turn skin cells into master cells are delivered using a type of virus called a retrovirus.
"Once they enter the genome, there is the danger that they can silence some genes that are important or they can activate some dangerous genes that shouldn't be activated," Hanna said.
Another obstacle is that one of the four genes used is c-Myc, which is known to cause cancer.
Hanna and colleagues got around that by removing the c-Myc gene after it had done its job of converting the skin cells into iPS cells. "It is far from solving the problem," he said.
Scientists hope to use stem cells to treat a host of diseases like diabetes, Parkinson's disease and spinal injuries. And the new technique for making stem cells will make them easier to study.
****
Julie Steenhuysen
Reuters
Friday, December 07, 2007
Using a new type of stem cells made from ordinary skin cells, U.S. researchers said Thursday they treated mice with sickle cell anemia, proving in principle that such cells could be used as a therapy.
U.S. and Japanese researchers last month reported they had reprogrammed human skin cells into behaving like embryonic stem cells, the body's master cells. They call the cells induced pluripotent stem cells, or iPS cells for short.
The Japanese team had previously done the reprogramming work in mouse skin cells.
A team at the Whitehead Institute of Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass., has now used the new cells to treat mice engineered to have sickle cell anemia, a disease of the blood caused by a defect in a single gene.
"This is the first evaluation of these cells for therapy," said Dr. Jacob Hanna, who worked on the study.
"The field has been working for years on strategies to generate customized stem cells," he added in an interview.
Creating stem cell therapies from a person's own cells would make them genetically identical, eliminating the need for immune suppression or donor matching, Hanna said.
"Now, with the breakthrough of this new method for generating stem cell-like cells, can we try to substitute a diseased tissue in a living animal?"
Hanna and colleagues working in Rudolf Jaenisch's lab at Whitehead Institute took skin cells from diseased mice and inserted four genes that reprogram the cells into becoming iPS cells.
"We call it the magic four factor," Hannah said.
Pluripotent or multipurpose cells, such as embryonic stem cells and the new cells, can morph into any type of cell in the human body.
The researchers then coaxed these mouse master cells into becoming blood-forming stem cells and substituted the faulty gene that causes sickle cell anemia with a working one. When they transplanted these cells into the diseased mice, tests showed normal blood and kidney function, they report in today's issue of the journal Science.
"This demonstrates that iPS cells have the same potential for therapy as embryonic stem cells, without the ethical and practical issues raised in creating embryonic stem cells," Jaenisch said in a statement.
But the technique is far from perfected. The four genes needed to turn skin cells into master cells are delivered using a type of virus called a retrovirus.
"Once they enter the genome, there is the danger that they can silence some genes that are important or they can activate some dangerous genes that shouldn't be activated," Hanna said.
Another obstacle is that one of the four genes used is c-Myc, which is known to cause cancer.
Hanna and colleagues got around that by removing the c-Myc gene after it had done its job of converting the skin cells into iPS cells. "It is far from solving the problem," he said.
Scientists hope to use stem cells to treat a host of diseases like diabetes, Parkinson's disease and spinal injuries. And the new technique for making stem cells will make them easier to study.
****
December 18, 2007
Findings
Why Nobody Likes a Smart Machine
By JOHN TIERNEY
At a Best Buy store in Midtown Manhattan, Donald Norman was previewing a scene about to be re-enacted in living rooms around the world.
He was playing with one of this year’s hot Christmas gifts, a digital photo frame from Kodak. It had a wondrous list of features — it could display your pictures, send them to a printer, put on a slide show, play your music — and there was probably no consumer on earth better prepared to put it through its paces.
Dr. Norman, a cognitive scientist who is a professor at Northwestern, has been the maestro of gizmos since publishing “The Design of Everyday Things,” his 1988 critique of VCRs no one could program, doors that couldn’t be opened without instructions and other technologies that seemed designed to drive humans crazy.
Besides writing scholarly analyses of gadgets, Dr. Norman has also been testing and building them for companies like Apple and Hewlett-Packard. One of his consulting gigs involved an early version of this very technology on the shelf at Best Buy: a digital photo frame developed for a startup company that was later acquired by Kodak.
“This is not the frame I designed,” Dr. Norman muttered as he tried to navigate the menu on the screen. “It’s bizarre. You have to look at the front while pushing buttons on the back that you can’t see, but there’s a long row of buttons that all feel the same. Are you expected to memorize them?”
He finally managed to switch the photo in the frame to vertical from horizontal. Then he spent five minutes trying to switch it back.
“I give up,” he said with a shrug. “In any design, once you learn how to do something once, you should be able to do it again. This is really horrible.”
So the bad news is that despite two decades of lectures from Dr. Norman on the virtue of “user-centered” design and the danger of a disease called “featuritis,” people will still be cursing at their gifts this Christmas.
And the worse news is that the gadgets of Christmas future will be even harder to command, because we and our machines are about to go through a rocky transition as the machines get smarter and take over more tasks. As Dr. Norman says in his new book, “The Design of Future Things,” what we’ll have here is a failure to communicate.
“It would be fine,” he told me, “if we had intelligent devices that would work well without any human intervention. My clothes dryer is a good example: it figures out when the clothes are dry and stops. But we are moving toward intelligent machines that still require human supervision and correction, and that is where the danger lies — machines that fight with us over how to do things.”
Can this relationship be saved? Until recently, Dr. Norman believed in the favorite tool of couples therapists: better dialogue. But he has concluded that dialogue isn’t the answer, because we’re too different from the machines.
You can’t explain to your car’s navigation system why you dislike its short, efficient route because the scenery is ugly. Your refrigerator may soon know exactly what food it contains, what you’ve already eaten today and what your calorie limit is, but it won’t be capable of an intelligent dialogue about your need for that piece of cheesecake.
To get along with machines, Dr. Norman suggests we build them using a lesson from Delft, a town in the Netherlands where cyclists whiz through crowds of pedestrians in the town square. If the pedestrians try to avoid an oncoming cyclist, they’re liable to surprise him and collide, but the cyclist can steer around them just fine if they ignore him and keep walking along at the same pace. “Behaving predictably, that’s the key,” Dr. Norman said. “If our smart devices were understandable and predictable, we wouldn’t dislike them so much.” Instead of trying to anticipate our actions, or debating the best plan, machines should let us know clearly what they’re doing.
Instead of beeping and buzzing mysteriously, or flashing arrays of red and white lights, machines should be more like Dr. Norman’s ideal of clear communication: a tea kettle that burbles as the water heats and lets out a steam whistle when it’s finished. He suggests using natural sounds and vibrations that don’t require explanatory labels or a manual no one will ever read.
But no matter how clearly the machines send their signals, Dr. Norman expects that we’ll have a hard time adjusting to them. He wasn’t surprised when I took him on a tour of the new headquarters of The New York Times and he kept hearing complaints from people about the smart elevators and window shades, or the automatic water faucets that refuse to dispense water. (For Dr. Norman’s analysis of our office building of the future, go to nytimes.com/tierneylab.)
As he watched our window shades mysteriously lowering themselves, having detected some change in cloud cover that eluded us, Dr. Norman recalled the fight that he and his colleagues at Northwestern waged against the computerized shades that kept letting sunlight glare on their computer screens.
“It took us a year and a half to get the administration to let us control the shades in our own offices,” he said. “Badly designed so-called intelligent technology makes us feel out of control, helpless. No wonder we hate it.” (For all our complaining, at The Times we have nicer shades that let us override the computer.)
Even when the bugs have been worked out of a new technology, designers will still turn out junk if they don’t get feedback from users — a common problem when their customer is a large bureaucracy. Engineers have known how to build a simple alarm clock for more than a century, so why can’t you figure out how to set the one in your hotel room? Because, Dr. Norman said, the clock was bought by someone in the hotel’s purchasing department who has never tried to navigate all those buttons at 1 in the morning.
“Our frustrations with machines are not going to be solved with better machines,” Dr. Norman said. “Most of our technological difficulties come from the way we interact with our machines and with other people. The technology part of the problem is usually pretty simple. The people part is complicated.”
Findings
Why Nobody Likes a Smart Machine
By JOHN TIERNEY
At a Best Buy store in Midtown Manhattan, Donald Norman was previewing a scene about to be re-enacted in living rooms around the world.
He was playing with one of this year’s hot Christmas gifts, a digital photo frame from Kodak. It had a wondrous list of features — it could display your pictures, send them to a printer, put on a slide show, play your music — and there was probably no consumer on earth better prepared to put it through its paces.
Dr. Norman, a cognitive scientist who is a professor at Northwestern, has been the maestro of gizmos since publishing “The Design of Everyday Things,” his 1988 critique of VCRs no one could program, doors that couldn’t be opened without instructions and other technologies that seemed designed to drive humans crazy.
Besides writing scholarly analyses of gadgets, Dr. Norman has also been testing and building them for companies like Apple and Hewlett-Packard. One of his consulting gigs involved an early version of this very technology on the shelf at Best Buy: a digital photo frame developed for a startup company that was later acquired by Kodak.
“This is not the frame I designed,” Dr. Norman muttered as he tried to navigate the menu on the screen. “It’s bizarre. You have to look at the front while pushing buttons on the back that you can’t see, but there’s a long row of buttons that all feel the same. Are you expected to memorize them?”
He finally managed to switch the photo in the frame to vertical from horizontal. Then he spent five minutes trying to switch it back.
“I give up,” he said with a shrug. “In any design, once you learn how to do something once, you should be able to do it again. This is really horrible.”
So the bad news is that despite two decades of lectures from Dr. Norman on the virtue of “user-centered” design and the danger of a disease called “featuritis,” people will still be cursing at their gifts this Christmas.
And the worse news is that the gadgets of Christmas future will be even harder to command, because we and our machines are about to go through a rocky transition as the machines get smarter and take over more tasks. As Dr. Norman says in his new book, “The Design of Future Things,” what we’ll have here is a failure to communicate.
“It would be fine,” he told me, “if we had intelligent devices that would work well without any human intervention. My clothes dryer is a good example: it figures out when the clothes are dry and stops. But we are moving toward intelligent machines that still require human supervision and correction, and that is where the danger lies — machines that fight with us over how to do things.”
Can this relationship be saved? Until recently, Dr. Norman believed in the favorite tool of couples therapists: better dialogue. But he has concluded that dialogue isn’t the answer, because we’re too different from the machines.
You can’t explain to your car’s navigation system why you dislike its short, efficient route because the scenery is ugly. Your refrigerator may soon know exactly what food it contains, what you’ve already eaten today and what your calorie limit is, but it won’t be capable of an intelligent dialogue about your need for that piece of cheesecake.
To get along with machines, Dr. Norman suggests we build them using a lesson from Delft, a town in the Netherlands where cyclists whiz through crowds of pedestrians in the town square. If the pedestrians try to avoid an oncoming cyclist, they’re liable to surprise him and collide, but the cyclist can steer around them just fine if they ignore him and keep walking along at the same pace. “Behaving predictably, that’s the key,” Dr. Norman said. “If our smart devices were understandable and predictable, we wouldn’t dislike them so much.” Instead of trying to anticipate our actions, or debating the best plan, machines should let us know clearly what they’re doing.
Instead of beeping and buzzing mysteriously, or flashing arrays of red and white lights, machines should be more like Dr. Norman’s ideal of clear communication: a tea kettle that burbles as the water heats and lets out a steam whistle when it’s finished. He suggests using natural sounds and vibrations that don’t require explanatory labels or a manual no one will ever read.
But no matter how clearly the machines send their signals, Dr. Norman expects that we’ll have a hard time adjusting to them. He wasn’t surprised when I took him on a tour of the new headquarters of The New York Times and he kept hearing complaints from people about the smart elevators and window shades, or the automatic water faucets that refuse to dispense water. (For Dr. Norman’s analysis of our office building of the future, go to nytimes.com/tierneylab.)
As he watched our window shades mysteriously lowering themselves, having detected some change in cloud cover that eluded us, Dr. Norman recalled the fight that he and his colleagues at Northwestern waged against the computerized shades that kept letting sunlight glare on their computer screens.
“It took us a year and a half to get the administration to let us control the shades in our own offices,” he said. “Badly designed so-called intelligent technology makes us feel out of control, helpless. No wonder we hate it.” (For all our complaining, at The Times we have nicer shades that let us override the computer.)
Even when the bugs have been worked out of a new technology, designers will still turn out junk if they don’t get feedback from users — a common problem when their customer is a large bureaucracy. Engineers have known how to build a simple alarm clock for more than a century, so why can’t you figure out how to set the one in your hotel room? Because, Dr. Norman said, the clock was bought by someone in the hotel’s purchasing department who has never tried to navigate all those buttons at 1 in the morning.
“Our frustrations with machines are not going to be solved with better machines,” Dr. Norman said. “Most of our technological difficulties come from the way we interact with our machines and with other people. The technology part of the problem is usually pretty simple. The people part is complicated.”
The Next Sexual Revolution
By RONALD W. DWORKIN
December 18, 2007; Page A21
Marxists divide life into real events and pseudo-events. Real events, such as wars and revolutions, have sociological significance. Pseudo-events have no such significance, no matter how exciting they are, or how much of a spectacle they are on television. The Super Bowl is a pseudo-event. So is the World Series. So are most medical discoveries.
The last "real" event in medicine (perhaps the greatest "real" medical event of the 20th century) was the creation of the birth-control pill, which helped fuel a sexual revolution that changed people's entire reproductive patterns. The political consequences reverberate to this day.
Today another "real" event looms: a practical method of storing unfertilized human eggs. Until now, only fertilized eggs (embryos) and sperm have been amenable to cryopreservation. The high water content in unfertilized eggs causes crystallization under freezing conditions, rendering the eggs useless when thawed.
A couple can store embryos indefinitely. A man can store his sperm indefinitely. But until now, a woman has been unable to store her eggs. If she wants to postpone having children, she must mix some sperm with her eggs before freezing them. That means going to the sperm bank, or getting sperm the old-fashioned way: going out on blind dates or asking friends if they know someone, all while worrying about her biological clock and working on her career.
The technology permitting egg storage, called "vitrification," is still in its infancy, but success is inevitable, and when it arrives, the sociological consequences will be enormous. Right now, one in five children world-wide is born to women over 35. When mass egg storage becomes feasible, that number will likely increase dramatically, and include not just women in their late 30s and 40s, but also women in their 50s, even 60s. The hurdle for a 50-year old woman trying to get pregnant is not that she can't carry a baby -- supplemental hormones can fix that, even after menopause -- but that her 50-year old eggs, assuming she has any eggs, won't implant in her uterus. But eggs harvested when she was a 20-year-old, stored for three decades, then thawed and fertilized, will implant. A uterus is ageless.
One consequence of this new technology is a potential reversal of the declining birth rate in Western countries. Low birth rates, especially in Europe, have already caused political and cultural dislocation. Raising children while building a serious career is hard for women, and when presented with the choice, many women opt for the latter. Half of Germany's female scientists, for example, are reportedly childless. By the time a career is established, say, in a woman's 40s, it may be too late to have a baby. If women could store their eggs, they could remain fertile.
Freezing unfertilized eggs gives women a way out of a complicated cultural maze. Decades ago, the lives of men and women diverged at adolescence. Men prepared for careers while women prepared for domestic life. Today, many young men and women go through high school, college and professional school often mistakenly assuming no differences in their respective trajectories.
When I suggested to a 22-year-old female medical student that she consider a career in anesthesiology because the hours were flexible enough to raise a family, she shot back: "I went to Harvard! Now I'm going to Johns Hopkins! I'm going to be a department chairman someday! And you want to put me on the mommy track?" Seven years later, when this woman applied for a job as an anesthesiologist, the first question she asked me was: "I'm trying to have a baby. Can I go part time?"
Our culture encourages women to pursue high-powered careers. Many women must pursue at least some kind of career: With the divorce rate over 50%, women can no longer rely on the integrity of the family unit to support them. The culture paints a rosy image about career and family. Then biological truth breaks through, by which time these women have lost a decade of their best childbearing years.
Women who opt to freeze their unfertilized eggs will gain those years back -- and more -- giving them the freedom to leisurely follow the male career trajectory. No more late night panicking. No more marrying a man you don't love "just to have the baby." No more lurching from Harvard to the mommy track.
True, if these women still decide not to have children when they hit their 40s or 50s, having grown accustomed to freedom, then the population in Western countries will not rise but plummet further. Yet most middle-aged people know that many careers can be pretty dull, without much chance to create. Following rules and procedures until midnight in a law firm may seem acceptable when you're 25, but not when you're 50. Armed with this insight, money and perfect eggs -- and with an expected life span of 86 years -- many women will likely choose to create a family.
But what kind of family? Women in their 30s are reluctant to use banked sperm to get pregnant, in part because they still hope to meet someone, because they can't support themselves as single mothers, or because they fear being judged by their peers.
A woman in her 50s probably has less hope of finding a man who wants to start a family than a woman in her 30s. And so a 50-year-old woman, without serious marital options, loaded with money and eggs, and far too wizened to worry about what other people say, might just go ahead and call that sperm bank if she wants a family. Or maybe she'll marry a 70-year-old man, who thinks that if women can be mothers into their 50s and 60s, why can't he be a father too?
While Marxists divide life into real events and pseudo-events, a more accurate division is between the truths of the times and the truths of fact. Young women forsaking their careers to bear children -- this is a truth of the times. Women driven by nature to procreate but having to find a new way to do so amid today's realities -- this is a truth of fact that is likely to prevail in the end.
Dr. Dworkin is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and the author of "Artificial Happiness" (Basic Books, 2006).
By RONALD W. DWORKIN
December 18, 2007; Page A21
Marxists divide life into real events and pseudo-events. Real events, such as wars and revolutions, have sociological significance. Pseudo-events have no such significance, no matter how exciting they are, or how much of a spectacle they are on television. The Super Bowl is a pseudo-event. So is the World Series. So are most medical discoveries.
The last "real" event in medicine (perhaps the greatest "real" medical event of the 20th century) was the creation of the birth-control pill, which helped fuel a sexual revolution that changed people's entire reproductive patterns. The political consequences reverberate to this day.
Today another "real" event looms: a practical method of storing unfertilized human eggs. Until now, only fertilized eggs (embryos) and sperm have been amenable to cryopreservation. The high water content in unfertilized eggs causes crystallization under freezing conditions, rendering the eggs useless when thawed.
A couple can store embryos indefinitely. A man can store his sperm indefinitely. But until now, a woman has been unable to store her eggs. If she wants to postpone having children, she must mix some sperm with her eggs before freezing them. That means going to the sperm bank, or getting sperm the old-fashioned way: going out on blind dates or asking friends if they know someone, all while worrying about her biological clock and working on her career.
The technology permitting egg storage, called "vitrification," is still in its infancy, but success is inevitable, and when it arrives, the sociological consequences will be enormous. Right now, one in five children world-wide is born to women over 35. When mass egg storage becomes feasible, that number will likely increase dramatically, and include not just women in their late 30s and 40s, but also women in their 50s, even 60s. The hurdle for a 50-year old woman trying to get pregnant is not that she can't carry a baby -- supplemental hormones can fix that, even after menopause -- but that her 50-year old eggs, assuming she has any eggs, won't implant in her uterus. But eggs harvested when she was a 20-year-old, stored for three decades, then thawed and fertilized, will implant. A uterus is ageless.
One consequence of this new technology is a potential reversal of the declining birth rate in Western countries. Low birth rates, especially in Europe, have already caused political and cultural dislocation. Raising children while building a serious career is hard for women, and when presented with the choice, many women opt for the latter. Half of Germany's female scientists, for example, are reportedly childless. By the time a career is established, say, in a woman's 40s, it may be too late to have a baby. If women could store their eggs, they could remain fertile.
Freezing unfertilized eggs gives women a way out of a complicated cultural maze. Decades ago, the lives of men and women diverged at adolescence. Men prepared for careers while women prepared for domestic life. Today, many young men and women go through high school, college and professional school often mistakenly assuming no differences in their respective trajectories.
When I suggested to a 22-year-old female medical student that she consider a career in anesthesiology because the hours were flexible enough to raise a family, she shot back: "I went to Harvard! Now I'm going to Johns Hopkins! I'm going to be a department chairman someday! And you want to put me on the mommy track?" Seven years later, when this woman applied for a job as an anesthesiologist, the first question she asked me was: "I'm trying to have a baby. Can I go part time?"
Our culture encourages women to pursue high-powered careers. Many women must pursue at least some kind of career: With the divorce rate over 50%, women can no longer rely on the integrity of the family unit to support them. The culture paints a rosy image about career and family. Then biological truth breaks through, by which time these women have lost a decade of their best childbearing years.
Women who opt to freeze their unfertilized eggs will gain those years back -- and more -- giving them the freedom to leisurely follow the male career trajectory. No more late night panicking. No more marrying a man you don't love "just to have the baby." No more lurching from Harvard to the mommy track.
True, if these women still decide not to have children when they hit their 40s or 50s, having grown accustomed to freedom, then the population in Western countries will not rise but plummet further. Yet most middle-aged people know that many careers can be pretty dull, without much chance to create. Following rules and procedures until midnight in a law firm may seem acceptable when you're 25, but not when you're 50. Armed with this insight, money and perfect eggs -- and with an expected life span of 86 years -- many women will likely choose to create a family.
But what kind of family? Women in their 30s are reluctant to use banked sperm to get pregnant, in part because they still hope to meet someone, because they can't support themselves as single mothers, or because they fear being judged by their peers.
A woman in her 50s probably has less hope of finding a man who wants to start a family than a woman in her 30s. And so a 50-year-old woman, without serious marital options, loaded with money and eggs, and far too wizened to worry about what other people say, might just go ahead and call that sperm bank if she wants a family. Or maybe she'll marry a 70-year-old man, who thinks that if women can be mothers into their 50s and 60s, why can't he be a father too?
While Marxists divide life into real events and pseudo-events, a more accurate division is between the truths of the times and the truths of fact. Young women forsaking their careers to bear children -- this is a truth of the times. Women driven by nature to procreate but having to find a new way to do so amid today's realities -- this is a truth of fact that is likely to prevail in the end.
Dr. Dworkin is a senior fellow at Hudson Institute and the author of "Artificial Happiness" (Basic Books, 2006).
There is an illuminative multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/26/busin ... ?th&emc=th
December 26, 2007
Hospitals Look to Nuclear Tool to Fight Cancer
By ANDREW POLLACK
There is a new nuclear arms race under way — in hospitals.
Medical centers are rushing to turn nuclear particle accelerators, formerly used only for exotic physics research, into the latest weapons against cancer.
Some experts say the push reflects the best and worst of the nation’s market-based health care system, which tends to pursue the latest, most expensive treatments — without much evidence of improved health — even as soaring costs add to the nation’s economic burden.
The machines accelerate protons to nearly the speed of light and shoot them into tumors. Scientists say proton beams are more precise than the X-rays now typically used for radiation therapy, meaning fewer side effects from stray radiation and, possibly, a higher cure rate.
But a 222-ton accelerator — and a building the size of a football field with walls up to 18-feet thick in which to house it — can cost more than $100 million. That makes a proton center, in the words of one equipment vendor, “the world’s most expensive and complex medical device.”
Until 2000, the United States had only one hospital-based proton therapy center. Now there are five, with more than a dozen others announced. Still more are under consideration.
Some experts say there is a vast need for more proton centers. But others contend that an arms race mentality has taken hold, as medical centers try to be first to take advantage of the prestige — and the profits — a proton site could provide.
“I’m fascinated and horrified by the way it’s developing,” said Dr. Anthony L. Zietman, a radiation oncologist at Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital, which operates a proton center. “This is the dark side of American medicine.”
Once hospitals have made such a huge investment, experts like Dr. Zietman say, doctors will be under pressure to guide patients toward proton therapy when a less costly alternative might suffice.
Similar cost concerns were expressed in the past about other new technology like M.R.I. scanners. While those have become accepted staples of medical practice, there is still concern about their overuse and the impact on medical spending.
Dr. Zietman said that while protons were vital in treating certain rare tumors, they were little better than the latest X-ray technology in dealing with prostate cancer, the common disease that many proton centers are counting on for business.
“You can scarcely tell the difference between them except in price,” he said. Medicare pays about $50,000 to treat prostate cancer with protons, almost twice as much as with X-rays.
Proponents, however, are adamant that proton centers provide better treatment.
“It all comes down to the physics,” said Dr. Jerry D. Slater, the head of radiation medicine at Loma Linda University Medical Center in Southern California. “Every X-ray beam I use puts most of the dose where I don’t want it.” By contrast, he said, proton beams put most of the dose in the tumor.
Loma Linda built the nation’s first hospital-based proton center in 1990 and has treated about 13,000 patients. Its success has inspired others.
Companies have sprung up to help finance, build and operate the proton centers. In some cases, local and state governments, seeking to attract medical tourists, have chipped in. Such financing is allowing proton centers to be built by community hospitals or groups of physicians.
One of the biggest and most costly projects, with a bill exceeding $140 million, is being undertaken by Hampton University in Virginia, a historically black college that does not have a medical school.
“Here at Hampton we dream no small dreams,” said William R. Harvey, the president. He said a proton center would help African-Americans, who have higher rates of some cancers than whites. And he said a medical school was not needed — that doctors would be hired to run the outpatient center.
Some of the planned centers will be very close together, raising the odds of overcapacity. Two proton centers are planned for Oklahoma City, for example, and two more in the western suburbs of Chicago.
The institutions building the centers say there is a need for many more of them. The existing centers, which collectively can treat only several thousand patients a year, are turning people away. And patients who are accepted often have to spend weeks in a city far from their homes.
Proponents say that more than 800,000 Americans — representing nearly two-thirds of new cancer cases — undergo radiation therapy each year. If only 250,000 of them could benefit from protons, they would fill more than 100 centers.
“If they built one across the street I wouldn’t worry about it,” said James D. Cox, chief of radiation oncology at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, which opened a $125 million proton center last year.
X-rays, which are high-energy electromagnetic waves, pass through the body, depositing their energy all along the way, not just in the tumor. By contrast, protons — subatomic particles with a positive electrical charge — can be made to stop on the tumor and dump most of their payload there.
Tumors in or near the eye, for instance, can be eradicated by protons without destroying vision or irradiating the brain. Protons are also valuable for treating tumors in brains, necks and spines, and tumors in children, who are especially sensitive to the side effects of radiation.
When 10-year-old Brooke Bemont was about to undergo X-ray treatment for a brain tumor last summer, a doctor warned her mother, “Do not plan on your daughter ever going to Harvard.” The radiation would damage Brooke’s mental capacity, she said.
So the family, from St. Charles, Ill., spent five weeks in Boston as Brooke was treated with protons at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center. “If there was a potential to save even a little of her brain tissue, there was no question that we would do it,” said Christal Bemont, Brooke’s mother. She added that Brooke was now apparently cancer-free and doing fairly well.
Head, spine and childhood cancers are rare, though. Most people undergoing proton treatment are men with localized prostate cancer.
Proton therapy can help avoid the worst side effects, like impotence, by exposing the bladder and rectum of a prostate patient to less radiation than X-rays. The stray radiation, though, from the newest form of X-rays, called intensity-modulated radiation therapy, is already low, diminishing any advantages from proton therapy.
“There are no solid clinical data that protons are better” said Dr. Theodore S. Lawrence, the chairman of radiation oncology at the University of Michigan. “If you are going to spend a lot more money, you want to make sure the patient can detect an improvement, not just a theoretical improvement.”
An economic analysis by researchers at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia found that proton treatment would be cost-effective for only a small subset of prostate cancer patients.
Lack of data aside, men are flocking to proton treatment.
“I’m 67 years old, and the last thing I want to do is wear a diaper for the rest of my life,” said Pete Freeman of Spokane, Wash., who was undergoing treatment at Loma Linda.
Some men hear about proton therapy from the Brotherhood of the Balloon, a group of 3,000 men who have had the treatment. (A balloon is inserted into the rectum and filled with water to immobilize the prostate during treatment.)
The organization, which now gets some financial support from Loma Linda, was founded by Robert J. Marckini, a former Loma Linda patient who calls himself Proton Bob.
At Loma Linda, prostate cancer treatment requires about two months of daily sessions. The actual irradiation, which the patient does not feel, takes only about a minute. Most men with early prostate cancer have no symptoms from their disease and many say the treatment has few immediate side effects, other than fatigue and an urgency to urinate.
“We go have our treatments, and we go out and play golf,” said Harold J. Phillips, an accountant from Tacoma who was being treated recently at Loma Linda.
Doctors are also learning how to use protons to treat lung and breast cancer. And over time, doctors say, costs should come down as the technology improves and it becomes more routine to build and operate proton centers. One company is trying to develop a $20 million proton system and has received orders from several hospitals.
On the horizon is therapy using beams of carbon ions, which are said to be even more powerful in killing tumors. Touro University says it will build a combined proton and carbon therapy center outside San Francisco, to open as early as 2011. The Mayo Clinic is also seriously considering one. Such centers will cost even more — as much as $300 million.
*****
There are interesting videos linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/26/healt ... ?th&emc=th
December 26, 2007
Six Killers: Alzheimer’s Disease
Finding Alzheimer’s Before a Mind Fails
By DENISE GRADY
For a perfectly healthy woman, Dianne Kerley has had quite a few medical tests in recent years: M.R.I. and PET scans of her brain, two spinal taps and hours of memory and thinking tests.
Ms. Kerley, 52, has spent much of her life in the shadow of an illness that gradually destroys memory, personality and the ability to think, speak and live independently. Her mother, grandmother and a maternal great-aunt all developed Alzheimer’s disease. Her mother, 78, is in a nursing home in the advanced stages of dementia, helpless and barely responsive.
“She’s in her own private purgatory,” Ms. Kerley said.
Ms. Kerley is part of an ambitious new scientific effort to find ways to detect Alzheimer’s disease at the earliest possible moment. Although the disease may seem like a calamity that strikes suddenly in old age, scientists now think it begins long before the mind fails.
“Alzheimer’s disease may be a chronic condition in which changes begin in midlife or even earlier,” said Dr. John C. Morris, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Washington University in St. Louis, where Ms. Kerley volunteers for studies.
But currently, the diagnosis is not made until symptoms develop, and by then it may already be too late to rescue the brain. Drugs now in use temporarily ease symptoms for some, but cannot halt the underlying disease.
Many scientists believe the best hope of progress, maybe the only hope, lies in detecting the disease early and devising treatments to stop it before brain damage becomes extensive. Better still, they would like to intervene even sooner, by identifying risk factors and treating people preventively — the same strategy that has markedly lowered death rates from heart disease, stroke and some cancers.
So far, Alzheimer’s has been unyielding. But research now under way may start answering major questions about when the disease begins and how best to fight it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/26/busin ... ?th&emc=th
December 26, 2007
Hospitals Look to Nuclear Tool to Fight Cancer
By ANDREW POLLACK
There is a new nuclear arms race under way — in hospitals.
Medical centers are rushing to turn nuclear particle accelerators, formerly used only for exotic physics research, into the latest weapons against cancer.
Some experts say the push reflects the best and worst of the nation’s market-based health care system, which tends to pursue the latest, most expensive treatments — without much evidence of improved health — even as soaring costs add to the nation’s economic burden.
The machines accelerate protons to nearly the speed of light and shoot them into tumors. Scientists say proton beams are more precise than the X-rays now typically used for radiation therapy, meaning fewer side effects from stray radiation and, possibly, a higher cure rate.
But a 222-ton accelerator — and a building the size of a football field with walls up to 18-feet thick in which to house it — can cost more than $100 million. That makes a proton center, in the words of one equipment vendor, “the world’s most expensive and complex medical device.”
Until 2000, the United States had only one hospital-based proton therapy center. Now there are five, with more than a dozen others announced. Still more are under consideration.
Some experts say there is a vast need for more proton centers. But others contend that an arms race mentality has taken hold, as medical centers try to be first to take advantage of the prestige — and the profits — a proton site could provide.
“I’m fascinated and horrified by the way it’s developing,” said Dr. Anthony L. Zietman, a radiation oncologist at Harvard and Massachusetts General Hospital, which operates a proton center. “This is the dark side of American medicine.”
Once hospitals have made such a huge investment, experts like Dr. Zietman say, doctors will be under pressure to guide patients toward proton therapy when a less costly alternative might suffice.
Similar cost concerns were expressed in the past about other new technology like M.R.I. scanners. While those have become accepted staples of medical practice, there is still concern about their overuse and the impact on medical spending.
Dr. Zietman said that while protons were vital in treating certain rare tumors, they were little better than the latest X-ray technology in dealing with prostate cancer, the common disease that many proton centers are counting on for business.
“You can scarcely tell the difference between them except in price,” he said. Medicare pays about $50,000 to treat prostate cancer with protons, almost twice as much as with X-rays.
Proponents, however, are adamant that proton centers provide better treatment.
“It all comes down to the physics,” said Dr. Jerry D. Slater, the head of radiation medicine at Loma Linda University Medical Center in Southern California. “Every X-ray beam I use puts most of the dose where I don’t want it.” By contrast, he said, proton beams put most of the dose in the tumor.
Loma Linda built the nation’s first hospital-based proton center in 1990 and has treated about 13,000 patients. Its success has inspired others.
Companies have sprung up to help finance, build and operate the proton centers. In some cases, local and state governments, seeking to attract medical tourists, have chipped in. Such financing is allowing proton centers to be built by community hospitals or groups of physicians.
One of the biggest and most costly projects, with a bill exceeding $140 million, is being undertaken by Hampton University in Virginia, a historically black college that does not have a medical school.
“Here at Hampton we dream no small dreams,” said William R. Harvey, the president. He said a proton center would help African-Americans, who have higher rates of some cancers than whites. And he said a medical school was not needed — that doctors would be hired to run the outpatient center.
Some of the planned centers will be very close together, raising the odds of overcapacity. Two proton centers are planned for Oklahoma City, for example, and two more in the western suburbs of Chicago.
The institutions building the centers say there is a need for many more of them. The existing centers, which collectively can treat only several thousand patients a year, are turning people away. And patients who are accepted often have to spend weeks in a city far from their homes.
Proponents say that more than 800,000 Americans — representing nearly two-thirds of new cancer cases — undergo radiation therapy each year. If only 250,000 of them could benefit from protons, they would fill more than 100 centers.
“If they built one across the street I wouldn’t worry about it,” said James D. Cox, chief of radiation oncology at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, which opened a $125 million proton center last year.
X-rays, which are high-energy electromagnetic waves, pass through the body, depositing their energy all along the way, not just in the tumor. By contrast, protons — subatomic particles with a positive electrical charge — can be made to stop on the tumor and dump most of their payload there.
Tumors in or near the eye, for instance, can be eradicated by protons without destroying vision or irradiating the brain. Protons are also valuable for treating tumors in brains, necks and spines, and tumors in children, who are especially sensitive to the side effects of radiation.
When 10-year-old Brooke Bemont was about to undergo X-ray treatment for a brain tumor last summer, a doctor warned her mother, “Do not plan on your daughter ever going to Harvard.” The radiation would damage Brooke’s mental capacity, she said.
So the family, from St. Charles, Ill., spent five weeks in Boston as Brooke was treated with protons at Massachusetts General Hospital Cancer Center. “If there was a potential to save even a little of her brain tissue, there was no question that we would do it,” said Christal Bemont, Brooke’s mother. She added that Brooke was now apparently cancer-free and doing fairly well.
Head, spine and childhood cancers are rare, though. Most people undergoing proton treatment are men with localized prostate cancer.
Proton therapy can help avoid the worst side effects, like impotence, by exposing the bladder and rectum of a prostate patient to less radiation than X-rays. The stray radiation, though, from the newest form of X-rays, called intensity-modulated radiation therapy, is already low, diminishing any advantages from proton therapy.
“There are no solid clinical data that protons are better” said Dr. Theodore S. Lawrence, the chairman of radiation oncology at the University of Michigan. “If you are going to spend a lot more money, you want to make sure the patient can detect an improvement, not just a theoretical improvement.”
An economic analysis by researchers at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia found that proton treatment would be cost-effective for only a small subset of prostate cancer patients.
Lack of data aside, men are flocking to proton treatment.
“I’m 67 years old, and the last thing I want to do is wear a diaper for the rest of my life,” said Pete Freeman of Spokane, Wash., who was undergoing treatment at Loma Linda.
Some men hear about proton therapy from the Brotherhood of the Balloon, a group of 3,000 men who have had the treatment. (A balloon is inserted into the rectum and filled with water to immobilize the prostate during treatment.)
The organization, which now gets some financial support from Loma Linda, was founded by Robert J. Marckini, a former Loma Linda patient who calls himself Proton Bob.
At Loma Linda, prostate cancer treatment requires about two months of daily sessions. The actual irradiation, which the patient does not feel, takes only about a minute. Most men with early prostate cancer have no symptoms from their disease and many say the treatment has few immediate side effects, other than fatigue and an urgency to urinate.
“We go have our treatments, and we go out and play golf,” said Harold J. Phillips, an accountant from Tacoma who was being treated recently at Loma Linda.
Doctors are also learning how to use protons to treat lung and breast cancer. And over time, doctors say, costs should come down as the technology improves and it becomes more routine to build and operate proton centers. One company is trying to develop a $20 million proton system and has received orders from several hospitals.
On the horizon is therapy using beams of carbon ions, which are said to be even more powerful in killing tumors. Touro University says it will build a combined proton and carbon therapy center outside San Francisco, to open as early as 2011. The Mayo Clinic is also seriously considering one. Such centers will cost even more — as much as $300 million.
*****
There are interesting videos linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/26/healt ... ?th&emc=th
December 26, 2007
Six Killers: Alzheimer’s Disease
Finding Alzheimer’s Before a Mind Fails
By DENISE GRADY
For a perfectly healthy woman, Dianne Kerley has had quite a few medical tests in recent years: M.R.I. and PET scans of her brain, two spinal taps and hours of memory and thinking tests.
Ms. Kerley, 52, has spent much of her life in the shadow of an illness that gradually destroys memory, personality and the ability to think, speak and live independently. Her mother, grandmother and a maternal great-aunt all developed Alzheimer’s disease. Her mother, 78, is in a nursing home in the advanced stages of dementia, helpless and barely responsive.
“She’s in her own private purgatory,” Ms. Kerley said.
Ms. Kerley is part of an ambitious new scientific effort to find ways to detect Alzheimer’s disease at the earliest possible moment. Although the disease may seem like a calamity that strikes suddenly in old age, scientists now think it begins long before the mind fails.
“Alzheimer’s disease may be a chronic condition in which changes begin in midlife or even earlier,” said Dr. John C. Morris, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Washington University in St. Louis, where Ms. Kerley volunteers for studies.
But currently, the diagnosis is not made until symptoms develop, and by then it may already be too late to rescue the brain. Drugs now in use temporarily ease symptoms for some, but cannot halt the underlying disease.
Many scientists believe the best hope of progress, maybe the only hope, lies in detecting the disease early and devising treatments to stop it before brain damage becomes extensive. Better still, they would like to intervene even sooner, by identifying risk factors and treating people preventively — the same strategy that has markedly lowered death rates from heart disease, stroke and some cancers.
So far, Alzheimer’s has been unyielding. But research now under way may start answering major questions about when the disease begins and how best to fight it.
December 30, 2007
Bright Ideas
Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike
By JANET RAE-DUPREE
IT’S a pickle of a paradox: As our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off. Why? Because the walls of the proverbial box in which we think are thickening along with our experience.
Andrew S. Grove, the co-founder of Intel, put it well in 2005 when he told an interviewer from Fortune, “When everybody knows that something is so, it means that nobody knows nothin’.” In other words, it becomes nearly impossible to look beyond what you know and think outside the box you’ve built around yourself.
This so-called curse of knowledge, a phrase used in a 1989 paper in The Journal of Political Economy, means that once you’ve become an expert in a particular subject, it’s hard to imagine not knowing what you do. Your conversations with others in the field are peppered with catch phrases and jargon that are foreign to the uninitiated. When it’s time to accomplish a task — open a store, build a house, buy new cash registers, sell insurance — those in the know get it done the way it has always been done, stifling innovation as they barrel along the well-worn path.
Elizabeth Newton, a psychologist, conducted an experiment on the curse of knowledge while working on her doctorate at Stanford in 1990. She gave one set of people, called “tappers,” a list of commonly known songs from which to choose. Their task was to rap their knuckles on a tabletop to the rhythm of the chosen tune as they thought about it in their heads. A second set of people, called “listeners,” were asked to name the songs.
Before the experiment began, the tappers were asked how often they believed that the listeners would name the songs correctly. On average, tappers expected listeners to get it right about half the time. In the end, however, listeners guessed only 3 of 120 songs tapped out, or 2.5 percent.
The tappers were astounded. The song was so clear in their minds; how could the listeners not “hear” it in their taps?
That’s a common reaction when experts set out to share their ideas in the business world, too, says Chip Heath, who with his brother, Dan, was a co-author of the 2007 book “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.” It’s why engineers design products ultimately useful only to other engineers. It’s why managers have trouble convincing the rank and file to adopt new processes. And it’s why the advertising world struggles to convey commercial messages to consumers.
“I HAVE a DVD remote control with 52 buttons on it, and every one of them is there because some engineer along the line knew how to use that button and believed I would want to use it, too,” Mr. Heath says. “People who design products are experts cursed by their knowledge, and they can’t imagine what it’s like to be as ignorant as the rest of us.”
But there are proven ways to exorcise the curse.
In their book, the Heath brothers outline six “hooks” that they say are guaranteed to communicate a new idea clearly by transforming it into what they call a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story. Each of the letters in the resulting acronym, Succes, refers to a different hook. (“S,” for example, suggests simplifying the message.) Although the hooks of “Made to Stick” focus on the art of communication, there are ways to fashion them around fostering innovation.
To innovate, Mr. Heath says, you have to bring together people with a variety of skills. If those people can’t communicate clearly with one another, innovation gets bogged down in the abstract language of specialization and expertise. “It’s kind of like the ugly American tourist trying to get across an idea in another country by speaking English slowly and more loudly,” he says. “You’ve got to find the common connections.”
In her 2006 book, “Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine — and What Smart Companies Are Doing About It,” Cynthia Barton Rabe proposes bringing in outsiders whom she calls zero-gravity thinkers to keep creativity and innovation on track.
When experts have to slow down and go back to basics to bring an outsider up to speed, she says, “it forces them to look at their world differently and, as a result, they come up with new solutions to old problems.”
She cites as an example the work of a colleague at Ralston Purina who moved to Eveready in the mid-1980s when Ralston bought that company. At the time, Eveready had become a household name because of its sales since the 1950s of inexpensive red plastic and metal flashlights. But by the mid-1980s, the flashlight business, which had been aimed solely at men shopping at hardware stores, was foundering.
While Ms. Rabe’s colleague had no experience with flashlights, she did have plenty of experience in consumer packaging and marketing from her years at Ralston Purina. She proceeded to revamp the flashlight product line to include colors like pink, baby blue and light green — colors that would appeal to women — and began distributing them through grocery store chains.
“It was not incredibly popular as a decision amongst the old guard at Eveready,” Ms. Rabe says. But after the changes, she says, “the flashlight business took off and was wildly successful for many years after that.”
MS. RABE herself experienced similar problems while working as a transient “zero-gravity thinker” at Intel.
“I would ask my very, very basic questions,” she said, noting that it frustrated some of the people who didn’t know her. Once they got past that point, however, “it always turned out that we could come up with some terrific ideas,” she said.
While Ms. Rabe usually worked inside the companies she discussed in her book, she said outside consultants could also serve the zero-gravity role, but only if their expertise was not identical to that of the group already working on the project.
“Look for people with renaissance-thinker tendencies, who’ve done work in a related area but not in your specific field,” she says. “Make it possible for someone who doesn’t report directly to that area to come in and say the emperor has no clothes.”
Janet Rae-Dupree writes about science and emerging technology in Silicon Valley.
Bright Ideas
Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike
By JANET RAE-DUPREE
IT’S a pickle of a paradox: As our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off. Why? Because the walls of the proverbial box in which we think are thickening along with our experience.
Andrew S. Grove, the co-founder of Intel, put it well in 2005 when he told an interviewer from Fortune, “When everybody knows that something is so, it means that nobody knows nothin’.” In other words, it becomes nearly impossible to look beyond what you know and think outside the box you’ve built around yourself.
This so-called curse of knowledge, a phrase used in a 1989 paper in The Journal of Political Economy, means that once you’ve become an expert in a particular subject, it’s hard to imagine not knowing what you do. Your conversations with others in the field are peppered with catch phrases and jargon that are foreign to the uninitiated. When it’s time to accomplish a task — open a store, build a house, buy new cash registers, sell insurance — those in the know get it done the way it has always been done, stifling innovation as they barrel along the well-worn path.
Elizabeth Newton, a psychologist, conducted an experiment on the curse of knowledge while working on her doctorate at Stanford in 1990. She gave one set of people, called “tappers,” a list of commonly known songs from which to choose. Their task was to rap their knuckles on a tabletop to the rhythm of the chosen tune as they thought about it in their heads. A second set of people, called “listeners,” were asked to name the songs.
Before the experiment began, the tappers were asked how often they believed that the listeners would name the songs correctly. On average, tappers expected listeners to get it right about half the time. In the end, however, listeners guessed only 3 of 120 songs tapped out, or 2.5 percent.
The tappers were astounded. The song was so clear in their minds; how could the listeners not “hear” it in their taps?
That’s a common reaction when experts set out to share their ideas in the business world, too, says Chip Heath, who with his brother, Dan, was a co-author of the 2007 book “Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die.” It’s why engineers design products ultimately useful only to other engineers. It’s why managers have trouble convincing the rank and file to adopt new processes. And it’s why the advertising world struggles to convey commercial messages to consumers.
“I HAVE a DVD remote control with 52 buttons on it, and every one of them is there because some engineer along the line knew how to use that button and believed I would want to use it, too,” Mr. Heath says. “People who design products are experts cursed by their knowledge, and they can’t imagine what it’s like to be as ignorant as the rest of us.”
But there are proven ways to exorcise the curse.
In their book, the Heath brothers outline six “hooks” that they say are guaranteed to communicate a new idea clearly by transforming it into what they call a Simple Unexpected Concrete Credentialed Emotional Story. Each of the letters in the resulting acronym, Succes, refers to a different hook. (“S,” for example, suggests simplifying the message.) Although the hooks of “Made to Stick” focus on the art of communication, there are ways to fashion them around fostering innovation.
To innovate, Mr. Heath says, you have to bring together people with a variety of skills. If those people can’t communicate clearly with one another, innovation gets bogged down in the abstract language of specialization and expertise. “It’s kind of like the ugly American tourist trying to get across an idea in another country by speaking English slowly and more loudly,” he says. “You’ve got to find the common connections.”
In her 2006 book, “Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine — and What Smart Companies Are Doing About It,” Cynthia Barton Rabe proposes bringing in outsiders whom she calls zero-gravity thinkers to keep creativity and innovation on track.
When experts have to slow down and go back to basics to bring an outsider up to speed, she says, “it forces them to look at their world differently and, as a result, they come up with new solutions to old problems.”
She cites as an example the work of a colleague at Ralston Purina who moved to Eveready in the mid-1980s when Ralston bought that company. At the time, Eveready had become a household name because of its sales since the 1950s of inexpensive red plastic and metal flashlights. But by the mid-1980s, the flashlight business, which had been aimed solely at men shopping at hardware stores, was foundering.
While Ms. Rabe’s colleague had no experience with flashlights, she did have plenty of experience in consumer packaging and marketing from her years at Ralston Purina. She proceeded to revamp the flashlight product line to include colors like pink, baby blue and light green — colors that would appeal to women — and began distributing them through grocery store chains.
“It was not incredibly popular as a decision amongst the old guard at Eveready,” Ms. Rabe says. But after the changes, she says, “the flashlight business took off and was wildly successful for many years after that.”
MS. RABE herself experienced similar problems while working as a transient “zero-gravity thinker” at Intel.
“I would ask my very, very basic questions,” she said, noting that it frustrated some of the people who didn’t know her. Once they got past that point, however, “it always turned out that we could come up with some terrific ideas,” she said.
While Ms. Rabe usually worked inside the companies she discussed in her book, she said outside consultants could also serve the zero-gravity role, but only if their expertise was not identical to that of the group already working on the project.
“Look for people with renaissance-thinker tendencies, who’ve done work in a related area but not in your specific field,” she says. “Make it possible for someone who doesn’t report directly to that area to come in and say the emperor has no clothes.”
Janet Rae-Dupree writes about science and emerging technology in Silicon Valley.
The future of futurology
Dec 30th 2007
From Economist.com
Think small, think short—and listen
SO THERE you are on the moon, reading The World in 2008 on disposable digital paper and waiting for the videophone to ring. But no rush, because you’re going to live for ever—and if you don’t, there’s a backed-up copy of your brain for downloading to your clone.
Yes? No? Well, that’s how the 21st century looked to some futurologists 40 or 50 years ago, and they’re having a hard time living it down now. You can still get away (as we do) with predicting trends in the world next year, but push the timeline out much further, and you might as well wear a T-shirt saying “crackpot”. Besides, since the West began obsessing a generation ago about accelerating social and technological change, people in government and industry can spend weeks each year in retreats brainstorming and scenario-building about the future of their company or their industry or their world. The only thing special about a futurologist is that he or she has no other job to do.
Small wonder that futurology as we knew it 30 or 40 years ago—the heyday of Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock”, the most popular work of prophecy since Nostradamus—is all but dead. The word “futurologist” has more or less disappeared from the business and academic world, and with it the implication that there might be some established discipline called “futurology”. Futurologists prefer to call themselves “futurists”, and they have stopped claiming to predict what “will” happen. They say that they “tell stories” about what might happen. There are plenty of them about, but they have stopped being famous. You have probably never heard of them unless you are in their world, or in the business of booking speakers for corporate dinners and retreats.
We can see now that the golden age of blockbuster futurology in the 1960s and 1970s was caused, not by the onset of profound technological and social change (as its champions claimed), but by the absence of it. The great determining technologies—electricity, the telephone, the internal combustion engine, even manned flight—were the products of a previous century, and their applications were well understood. The geopolitical fundamentals were stable, too, thanks to the cold war. Futurologists extrapolated the most obvious possibilities, with computers and nuclear weapons as their wild cards. The big difference today is that we assume our determining forces to be ones that 99% of us do not understand at all: genetic engineering, nanotechnology, climate change, clashing cultures and seemingly limitless computing power. When the popular sense of direction is baffled, there is no conventional wisdom for futurologists to appropriate or contradict.
Popcorn and prediction markets
There are still some hold-outs prophesying at the planetary level: James Canton, for example, author of “Extreme Future”. But the best advice for aspirant futurists these days is: think small. The best what-lies-ahead book of 1982 was “Megatrends”, by John Naisbitt, which prophesied the future of humanity. A quarter-century later, its counterpart for 2007 was “Microtrends”, by Mark Penn, a public-relations man who doubles as chief strategy adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. “Microtrends” looks at the prospects for niche social groups such as left-handers and vegan children. The logical next step would be a book called “Nanotrends”, save that the title already belongs to a journal of nano-engineering.
The next rule is: think short-term. An American practitioner, Faith Popcorn, showed the way with “The Popcorn Report” in 1991, applying her foresight to consumer trends instead of rocket science. The Popcornised end of the industry thrives as an adjunct of the marketing business, a research arm for its continuous innovation in consumer goods. One firm, Trendwatching of Amsterdam, predicts in its Trend Report for 2008 a list of social fads and niche markets including “eco-embedded brands” (so green they don’t even need to emphasise it) and “the next small thing” (“What happens when consumers want to be anything but the Joneses?”).
A third piece of advice: say you don’t know. Uncertainty looks smarter than ever before. Even politicians are seeing the use of it: governments that signed the Kyoto protocol on climate change said, in effect: “We don’t know for sure, but best to be on the safe side”—and they have come to look a lot smarter than countries such as America and Australia which claimed to understand climate change well enough to see no need for action.
The last great redoubt of the know-alls has been the financial markets, hedge funds claiming to have winning strategies for beating the average. But after the market panic of 2007 more humility is to be expected there too.
A fourth piece of advice for the budding futurist: get embedded in a particular industry, preferably something to do with computing or national security or global warming. All are fast-growing industries fascinated by uncertainty and with little use for generalists. Global warming, in particular, is making general-purpose futurology all but futile. When the best scientists in the field say openly that they can only guess at the long-term effects, how can a futurologist do better? “I cannot stop my life to spend the next two or ten years to become an expert on the environment,” complains Mr Naisbitt in his latest book, “Mindset” (although the rewards for Al Gore, who did just that, have been high).
A fifth piece of advice: talk less, listen more. Thanks to the internet, every intelligent person can amass the sort of information that used to need travel, networking, research assistants, access to power. It is no coincidence that the old standard work on herd instinct, Charles Mackay’s “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”, has been displaced by James Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds”.
The most heeded futurists these days are not individuals, but prediction markets, where the informed guesswork of many is consolidated into hard probability. Will Osama bin Laden be caught in 2008? Only a 15% chance, said Newsfutures in mid-October 2007. Would Iran have nuclear weapons by January 1st 2008? Only a 6.6% chance, said Inkling Markets. Will George Bush pardon Lewis “Scooter” Libby? A better-than-40% chance, said Intrade. There may even be a prediction market somewhere taking bets on immortality. But beware: long- and short-sellers alike will find it hard to collect.
Dec 30th 2007
From Economist.com
Think small, think short—and listen
SO THERE you are on the moon, reading The World in 2008 on disposable digital paper and waiting for the videophone to ring. But no rush, because you’re going to live for ever—and if you don’t, there’s a backed-up copy of your brain for downloading to your clone.
Yes? No? Well, that’s how the 21st century looked to some futurologists 40 or 50 years ago, and they’re having a hard time living it down now. You can still get away (as we do) with predicting trends in the world next year, but push the timeline out much further, and you might as well wear a T-shirt saying “crackpot”. Besides, since the West began obsessing a generation ago about accelerating social and technological change, people in government and industry can spend weeks each year in retreats brainstorming and scenario-building about the future of their company or their industry or their world. The only thing special about a futurologist is that he or she has no other job to do.
Small wonder that futurology as we knew it 30 or 40 years ago—the heyday of Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock”, the most popular work of prophecy since Nostradamus—is all but dead. The word “futurologist” has more or less disappeared from the business and academic world, and with it the implication that there might be some established discipline called “futurology”. Futurologists prefer to call themselves “futurists”, and they have stopped claiming to predict what “will” happen. They say that they “tell stories” about what might happen. There are plenty of them about, but they have stopped being famous. You have probably never heard of them unless you are in their world, or in the business of booking speakers for corporate dinners and retreats.
We can see now that the golden age of blockbuster futurology in the 1960s and 1970s was caused, not by the onset of profound technological and social change (as its champions claimed), but by the absence of it. The great determining technologies—electricity, the telephone, the internal combustion engine, even manned flight—were the products of a previous century, and their applications were well understood. The geopolitical fundamentals were stable, too, thanks to the cold war. Futurologists extrapolated the most obvious possibilities, with computers and nuclear weapons as their wild cards. The big difference today is that we assume our determining forces to be ones that 99% of us do not understand at all: genetic engineering, nanotechnology, climate change, clashing cultures and seemingly limitless computing power. When the popular sense of direction is baffled, there is no conventional wisdom for futurologists to appropriate or contradict.
Popcorn and prediction markets
There are still some hold-outs prophesying at the planetary level: James Canton, for example, author of “Extreme Future”. But the best advice for aspirant futurists these days is: think small. The best what-lies-ahead book of 1982 was “Megatrends”, by John Naisbitt, which prophesied the future of humanity. A quarter-century later, its counterpart for 2007 was “Microtrends”, by Mark Penn, a public-relations man who doubles as chief strategy adviser to Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign. “Microtrends” looks at the prospects for niche social groups such as left-handers and vegan children. The logical next step would be a book called “Nanotrends”, save that the title already belongs to a journal of nano-engineering.
The next rule is: think short-term. An American practitioner, Faith Popcorn, showed the way with “The Popcorn Report” in 1991, applying her foresight to consumer trends instead of rocket science. The Popcornised end of the industry thrives as an adjunct of the marketing business, a research arm for its continuous innovation in consumer goods. One firm, Trendwatching of Amsterdam, predicts in its Trend Report for 2008 a list of social fads and niche markets including “eco-embedded brands” (so green they don’t even need to emphasise it) and “the next small thing” (“What happens when consumers want to be anything but the Joneses?”).
A third piece of advice: say you don’t know. Uncertainty looks smarter than ever before. Even politicians are seeing the use of it: governments that signed the Kyoto protocol on climate change said, in effect: “We don’t know for sure, but best to be on the safe side”—and they have come to look a lot smarter than countries such as America and Australia which claimed to understand climate change well enough to see no need for action.
The last great redoubt of the know-alls has been the financial markets, hedge funds claiming to have winning strategies for beating the average. But after the market panic of 2007 more humility is to be expected there too.
A fourth piece of advice for the budding futurist: get embedded in a particular industry, preferably something to do with computing or national security or global warming. All are fast-growing industries fascinated by uncertainty and with little use for generalists. Global warming, in particular, is making general-purpose futurology all but futile. When the best scientists in the field say openly that they can only guess at the long-term effects, how can a futurologist do better? “I cannot stop my life to spend the next two or ten years to become an expert on the environment,” complains Mr Naisbitt in his latest book, “Mindset” (although the rewards for Al Gore, who did just that, have been high).
A fifth piece of advice: talk less, listen more. Thanks to the internet, every intelligent person can amass the sort of information that used to need travel, networking, research assistants, access to power. It is no coincidence that the old standard work on herd instinct, Charles Mackay’s “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds”, has been displaced by James Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds”.
The most heeded futurists these days are not individuals, but prediction markets, where the informed guesswork of many is consolidated into hard probability. Will Osama bin Laden be caught in 2008? Only a 15% chance, said Newsfutures in mid-October 2007. Would Iran have nuclear weapons by January 1st 2008? Only a 6.6% chance, said Inkling Markets. Will George Bush pardon Lewis “Scooter” Libby? A better-than-40% chance, said Intrade. There may even be a prediction market somewhere taking bets on immortality. But beware: long- and short-sellers alike will find it hard to collect.
'Immortality' in forecast
Future society also predicts invisibility cloak, end of privacy
Shannon Proudfoot
CanWest News Service
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Virtual immortality, a real-life version of Harry Potter's invisibility cloak and smart fabrics that release a scent to drive away unwanted company could be just over the horizon for 2008 and beyond. That's according to the World Future Society's annual forecast of upcoming innovations.
"We've strived over the years to do one thing and to really excel at it, and that is to be a neutral clearing house for ideas on the future," says Patrick Tucker, director of communications for the society and editor of its magazine, The Futurist.
To that end, the Washington, D.C.-based organization keeps tabs on technological developments, public policy shifts and non-governmental organizations. The work is not about crystal ball prophecies, but highlighting what could happen based on current trends, he adds.
"No one should take them as predictions," he says. "It's impossible to know the future, but it is possible to change it."
Since 1985, The Futurist has published a year-end list of the most relevant forecasts. Some of them may be 20 or 30 years from fruition, Tucker says, but many are immediate possibilities. They've developed a reasonably good record for accuracy, he says.
"We did do a couple of things right that we're very proud of," he says. "We spotlighted the emergence of the Internet, we had someone who wrote about virtual reality before it entered the mainstream. We forecast the end of the Cold War."
So what could 2008 bring?
The society forecasts that the growth of surveillance technologies and voyeuristic venues like YouTube will ultimately spell the death of any notions of "privateness." At the same time, increasingly sophisticated virtual reality graphics and artificial intelligence will allow computers to capture someone's voice and appearance, even their personality and knowledge. This could create "virtual immortality" in which it's possible to visit with the dearly departed long after they've shuffled off this mortal coil.
The World Future Society also believes Harry Potter's invisibility cloak will have real-world competition within a decade, with "optical cloaking" that bends light around an object and makes it disappear from view.
Right now, "smart fabrics" with computing capabilities woven into them are a $400-million market, Tucker says, confined mostly to self-heating car seats and military uses. The technology is still clunky, but as it evolves, he foresees increasingly sophisticated and playful products such as scented clothing.
"You would smell slightly different depending on whether you're listening to one genre of music or another," he says. "You could emit a different fragrance depending on whether you enjoy the company of the person you're with or if you wanted to theoretically send them away."
British researcher Jenny Tillotson has already created garments and accessories that harness some of this potential, he says.
The biggest current obstacle to smart fabric development is finding a tiny and reliable power source, Tucker says.
Wireless Internet access everywhere will be the next major technological breakthrough, according to William Halal, president of TechCast.org, which tracks upcoming innovations and their likely time frames.
Apple's iPhone and similar devices in development at Google have put the Internet in people's pockets, he says, but they have yet to overcome the limitations of a minuscule keyboard and eye-straining screen.
Within the next five to 10 years, artificial intelligence will allow people to simply tell their phones what to do, says Halal, who is also a professor of science, technology and innovation at George Washington University in the U.S. capital. At the same time, display capabilities will become so sophisticated the screen will simply be projected in front of us or onto our eyeglasses, he says -- a development that already exists in prototype.
"It's going to be enormous," he says.
Another development Halal foresees, likely within a decade, is that virtual education will go mainstream. Universities are really conservative institutions at heart, he says, and they've been reluctant to embrace the practice because it's not traditional.
Those programs or schools that have ventured into virtual education have found it prohibitively expensive because they essentially use it to duplicate the experience of a small-scale regular classroom, he says.
"The benefits of virtual education are going to occur when they really leverage the technology and have big numbers, like hundreds or thousands of students around the world, and the best professors are lecturing," Halal says.
It could take the form of sophisticated video conferencing, he says, or eventually professors and students could interact in a virtual classroom through holographic avatars.
In the intellectual sphere, Tucker also sees the deeply ambivalent potential for technology to create a society of "educated illiterates." Artificial intelligence will evolve to the point where we can simply ask our computers a verbal question to get any information we need, he says. When we can "outsource" all our typical reading tasks to computers, traditional literacy could become obsolete, he adds, possibly replaced by web-friendly skills like creativity or critical thinking.
Whether that's a good or bad thing depends on your perspective, he says, but working for the World Future Society doesn't mean he's enthusiastic about everything that might come to pass.
"I would argue that the ability to sit and read and think about information in a slow and patient and focused way is a very valuable skill, and it's one that we're cheapening, which frightens me," Tucker says.
"But other people don't necessarily share that fear."
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Future society also predicts invisibility cloak, end of privacy
Shannon Proudfoot
CanWest News Service
Thursday, January 03, 2008
Virtual immortality, a real-life version of Harry Potter's invisibility cloak and smart fabrics that release a scent to drive away unwanted company could be just over the horizon for 2008 and beyond. That's according to the World Future Society's annual forecast of upcoming innovations.
"We've strived over the years to do one thing and to really excel at it, and that is to be a neutral clearing house for ideas on the future," says Patrick Tucker, director of communications for the society and editor of its magazine, The Futurist.
To that end, the Washington, D.C.-based organization keeps tabs on technological developments, public policy shifts and non-governmental organizations. The work is not about crystal ball prophecies, but highlighting what could happen based on current trends, he adds.
"No one should take them as predictions," he says. "It's impossible to know the future, but it is possible to change it."
Since 1985, The Futurist has published a year-end list of the most relevant forecasts. Some of them may be 20 or 30 years from fruition, Tucker says, but many are immediate possibilities. They've developed a reasonably good record for accuracy, he says.
"We did do a couple of things right that we're very proud of," he says. "We spotlighted the emergence of the Internet, we had someone who wrote about virtual reality before it entered the mainstream. We forecast the end of the Cold War."
So what could 2008 bring?
The society forecasts that the growth of surveillance technologies and voyeuristic venues like YouTube will ultimately spell the death of any notions of "privateness." At the same time, increasingly sophisticated virtual reality graphics and artificial intelligence will allow computers to capture someone's voice and appearance, even their personality and knowledge. This could create "virtual immortality" in which it's possible to visit with the dearly departed long after they've shuffled off this mortal coil.
The World Future Society also believes Harry Potter's invisibility cloak will have real-world competition within a decade, with "optical cloaking" that bends light around an object and makes it disappear from view.
Right now, "smart fabrics" with computing capabilities woven into them are a $400-million market, Tucker says, confined mostly to self-heating car seats and military uses. The technology is still clunky, but as it evolves, he foresees increasingly sophisticated and playful products such as scented clothing.
"You would smell slightly different depending on whether you're listening to one genre of music or another," he says. "You could emit a different fragrance depending on whether you enjoy the company of the person you're with or if you wanted to theoretically send them away."
British researcher Jenny Tillotson has already created garments and accessories that harness some of this potential, he says.
The biggest current obstacle to smart fabric development is finding a tiny and reliable power source, Tucker says.
Wireless Internet access everywhere will be the next major technological breakthrough, according to William Halal, president of TechCast.org, which tracks upcoming innovations and their likely time frames.
Apple's iPhone and similar devices in development at Google have put the Internet in people's pockets, he says, but they have yet to overcome the limitations of a minuscule keyboard and eye-straining screen.
Within the next five to 10 years, artificial intelligence will allow people to simply tell their phones what to do, says Halal, who is also a professor of science, technology and innovation at George Washington University in the U.S. capital. At the same time, display capabilities will become so sophisticated the screen will simply be projected in front of us or onto our eyeglasses, he says -- a development that already exists in prototype.
"It's going to be enormous," he says.
Another development Halal foresees, likely within a decade, is that virtual education will go mainstream. Universities are really conservative institutions at heart, he says, and they've been reluctant to embrace the practice because it's not traditional.
Those programs or schools that have ventured into virtual education have found it prohibitively expensive because they essentially use it to duplicate the experience of a small-scale regular classroom, he says.
"The benefits of virtual education are going to occur when they really leverage the technology and have big numbers, like hundreds or thousands of students around the world, and the best professors are lecturing," Halal says.
It could take the form of sophisticated video conferencing, he says, or eventually professors and students could interact in a virtual classroom through holographic avatars.
In the intellectual sphere, Tucker also sees the deeply ambivalent potential for technology to create a society of "educated illiterates." Artificial intelligence will evolve to the point where we can simply ask our computers a verbal question to get any information we need, he says. When we can "outsource" all our typical reading tasks to computers, traditional literacy could become obsolete, he adds, possibly replaced by web-friendly skills like creativity or critical thinking.
Whether that's a good or bad thing depends on your perspective, he says, but working for the World Future Society doesn't mean he's enthusiastic about everything that might come to pass.
"I would argue that the ability to sit and read and think about information in a slow and patient and focused way is a very valuable skill, and it's one that we're cheapening, which frightens me," Tucker says.
"But other people don't necessarily share that fear."
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Stem cell research can co-exist with ethics
Susan Martinuk
Calgary Herald
Friday, January 04, 2008
CREDIT: Calgary Herald Archive, Getty Images
A graduate student tests for stem cell secretion at the Reeve-Irvine Research Center at University of California.
Recent scientific breakthroughs that have been described as "the biological equivalent of the Wright brothers' first airplane ride" have demonstrated that human skin cells can be converted into the highly valued embryonic state where they theoretically have the potential to develop into any cell, tissue or organ that will treat almost any disease.
Taking fully developed cells back to an immature state may seem like a step backwards. But, once in that state, the addition of nutrients, growth factors and hormones can direct the cells to develop into new heart, nerve, muscle or any kind of cell required to replace or regenerate damaged cells and diseased cells in the body. The technique is called therapeutic cloning.
In November, researchers from the U.S. and Japan reported they had tricked cultured adult cells (grown in the lab) to convert to embryonic cells.
Then, in December, another U.S. group accomplished the same thing, using scrapings of skin cells from adult volunteers.
In other words, a working technique now exists to take a swab of cells from injured or diseased individuals, and then convert them into genetically identical cells that are needed to fix the problem.
The concept is remarkable. The technique is practical, simple and cheap. Most importantly, the implications are enormous, as it now renders moot the controversies that have prevented this research from reaching its full potential.
For years, scientists, politicians and financial investors have squabbled about how to best capture this potential -- and the dividing line has focused on ethics.
One group has supported the use of embryonic stem cells, obtained from human embryos created for that purpose or by destroying large numbers of embryos that are headed for the discard pile at infertility clinics.
Consequently, the research is highly controversial and any progress (or resultant cure) is laden with ethical and moral questions.
A second group skirted the issue by converting readily available adult cells (mostly from blood or bone marrow) into cells needed to treat disease.
The successes of this latter group have far outstripped those of the former, but news of scientific gains was often lost amid the overbearing voices of those who have no qualms about taking a human life to save a human life, and who believe research should be viewed from a strictly utilitarian perspective.
This debate has been driven not by science, but by the power of celebrity.
Michael J. Fox, Christopher Reeve and Mary Tyler Moore have all made heart-rending pleas in support of embryonic stem cell research as a panacea for Parkinson's, spinal cord injuries and diabetes, respectively.
Ronald Reagan's wife, Nancy, also took up the call in the wake of his death from Alzheimer's. All of this produced much public sympathy, but it also created the mistaken impression that all hope lay with embryonic cell research.
President George W. Bush was accused of withholding government money for embryonic stem cell research when, in fact, embryonic research had billions of government and private money at its disposal.
In 2001, Bush directed the majority of federal money toward adult stem cell research and, as unpopular as this may sound, he was right.
Bush backed the right science and made a courageous stand for morality and ethics in medicine.
In contrast, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger may have some explaining to do.
He successfully encouraged voters to support his 2004 proposal for California to borrow $3 billion over 10 years to invest in embryonic stem cell research.
New Jersey voters just rejected a similar proposal (on a far smaller level), even though their governor had promised investment returns of 16,000 per cent. Embryonic stem cell research isn't over. But it will be difficult to justify the wholesale creation, and destruction, of human embryos and the expense that is required to obtain the very same cells that are now readily available by running a cotton swab over the inside of a cheek.
The principle behind Ockham 's razor stands: The simplest solution is the best.
Scottish professor Ian Wilmut, known as a leader in human cloning research and the infamous creator of Dolly (the first cloned sheep), says reprogramming "represents the future for stem cell research" and has abandoned his work utilizing other techniques.
In this case, it is a bonus that the simplest and best solution also preserves our moral obligations to upholding human dignity and life. Our society and our own humanity would surely suffer if we were to abandon those obligations just so we could live our modern lives with less pain and sorrow.
Susan Martinuk's column appears every Friday.
http://www.canada.com/components/print. ... d0eda41e96
***
Astronomer ponders ET's perspective
Alien's view of Earth helps in telescope design
Tom Spears
CanWest News Service
Friday, January 04, 2008
CREDIT: Herald Archive, AFP-Getty Images
University of Florida astronomer Eric Ford said he used space views of Earth, as an alien would see our world, to figure out how to design a space telescope to pick out Earth-like planets throughout the cosmos.
Astronomers from Boston and Florida have reversed the usual search for life on other planets, asking instead: What would we look like if ET, the extraterrestrial, pointed a telescope toward Earth?
Surprisingly, they say, even a faint view of Earth would show we're a likely place to harbour life, even if we just showed up as a single faint dot on some telescope in another solar system.
That's because our brightness -- the reflection of sunlight off our planet -- would grow brighter and dimmer in a pattern that shows the presence of land and oceans, our 24-hour day, and even clouds, they say.
This in turn teaches an excellent lesson in how we should turn the next space telescope toward distant planets, the astronomers believe.
At the University of Florida, astronomer Eric Ford had been wondering for a long time what kind of space telescope should follow Hubble and the other current ones.
"The reason we're doing this is to plan for future (telescope) missions, where we want to look for Earth-like planets," he said.
Searching for planets really needs a space telescope, he said. Observatories on Earth have to look through our atmosphere and the view is too blurry to see an Earth-sized planet far away.
He started figuring out what an eight-metre telescope would see.
(That means the mirror collecting light is eight metres wide -- large, though not the biggest that observatories have today. Coincidentally, that's the biggest size one could squeeze into the space shuttles, or a later launch vessel of similar size.)
Along with astronomers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in the Canary Islands, he got to calculating whether the aliens could detect our home.
It was good news, as long as the aliens are friendly. Clouds reflect a lot of light. Land reflects a medium amount. Oceans don't reflect much at all.
That means that a spinning Earth will show ET a changing pattern of oceans and continents that repeats every 24 hours -- proving we don't always have one side toward the sun, frying, and the other side dark and freezing.
As well, little variations in the basic pattern would reveal clouds coming and going, showing it's warm enough to evaporate some water, but cool enough to have the liquid oceans, too.
"You may say 'Oh, big deal,' but if you did that for the rest of the solar system, there's no other planet that has continents and oceans," he said.
"This doesn't tell you there are little green men. It doesn't tell you there ever was or will be life. But it does tell you how to recognize a planet that has liquid and solids," he said.
Of the 240 planets found around other stars so far, none share these characteristics. That's partly because our current telescopes can mainly find hot planets very close to stars.
"The reason this is hard is that these (Earth-like planets) are sitting next to a very bright star. It's a bit like looking for a firefly next to stadium lights," Ford said.
NASA will launch its Kepler space telescope to search for Earth-like planets in 2009. A future telescope, called the Terrestrial Planet Finder, is still on the drawing board.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
http://www.canada.com/components/print. ... cb5a0fe06b
Susan Martinuk
Calgary Herald
Friday, January 04, 2008
CREDIT: Calgary Herald Archive, Getty Images
A graduate student tests for stem cell secretion at the Reeve-Irvine Research Center at University of California.
Recent scientific breakthroughs that have been described as "the biological equivalent of the Wright brothers' first airplane ride" have demonstrated that human skin cells can be converted into the highly valued embryonic state where they theoretically have the potential to develop into any cell, tissue or organ that will treat almost any disease.
Taking fully developed cells back to an immature state may seem like a step backwards. But, once in that state, the addition of nutrients, growth factors and hormones can direct the cells to develop into new heart, nerve, muscle or any kind of cell required to replace or regenerate damaged cells and diseased cells in the body. The technique is called therapeutic cloning.
In November, researchers from the U.S. and Japan reported they had tricked cultured adult cells (grown in the lab) to convert to embryonic cells.
Then, in December, another U.S. group accomplished the same thing, using scrapings of skin cells from adult volunteers.
In other words, a working technique now exists to take a swab of cells from injured or diseased individuals, and then convert them into genetically identical cells that are needed to fix the problem.
The concept is remarkable. The technique is practical, simple and cheap. Most importantly, the implications are enormous, as it now renders moot the controversies that have prevented this research from reaching its full potential.
For years, scientists, politicians and financial investors have squabbled about how to best capture this potential -- and the dividing line has focused on ethics.
One group has supported the use of embryonic stem cells, obtained from human embryos created for that purpose or by destroying large numbers of embryos that are headed for the discard pile at infertility clinics.
Consequently, the research is highly controversial and any progress (or resultant cure) is laden with ethical and moral questions.
A second group skirted the issue by converting readily available adult cells (mostly from blood or bone marrow) into cells needed to treat disease.
The successes of this latter group have far outstripped those of the former, but news of scientific gains was often lost amid the overbearing voices of those who have no qualms about taking a human life to save a human life, and who believe research should be viewed from a strictly utilitarian perspective.
This debate has been driven not by science, but by the power of celebrity.
Michael J. Fox, Christopher Reeve and Mary Tyler Moore have all made heart-rending pleas in support of embryonic stem cell research as a panacea for Parkinson's, spinal cord injuries and diabetes, respectively.
Ronald Reagan's wife, Nancy, also took up the call in the wake of his death from Alzheimer's. All of this produced much public sympathy, but it also created the mistaken impression that all hope lay with embryonic cell research.
President George W. Bush was accused of withholding government money for embryonic stem cell research when, in fact, embryonic research had billions of government and private money at its disposal.
In 2001, Bush directed the majority of federal money toward adult stem cell research and, as unpopular as this may sound, he was right.
Bush backed the right science and made a courageous stand for morality and ethics in medicine.
In contrast, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger may have some explaining to do.
He successfully encouraged voters to support his 2004 proposal for California to borrow $3 billion over 10 years to invest in embryonic stem cell research.
New Jersey voters just rejected a similar proposal (on a far smaller level), even though their governor had promised investment returns of 16,000 per cent. Embryonic stem cell research isn't over. But it will be difficult to justify the wholesale creation, and destruction, of human embryos and the expense that is required to obtain the very same cells that are now readily available by running a cotton swab over the inside of a cheek.
The principle behind Ockham 's razor stands: The simplest solution is the best.
Scottish professor Ian Wilmut, known as a leader in human cloning research and the infamous creator of Dolly (the first cloned sheep), says reprogramming "represents the future for stem cell research" and has abandoned his work utilizing other techniques.
In this case, it is a bonus that the simplest and best solution also preserves our moral obligations to upholding human dignity and life. Our society and our own humanity would surely suffer if we were to abandon those obligations just so we could live our modern lives with less pain and sorrow.
Susan Martinuk's column appears every Friday.
http://www.canada.com/components/print. ... d0eda41e96
***
Astronomer ponders ET's perspective
Alien's view of Earth helps in telescope design
Tom Spears
CanWest News Service
Friday, January 04, 2008
CREDIT: Herald Archive, AFP-Getty Images
University of Florida astronomer Eric Ford said he used space views of Earth, as an alien would see our world, to figure out how to design a space telescope to pick out Earth-like planets throughout the cosmos.
Astronomers from Boston and Florida have reversed the usual search for life on other planets, asking instead: What would we look like if ET, the extraterrestrial, pointed a telescope toward Earth?
Surprisingly, they say, even a faint view of Earth would show we're a likely place to harbour life, even if we just showed up as a single faint dot on some telescope in another solar system.
That's because our brightness -- the reflection of sunlight off our planet -- would grow brighter and dimmer in a pattern that shows the presence of land and oceans, our 24-hour day, and even clouds, they say.
This in turn teaches an excellent lesson in how we should turn the next space telescope toward distant planets, the astronomers believe.
At the University of Florida, astronomer Eric Ford had been wondering for a long time what kind of space telescope should follow Hubble and the other current ones.
"The reason we're doing this is to plan for future (telescope) missions, where we want to look for Earth-like planets," he said.
Searching for planets really needs a space telescope, he said. Observatories on Earth have to look through our atmosphere and the view is too blurry to see an Earth-sized planet far away.
He started figuring out what an eight-metre telescope would see.
(That means the mirror collecting light is eight metres wide -- large, though not the biggest that observatories have today. Coincidentally, that's the biggest size one could squeeze into the space shuttles, or a later launch vessel of similar size.)
Along with astronomers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and in the Canary Islands, he got to calculating whether the aliens could detect our home.
It was good news, as long as the aliens are friendly. Clouds reflect a lot of light. Land reflects a medium amount. Oceans don't reflect much at all.
That means that a spinning Earth will show ET a changing pattern of oceans and continents that repeats every 24 hours -- proving we don't always have one side toward the sun, frying, and the other side dark and freezing.
As well, little variations in the basic pattern would reveal clouds coming and going, showing it's warm enough to evaporate some water, but cool enough to have the liquid oceans, too.
"You may say 'Oh, big deal,' but if you did that for the rest of the solar system, there's no other planet that has continents and oceans," he said.
"This doesn't tell you there are little green men. It doesn't tell you there ever was or will be life. But it does tell you how to recognize a planet that has liquid and solids," he said.
Of the 240 planets found around other stars so far, none share these characteristics. That's partly because our current telescopes can mainly find hot planets very close to stars.
"The reason this is hard is that these (Earth-like planets) are sitting next to a very bright star. It's a bit like looking for a firefly next to stadium lights," Ford said.
NASA will launch its Kepler space telescope to search for Earth-like planets in 2009. A future telescope, called the Terrestrial Planet Finder, is still on the drawing board.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
http://www.canada.com/components/print. ... cb5a0fe06b
With venture capital cash in hand, 'YouTube for ideas' becomes a reality
By Tim Arango
http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=9043331
Sunday, January 6, 2008
NEW YORK: In June 2006, Peter Hopkins, a civic-minded and idealistic 2004 Harvard graduate, trekked up to his alma mater from New York for a meeting with Lawrence Summers, the economist and former U.S. Treasury secretary.
Hopkins, who finagled the appointment through his friendship with Summers' assistant, had a business idea: a Web site that could do for intellectuals what YouTube, the popular video-sharing site, did for bulldogs on skateboards.
The pitch - "a YouTube for ideas" - appealed to Summers. "Larry, to his credit, is open to new ideas," Hopkins recalled recently. "He grilled me for two hours." In the age of user-generated content, Summers did have one worry: "Let's say someone puts up a porn video next to my macroeconomic speech?"
It took awhile, but a year after that meeting, Summers decided to invest ("a few tens of thousands of dollars," he said, adding "not something I'm hoping to retire on") in the site, called Big Think, which officially makes its debut Monday after several months of testing.
Big Think (www.bigthink.com) mixes interviews with public intellectuals from a variety of fields, from politics to law to business, and allows users to engage in debates on issues like global warming and the two-party system. It plans to add new features as it goes along, including a Facebook-like application for social networking, and Hopkins said he would like the site to become a go-to place for college students looking for original sources.
"I've had the general view that there is a hunger for people my age looking for more intellectual content," said Summers, who resigned as Harvard president in 2006 after making controversial comments about the lack of women in science and engineering. "I saw it as president of Harvard when I saw CEOs come up to my wife and want to discuss Hawthorne." (His wife, Elisa New, is a professor of English at Harvard).
A handful of other deep-pocketed investors also decided to chip in, including Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist and co-founder of PayPal, the online payments site; Tom Scott, who struck it rich by founding, and selling, the juice company Nantucket Nectars and now owns Plum TV, a collection of local television stations in wealthy playgrounds like Aspen, Martha's Vineyard and the Hamptons; the television producer Gary David Goldberg, who was behind the hit shows "Spin City" and "Family Ties"; and David Frankel, a venture capitalist who was the lead investor in Big Think.
Frankel said "the initial investors may put in more. I imagine we will go out and raise more money in the future."
Hopkins and his partner, Victoria Brown, germinated the idea for Big Think while working together at PBS on the "Charlie Rose Show" in 2006.
When they surveyed the landscape, Hopkins, 24, and Brown, 33, saw a vast array of celebrity and sophomoric video content (remember the clips of cats urinating in toilets that caused a sensation on YouTube?).
"Everyone says Americans are stupid - that's what we generally heard from venture capitalists" when trying to raise money, Hopkins said. Obviously, Hopkins and Brown felt differently - and the success of the business basically hinges on proving that Americans have an appetite for other kinds of content.
Of course, Hopkins and Brown are not the first to see the Internet as an opportunity to further public discourse. It was invented largely by academics, and numerous sites like Arts & Letters Daily, an offshoot of the Chronicle of Higher Education, seek to serve intellectuals.
Big Think's business model right now is rudimentary: attract enough viewers, then sell advertising.
So for the time being, money will be flowing one way - out the door. Over the past several months, Big Think's handful of producers, working out of a pod of desks in a New York office space, have amassed a library of about 180 interviews with leading thinkers, politicians and businesspeople like the Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and the Blackstone co-founder Pete Peterson. Many of the interviews were conducted in a closet-turned-studio in a back room off the kitchen.
The interview style, borrowed from the documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, makes the interviewer almost an afterthought. The person asking the questions sits in an even smaller closet behind a shower curtain, and the subject hears the questions from a closed-circuit monitor. The finished product eliminates the interviewer's voice, and the questions appear as text on the screen.
"The whole idea is really to take the interviewer out of the equation," Hopkins said. "It allows people to be very candid. Pete Peterson went on about how his mother never loved him. It was like he was coming in for his last testament."
Tom Freston, the former chief executive of Viacom, has shown little interest in publicly reflecting on his 2005 firing by Sumner Redstone, the Viacom chairman. But he agreed to discuss it with Big Think, saying during an interview, "Say if you're a CEO of a public company, a lot of it you're playing defense. You're dealing with problems or crises. At the moment, in the smaller life I have for myself I've got a lot less of that, which is a good thing."
Videos stockpiled over the past months will be rolled out piecemeal and used in a variety of ways. For example, the site may pose the question "are two parties enough?" and assemble clips from U.S. politicians like John McCain and Dennis Kucinich. Readers would then have an opportunity to submit their own views.
"The idea behind Big Think is that you do have to sit down for a few minutes and listen to people who know more than you do," Hopkins said.
Hopkins expects his site will naturally appeal to secular Eastern intellectuals, but he wants to challenge their secularism with sections on faith and love and happiness. "There's a ton of evangelicals," including an interview with Rick Warren, the pastor and best-selling author of "The Purpose Driven Life."
"People, whether or not they believe in God, these issues really resonate," said Hopkins. "Look at the success of 'The Secret' and 'The Purpose Driven Life.' "
By Tim Arango
http://www.iht.com/bin/printfriendly.php?id=9043331
Sunday, January 6, 2008
NEW YORK: In June 2006, Peter Hopkins, a civic-minded and idealistic 2004 Harvard graduate, trekked up to his alma mater from New York for a meeting with Lawrence Summers, the economist and former U.S. Treasury secretary.
Hopkins, who finagled the appointment through his friendship with Summers' assistant, had a business idea: a Web site that could do for intellectuals what YouTube, the popular video-sharing site, did for bulldogs on skateboards.
The pitch - "a YouTube for ideas" - appealed to Summers. "Larry, to his credit, is open to new ideas," Hopkins recalled recently. "He grilled me for two hours." In the age of user-generated content, Summers did have one worry: "Let's say someone puts up a porn video next to my macroeconomic speech?"
It took awhile, but a year after that meeting, Summers decided to invest ("a few tens of thousands of dollars," he said, adding "not something I'm hoping to retire on") in the site, called Big Think, which officially makes its debut Monday after several months of testing.
Big Think (www.bigthink.com) mixes interviews with public intellectuals from a variety of fields, from politics to law to business, and allows users to engage in debates on issues like global warming and the two-party system. It plans to add new features as it goes along, including a Facebook-like application for social networking, and Hopkins said he would like the site to become a go-to place for college students looking for original sources.
"I've had the general view that there is a hunger for people my age looking for more intellectual content," said Summers, who resigned as Harvard president in 2006 after making controversial comments about the lack of women in science and engineering. "I saw it as president of Harvard when I saw CEOs come up to my wife and want to discuss Hawthorne." (His wife, Elisa New, is a professor of English at Harvard).
A handful of other deep-pocketed investors also decided to chip in, including Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist and co-founder of PayPal, the online payments site; Tom Scott, who struck it rich by founding, and selling, the juice company Nantucket Nectars and now owns Plum TV, a collection of local television stations in wealthy playgrounds like Aspen, Martha's Vineyard and the Hamptons; the television producer Gary David Goldberg, who was behind the hit shows "Spin City" and "Family Ties"; and David Frankel, a venture capitalist who was the lead investor in Big Think.
Frankel said "the initial investors may put in more. I imagine we will go out and raise more money in the future."
Hopkins and his partner, Victoria Brown, germinated the idea for Big Think while working together at PBS on the "Charlie Rose Show" in 2006.
When they surveyed the landscape, Hopkins, 24, and Brown, 33, saw a vast array of celebrity and sophomoric video content (remember the clips of cats urinating in toilets that caused a sensation on YouTube?).
"Everyone says Americans are stupid - that's what we generally heard from venture capitalists" when trying to raise money, Hopkins said. Obviously, Hopkins and Brown felt differently - and the success of the business basically hinges on proving that Americans have an appetite for other kinds of content.
Of course, Hopkins and Brown are not the first to see the Internet as an opportunity to further public discourse. It was invented largely by academics, and numerous sites like Arts & Letters Daily, an offshoot of the Chronicle of Higher Education, seek to serve intellectuals.
Big Think's business model right now is rudimentary: attract enough viewers, then sell advertising.
So for the time being, money will be flowing one way - out the door. Over the past several months, Big Think's handful of producers, working out of a pod of desks in a New York office space, have amassed a library of about 180 interviews with leading thinkers, politicians and businesspeople like the Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer and the Blackstone co-founder Pete Peterson. Many of the interviews were conducted in a closet-turned-studio in a back room off the kitchen.
The interview style, borrowed from the documentary filmmaker Errol Morris, makes the interviewer almost an afterthought. The person asking the questions sits in an even smaller closet behind a shower curtain, and the subject hears the questions from a closed-circuit monitor. The finished product eliminates the interviewer's voice, and the questions appear as text on the screen.
"The whole idea is really to take the interviewer out of the equation," Hopkins said. "It allows people to be very candid. Pete Peterson went on about how his mother never loved him. It was like he was coming in for his last testament."
Tom Freston, the former chief executive of Viacom, has shown little interest in publicly reflecting on his 2005 firing by Sumner Redstone, the Viacom chairman. But he agreed to discuss it with Big Think, saying during an interview, "Say if you're a CEO of a public company, a lot of it you're playing defense. You're dealing with problems or crises. At the moment, in the smaller life I have for myself I've got a lot less of that, which is a good thing."
Videos stockpiled over the past months will be rolled out piecemeal and used in a variety of ways. For example, the site may pose the question "are two parties enough?" and assemble clips from U.S. politicians like John McCain and Dennis Kucinich. Readers would then have an opportunity to submit their own views.
"The idea behind Big Think is that you do have to sit down for a few minutes and listen to people who know more than you do," Hopkins said.
Hopkins expects his site will naturally appeal to secular Eastern intellectuals, but he wants to challenge their secularism with sections on faith and love and happiness. "There's a ton of evangelicals," including an interview with Rick Warren, the pastor and best-selling author of "The Purpose Driven Life."
"People, whether or not they believe in God, these issues really resonate," said Hopkins. "Look at the success of 'The Secret' and 'The Purpose Driven Life.' "
Embryo cloning should cease
Research should focus on work that doesn't compromise ethics
Calgary Herald
Sunday, January 20, 2008
It was exactly two months ago that scientists working on independent projects at Japan's Kyoto University and the University of Wisconsin came up with a way to obtain stem cells without using embryos.
So it is rather strange that Stemagen Corp. of La Jolla, Calif., claims its researchers have successfully cloned human embryos and that their work will lead to great strides in the stem cell field. The truth is, it won't -- and it shouldn't go forward. There's no need for it, with the dazzlingly simple technique developed by the Japanese and American researchers, which involves reprogramming four genes in human skin cells. The reprogramming is like reformatting a computer disk, making the cells ready to be "initialized" to create whatever specific cell is needed.
The California researchers say they cloned five embryos at the blastocyst stage. According to the Advanced Fertility Center of Chicago, a blastocyst is an embryo that "has developed to the point of having two different cell components and a fluid cavity. Human embryos . . . usually reach the blastocyst stage by five days after fertilization."
A blastocyst is a pre-embryonic stage that occurs before the developing mass of cells normally implants itself in the wall of the uterus, to continue developing into a fetus.
The scientists in Japan and Wisconsin say their method can produce stem cells genetically matched to the donor, without the morally repugnant processes of cloning or creating and then killing human embryos for their stem cells.
There is more than a tinge of the Frankensteinish to the La Jolla lab's work. No stem cells could be taken from the blastocysts because during the scientific process of verifying that these were actually clones, the stem cells were destroyed.
These embryos, then, appear to have been created solely for the purpose of seeing if it could finally be done, to achieve some sort of misguided prestige in the scientific community at being the first to attain such a dubious distinction.
Dr. Douglas Melton, co-director of the Stem Cell Institute at Harvard University, calls the Japanese and American researchers' method "ethically uncomplicated."
There is no need for the La Jolla lab, or any other organization for that matter, to continue trying to clone human embryos; they should redirect their work in accordance with the latest development, instead.
Certain things need to firmly remain taboo in an enlightened society. One of them is performing ghoulish replications of human embryos just for the sake of it, and the other is creating human life, only to kill it for the purposes of science.
Research has come up with a new approach that liberates stem cell work from its moral shadows. It should be embraced for its impeccable ethics.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Research should focus on work that doesn't compromise ethics
Calgary Herald
Sunday, January 20, 2008
It was exactly two months ago that scientists working on independent projects at Japan's Kyoto University and the University of Wisconsin came up with a way to obtain stem cells without using embryos.
So it is rather strange that Stemagen Corp. of La Jolla, Calif., claims its researchers have successfully cloned human embryos and that their work will lead to great strides in the stem cell field. The truth is, it won't -- and it shouldn't go forward. There's no need for it, with the dazzlingly simple technique developed by the Japanese and American researchers, which involves reprogramming four genes in human skin cells. The reprogramming is like reformatting a computer disk, making the cells ready to be "initialized" to create whatever specific cell is needed.
The California researchers say they cloned five embryos at the blastocyst stage. According to the Advanced Fertility Center of Chicago, a blastocyst is an embryo that "has developed to the point of having two different cell components and a fluid cavity. Human embryos . . . usually reach the blastocyst stage by five days after fertilization."
A blastocyst is a pre-embryonic stage that occurs before the developing mass of cells normally implants itself in the wall of the uterus, to continue developing into a fetus.
The scientists in Japan and Wisconsin say their method can produce stem cells genetically matched to the donor, without the morally repugnant processes of cloning or creating and then killing human embryos for their stem cells.
There is more than a tinge of the Frankensteinish to the La Jolla lab's work. No stem cells could be taken from the blastocysts because during the scientific process of verifying that these were actually clones, the stem cells were destroyed.
These embryos, then, appear to have been created solely for the purpose of seeing if it could finally be done, to achieve some sort of misguided prestige in the scientific community at being the first to attain such a dubious distinction.
Dr. Douglas Melton, co-director of the Stem Cell Institute at Harvard University, calls the Japanese and American researchers' method "ethically uncomplicated."
There is no need for the La Jolla lab, or any other organization for that matter, to continue trying to clone human embryos; they should redirect their work in accordance with the latest development, instead.
Certain things need to firmly remain taboo in an enlightened society. One of them is performing ghoulish replications of human embryos just for the sake of it, and the other is creating human life, only to kill it for the purposes of science.
Research has come up with a new approach that liberates stem cell work from its moral shadows. It should be embraced for its impeccable ethics.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
http://www.abc4.com/mediacenter/local.a ... eoID=61147
Merry Go Round Empower Playground
The Empower Playground uses kid-power to create enough energy to light their school's classrooms. The project was designed by Brigham Young University engineering students. The first system will be installed in a community in Ghana.
Video story from ABC4 News in Utah.
Merry Go Round Empower Playground
The Empower Playground uses kid-power to create enough energy to light their school's classrooms. The project was designed by Brigham Young University engineering students. The first system will be installed in a community in Ghana.
Video story from ABC4 News in Utah.
Patient uses own stem cells for new jaw
Sami Torma
Reuters
Saturday, February 02, 2008
Scientists in Finland said they had replaced a 65-year-old patient's upper jaw with a bone transplant cultivated from stem cells isolated from his own fatty tissue and grown inside his abdomen.
Researchers said on Friday the breakthrough opened new ways to treat severe tissue damage and made the prospect of custom-made living spare parts for humans a step closer to reality.
"There have been a couple of similar-sounding procedures before, but these didn't use the patient's own stem cells that were first cultured and expanded in laboratory and differentiated into bone tissue," said Riitta Suuronen of the Regea Institute of Regenerative Medicine, part of the University of Tampere.
She told a news conference the patient was recovering more quickly than he would have if he had received a bone graft from his leg.
"From the outside nobody would be able to tell he has been through such a procedure," she said.
She added, the team used no materials from animals -- preventing the risk of transmitting viruses than can be hidden in an animal's DNA, and followed European Union guidelines.
Stem cells are the body's master cells and they can be found throughout blood and tissues. Researchers have recently found that fat contains stem cells which can be directed to form a variety of different tissues. Using a patient's own stem cells provides a tailor-made transplant that the body should not reject.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Sami Torma
Reuters
Saturday, February 02, 2008
Scientists in Finland said they had replaced a 65-year-old patient's upper jaw with a bone transplant cultivated from stem cells isolated from his own fatty tissue and grown inside his abdomen.
Researchers said on Friday the breakthrough opened new ways to treat severe tissue damage and made the prospect of custom-made living spare parts for humans a step closer to reality.
"There have been a couple of similar-sounding procedures before, but these didn't use the patient's own stem cells that were first cultured and expanded in laboratory and differentiated into bone tissue," said Riitta Suuronen of the Regea Institute of Regenerative Medicine, part of the University of Tampere.
She told a news conference the patient was recovering more quickly than he would have if he had received a bone graft from his leg.
"From the outside nobody would be able to tell he has been through such a procedure," she said.
She added, the team used no materials from animals -- preventing the risk of transmitting viruses than can be hidden in an animal's DNA, and followed European Union guidelines.
Stem cells are the body's master cells and they can be found throughout blood and tissues. Researchers have recently found that fat contains stem cells which can be directed to form a variety of different tissues. Using a patient's own stem cells provides a tailor-made transplant that the body should not reject.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Clock accurate for 200 million years
Atomic instrument vies to be world's most accurate
Julie Steenhuysen
Reuters
Saturday, February 16, 2008
U.S. physicists have made a clock so accurate it will neither gain nor lose even a second in more than 200 million years, a finding sure to please even the most punctually minded.
The clock, described in the Friday issue of the journal Science, outperforms the official atomic clock used by the U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology, which promises to keep accurate time down to the second for 80 million years.
The new atomic clock is vying for the title of world's most accurate with another experimental clock developed in the same lab at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, a collaboration between NIST and the University of Colorado in Boulder.
"These clocks are improving so rapidly that it is impossible to tell which one will be the best," said Tom 0'Brian, head of the Time and Frequency Division at NIST.
Such highly precise clocks are critical for deep space navigation, where even a slight error can make or break a space mission.
The secret to making an extremely accurate clock is speeding up how fast it ticks. "If you make a mistake, you can know about that mistake very fast," said Jun Ye, who developed the atomic clock at JILA.
Ye's clock has 430 trillion "ticks" per second.
Its pendulum uses thousands of strontium atoms suspended in grids of laser light. This allows the researchers to trap the atoms and measure the movement of energy inside.
"Essentially, we are probing the energy structure of the atom. We are probing how electrons make transitions between a set of energy levels," Ye said in a telephone interview.
"This is the time scale that was made by the universe. It is very stable."
To test his clock's accuracy, Ye and colleagues compared it with another optical atomic clock -- this one measuring calcium atoms.
****
Spacewalkers connect solar observatory
Ed Stoddard and Irene Klotz
Reuters
Saturday, February 16, 2008
CREDIT: NASA video, Agence France-Presse, Getty Images
Atlantis mission specialist Stanley Love moves the European Technology Exposure Facility from the space shuttle's cargo bay on Friday for installation on the International Space Station.
Two shuttle Atlantis astronauts wrapped up a spacewalk Friday to install a solar observatory and a science experiment on Europe's space lab.
The Columbus module, the European Space Agency's $1.9 billion permanent space laboratory, was launched aboard NASA's Atlantis last week and connected to the International Space Station Monday.
The solar observatory contains instruments which will, among other things, measure aspects of the sun's energy and help scientists decipher the impact of solar activity on Earth's climate.
The other facility attached to Columbus' hull will be used to conduct a range of space-related experiments. These include exposing lichen and fungi for around 1 1/2 years to space conditions to test the limits of their survival.
Another will evaluate the effects of space on different materials which may be used on spacecraft in low earth orbit.
"The aim is to improve components and materials for spacecraft design," Alan Thirkettle, the ISS program manager for the European Space Agency, told Reuters.
Lead spacewalker Rex Walheim and partner Stanley Love flew out of the station's airlock about 8:15 a.m. EST to begin the third and final outside excursion planned during Atlantis' nine-day visit. It lasted almost 7-1/2 hours.
They also picked up a broken gyroscope and did some inspection work on a hand rail outside the airlock but did not have time to examine a contaminated solar wing joint that has mired station operations since October.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Atomic instrument vies to be world's most accurate
Julie Steenhuysen
Reuters
Saturday, February 16, 2008
U.S. physicists have made a clock so accurate it will neither gain nor lose even a second in more than 200 million years, a finding sure to please even the most punctually minded.
The clock, described in the Friday issue of the journal Science, outperforms the official atomic clock used by the U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology, which promises to keep accurate time down to the second for 80 million years.
The new atomic clock is vying for the title of world's most accurate with another experimental clock developed in the same lab at the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics, a collaboration between NIST and the University of Colorado in Boulder.
"These clocks are improving so rapidly that it is impossible to tell which one will be the best," said Tom 0'Brian, head of the Time and Frequency Division at NIST.
Such highly precise clocks are critical for deep space navigation, where even a slight error can make or break a space mission.
The secret to making an extremely accurate clock is speeding up how fast it ticks. "If you make a mistake, you can know about that mistake very fast," said Jun Ye, who developed the atomic clock at JILA.
Ye's clock has 430 trillion "ticks" per second.
Its pendulum uses thousands of strontium atoms suspended in grids of laser light. This allows the researchers to trap the atoms and measure the movement of energy inside.
"Essentially, we are probing the energy structure of the atom. We are probing how electrons make transitions between a set of energy levels," Ye said in a telephone interview.
"This is the time scale that was made by the universe. It is very stable."
To test his clock's accuracy, Ye and colleagues compared it with another optical atomic clock -- this one measuring calcium atoms.
****
Spacewalkers connect solar observatory
Ed Stoddard and Irene Klotz
Reuters
Saturday, February 16, 2008
CREDIT: NASA video, Agence France-Presse, Getty Images
Atlantis mission specialist Stanley Love moves the European Technology Exposure Facility from the space shuttle's cargo bay on Friday for installation on the International Space Station.
Two shuttle Atlantis astronauts wrapped up a spacewalk Friday to install a solar observatory and a science experiment on Europe's space lab.
The Columbus module, the European Space Agency's $1.9 billion permanent space laboratory, was launched aboard NASA's Atlantis last week and connected to the International Space Station Monday.
The solar observatory contains instruments which will, among other things, measure aspects of the sun's energy and help scientists decipher the impact of solar activity on Earth's climate.
The other facility attached to Columbus' hull will be used to conduct a range of space-related experiments. These include exposing lichen and fungi for around 1 1/2 years to space conditions to test the limits of their survival.
Another will evaluate the effects of space on different materials which may be used on spacecraft in low earth orbit.
"The aim is to improve components and materials for spacecraft design," Alan Thirkettle, the ISS program manager for the European Space Agency, told Reuters.
Lead spacewalker Rex Walheim and partner Stanley Love flew out of the station's airlock about 8:15 a.m. EST to begin the third and final outside excursion planned during Atlantis' nine-day visit. It lasted almost 7-1/2 hours.
They also picked up a broken gyroscope and did some inspection work on a hand rail outside the airlock but did not have time to examine a contaminated solar wing joint that has mired station operations since October.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
February 19, 2008
Lowering Odds of Multiple Births
By LAURIE TARKAN
In the complex, expensive and emotionally charged world of fertility treatment, doctors are sounding a call to arms to reverse the soaring rate of multiple births.
The doctors are responding to an unintended consequence of the success of in vitro fertilization — that it is often too successful. Since 1980, when the technique became available in the United States, the rate of twins in all births has climbed 70 percent, to 3.2 percent of births in 2004.
Much of the increase, experts say, is a result of in vitro treatment. The rate of triplets and higher-order multiples increased even more from 1980 to 1998. It is not that twins or triplets are undesirable, doctors say. But multiple pregnancies often lead to risky preterm births and other complications. With that in mind, fertility centers are trying to lower the odds of such pregnancies, even at a cost of slightly lower success rates.
“Now is the time for all of us to rethink what is the paradigm of a successful I.V.F. pregnancy,” said Dr. Aaron K. Styer, a reproductive endocrinologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital Fertility Center in Boston. “Is it a pregnancy without regard to the number of gestations or a pregnancy with a singleton live birth?”
In I.V.F., a woman is given ovulation-induction hormones to produce multiple eggs, which are retrieved, fertilized with her partner’s sperm and transferred back to her uterus. The more embryos transferred, the higher the likelihood of multiples.
To achieve the goal of a single healthy baby, clinics are focusing on transferring fewer embryos and on developing more sophisticated ways to identify the healthiest embryos with the greatest chance of success.
“We have been getting better at I.V.F. over the years, and as success rates go up, the number we transfer has to go down accordingly,” said Dr. Judy E. Stern, director of the human embryology and andrology lab at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H. “Where three embryos used to work and give you mostly singletons, now we transfer two, because we’re making better embryos and more of them implant.”
The number of I.V.F. cycles in which four or more embryos were transferred has dropped sharply, to 21 percent in 2004 from 62 percent in 1996. Although the efforts have substantially lowered the rates of triplets born through in vitro fertilization, they have not made a dent in the twin rate. That is because many doctors and patients are reluctant to take the final step to ensure a single birth, a process called S.E.T., for single embryo transfer. From 1996 to 2004, the rate of such procedures rose modestly, to 8 percent from 6 percent.
The American Society of Reproductive Medicine now recommends that women younger than 35 with a good prognosis have just one embryo transferred. Women under 35 make up 44 percent of I.V.F. cycles.
In women older than 37, who have a higher incidence of embryos with chromosomal defects, three to five embryos are still recommended, depending on the woman’s age.
The main obstacle to single embryo transfer is its lower success rate. Some experts ask women to agree to two cycles, first transferring one fresh embryo while freezing the others. If the first transfer fails, doctors transfer a single frozen embryo, a much less costly and onerous procedure. That approach yields similar success rates to transferring two at once while drastically reducing twin rates.
With momentum building to transfer just one or two embryos, clinics focus on choosing the embryo most likely to succeed. Selecting embryos has traditionally been based on a visual examination of their morphology — shape, number of divisions and other physical factors. But morphology does not tell all, and many embryos that look great under the microscope have undetected chromosomal abnormalities like missing or extra chromosomes, called aneuploidy.
One method used to weed out unhealthy embryos is to leave the embryos in a Petri dish for five days, two more than usual, to allow more time for hidden chromosomal abnormalities to show up.
Other researchers are looking at the traits of women at high risk of having multiples. In research presented at the reproductive society’s annual meeting last October, Dr. Stern linked a higher number of oocytes, or eggs retrieved from ovaries, with higher rates of single and multiple pregnancies.
“This will change our practice,” she said. “If more oocytes are retrieved, we’ll want to transfer fewer embryos.”
Other experts are turning to preimplantation genetic screening to cull embryos without aneuploidy. The screening is used to select healthy embryos in families with histories of genetic diseases. Because one or two cells have to be removed for analysis, there is some concern that the process can damage embryos, lowering pregnancy rates.
Another screening, comparative genomic hybridization, can assess all 23 pairs of chromosomes, providing an 80 percent chance of a healthy embryo and a 60 percent chance of a live birth, says Dr. Geoffrey Sher, executive medical director of the Sher Institutes of Reproductive Medicine, a nationwide group of fertility centers.
But Dr. Sher, whose lab performs this procedure, has encountered the same obstacles as others. He has a very high twin rate, hovering around 60 percent, because although the technique yields a higher success rate, women are refusing to have just one embryo implanted.
Many women in fertility treatment say that they simply do not view having twins as a risky situation and that they are willing, if not eager, to have them to speed the completion of their family, to avoid the high costs of future I.V.F. cycles or to ensure that their child has a sibling, among other reasons.
For a couple in Brooklyn who asked that just the woman’s first name be used to protect their privacy, six years of infertility and several failed procedures was enough. When the woman, Marie, was 28, they requested that three embryos be transferred, even though their doctor advised transferring two.
“I wanted a set of twins,” Marie said. “It is such a complicated and sometimes painful thing to go through I.V.F., and to have to go through it all again for a second child was just a waste for me.”
In the third in vitro cycle, last June, Marie became pregnant, with triplets. At four weeks, she lost a fetus. At four and a half months, she lost the entire pregnancy.
She was devastated, she said, but she added, “I don’t regret my decision.”
Though it is widely accepted that carrying three or more fetuses can have serious complications, some fertility specialists do not view a pregnancy with twins as risky, as long as the patient is carefully monitored.
“Yes, twin delivery has more risk than singleton delivery, but with good obstetrical care and educated patients, the risk of twin delivery is minimally higher,” said Dr. Norbert Gleicher, medical director of the Center for Human Reproduction in New York.
Carrying twins or higher-order multiples raises the risk of preterm births; low-birth-weight babies, with the possibility of death in very premature infants; long-term health problems; and pregnancy complications, including pre-eclampsia, gestational diabetes and Caesarean section. Studies show that 56 percent of I.V.F. twins born in 2004 weighed less than 5.5 pounds, and 65 percent were born prematurely, before 37 weeks of gestation.
Still, many patients take comfort in the improvements in neonatal care. The survival rate for newborns over 2 pounds 3 ounces is 85 percent. And many people just see the adorable twins cooing in the double strollers crisscrossing Central Park — not the ones that do not make it out of neonatal intensive care — or the fetus that was eliminated in a medical procedure called a reduction to improve the chance of survival for the remaining fetus or fetuses.
Along with changes to in vitro fertilization, experts say, physicians need to improve monitoring drugs used to enhance ovulation.
“The biggest problem with high multiples is coming from ovulation induction,” said Dr. Richard P. Dickey, chief of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at Louisiana State University Medical School in New Orleans.
If ovaries are too aggressively stimulated with hormones, a woman can produce a nest full of eggs and increase her risk of having triplets, quadruplets and even sextuplets. All ovulation-induction cycles should be closely monitored, and the cycles that produce too many oocytes should be canceled, Dr. Dickey said.
The biggest obstacles to reducing twins in infertility treatment are not medical, experts said, but the lack of insurance coverage, as well as pressure from patients to be aggressive.
“People have to recognize that there’s a connection between cost and how the treatment is going to play out,” said Barbara Collura, executive director of Resolve, a patient advocacy organization for people with infertility. “If you have $10,000 that you’ve begged, borrowed and stolen for this one I.V.F. cycle, you’re not going to say, ‘Please just transfer one.’ ”
Even doctors in the vanguard of the trend face resistance from patients like Marie.
Despite her pregnancy loss, she said, “With all the hard work I put into getting pregnant, I’d just rather have a set of twins than a singleton.”
Lowering Odds of Multiple Births
By LAURIE TARKAN
In the complex, expensive and emotionally charged world of fertility treatment, doctors are sounding a call to arms to reverse the soaring rate of multiple births.
The doctors are responding to an unintended consequence of the success of in vitro fertilization — that it is often too successful. Since 1980, when the technique became available in the United States, the rate of twins in all births has climbed 70 percent, to 3.2 percent of births in 2004.
Much of the increase, experts say, is a result of in vitro treatment. The rate of triplets and higher-order multiples increased even more from 1980 to 1998. It is not that twins or triplets are undesirable, doctors say. But multiple pregnancies often lead to risky preterm births and other complications. With that in mind, fertility centers are trying to lower the odds of such pregnancies, even at a cost of slightly lower success rates.
“Now is the time for all of us to rethink what is the paradigm of a successful I.V.F. pregnancy,” said Dr. Aaron K. Styer, a reproductive endocrinologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital Fertility Center in Boston. “Is it a pregnancy without regard to the number of gestations or a pregnancy with a singleton live birth?”
In I.V.F., a woman is given ovulation-induction hormones to produce multiple eggs, which are retrieved, fertilized with her partner’s sperm and transferred back to her uterus. The more embryos transferred, the higher the likelihood of multiples.
To achieve the goal of a single healthy baby, clinics are focusing on transferring fewer embryos and on developing more sophisticated ways to identify the healthiest embryos with the greatest chance of success.
“We have been getting better at I.V.F. over the years, and as success rates go up, the number we transfer has to go down accordingly,” said Dr. Judy E. Stern, director of the human embryology and andrology lab at the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in Lebanon, N.H. “Where three embryos used to work and give you mostly singletons, now we transfer two, because we’re making better embryos and more of them implant.”
The number of I.V.F. cycles in which four or more embryos were transferred has dropped sharply, to 21 percent in 2004 from 62 percent in 1996. Although the efforts have substantially lowered the rates of triplets born through in vitro fertilization, they have not made a dent in the twin rate. That is because many doctors and patients are reluctant to take the final step to ensure a single birth, a process called S.E.T., for single embryo transfer. From 1996 to 2004, the rate of such procedures rose modestly, to 8 percent from 6 percent.
The American Society of Reproductive Medicine now recommends that women younger than 35 with a good prognosis have just one embryo transferred. Women under 35 make up 44 percent of I.V.F. cycles.
In women older than 37, who have a higher incidence of embryos with chromosomal defects, three to five embryos are still recommended, depending on the woman’s age.
The main obstacle to single embryo transfer is its lower success rate. Some experts ask women to agree to two cycles, first transferring one fresh embryo while freezing the others. If the first transfer fails, doctors transfer a single frozen embryo, a much less costly and onerous procedure. That approach yields similar success rates to transferring two at once while drastically reducing twin rates.
With momentum building to transfer just one or two embryos, clinics focus on choosing the embryo most likely to succeed. Selecting embryos has traditionally been based on a visual examination of their morphology — shape, number of divisions and other physical factors. But morphology does not tell all, and many embryos that look great under the microscope have undetected chromosomal abnormalities like missing or extra chromosomes, called aneuploidy.
One method used to weed out unhealthy embryos is to leave the embryos in a Petri dish for five days, two more than usual, to allow more time for hidden chromosomal abnormalities to show up.
Other researchers are looking at the traits of women at high risk of having multiples. In research presented at the reproductive society’s annual meeting last October, Dr. Stern linked a higher number of oocytes, or eggs retrieved from ovaries, with higher rates of single and multiple pregnancies.
“This will change our practice,” she said. “If more oocytes are retrieved, we’ll want to transfer fewer embryos.”
Other experts are turning to preimplantation genetic screening to cull embryos without aneuploidy. The screening is used to select healthy embryos in families with histories of genetic diseases. Because one or two cells have to be removed for analysis, there is some concern that the process can damage embryos, lowering pregnancy rates.
Another screening, comparative genomic hybridization, can assess all 23 pairs of chromosomes, providing an 80 percent chance of a healthy embryo and a 60 percent chance of a live birth, says Dr. Geoffrey Sher, executive medical director of the Sher Institutes of Reproductive Medicine, a nationwide group of fertility centers.
But Dr. Sher, whose lab performs this procedure, has encountered the same obstacles as others. He has a very high twin rate, hovering around 60 percent, because although the technique yields a higher success rate, women are refusing to have just one embryo implanted.
Many women in fertility treatment say that they simply do not view having twins as a risky situation and that they are willing, if not eager, to have them to speed the completion of their family, to avoid the high costs of future I.V.F. cycles or to ensure that their child has a sibling, among other reasons.
For a couple in Brooklyn who asked that just the woman’s first name be used to protect their privacy, six years of infertility and several failed procedures was enough. When the woman, Marie, was 28, they requested that three embryos be transferred, even though their doctor advised transferring two.
“I wanted a set of twins,” Marie said. “It is such a complicated and sometimes painful thing to go through I.V.F., and to have to go through it all again for a second child was just a waste for me.”
In the third in vitro cycle, last June, Marie became pregnant, with triplets. At four weeks, she lost a fetus. At four and a half months, she lost the entire pregnancy.
She was devastated, she said, but she added, “I don’t regret my decision.”
Though it is widely accepted that carrying three or more fetuses can have serious complications, some fertility specialists do not view a pregnancy with twins as risky, as long as the patient is carefully monitored.
“Yes, twin delivery has more risk than singleton delivery, but with good obstetrical care and educated patients, the risk of twin delivery is minimally higher,” said Dr. Norbert Gleicher, medical director of the Center for Human Reproduction in New York.
Carrying twins or higher-order multiples raises the risk of preterm births; low-birth-weight babies, with the possibility of death in very premature infants; long-term health problems; and pregnancy complications, including pre-eclampsia, gestational diabetes and Caesarean section. Studies show that 56 percent of I.V.F. twins born in 2004 weighed less than 5.5 pounds, and 65 percent were born prematurely, before 37 weeks of gestation.
Still, many patients take comfort in the improvements in neonatal care. The survival rate for newborns over 2 pounds 3 ounces is 85 percent. And many people just see the adorable twins cooing in the double strollers crisscrossing Central Park — not the ones that do not make it out of neonatal intensive care — or the fetus that was eliminated in a medical procedure called a reduction to improve the chance of survival for the remaining fetus or fetuses.
Along with changes to in vitro fertilization, experts say, physicians need to improve monitoring drugs used to enhance ovulation.
“The biggest problem with high multiples is coming from ovulation induction,” said Dr. Richard P. Dickey, chief of reproductive endocrinology and infertility at Louisiana State University Medical School in New Orleans.
If ovaries are too aggressively stimulated with hormones, a woman can produce a nest full of eggs and increase her risk of having triplets, quadruplets and even sextuplets. All ovulation-induction cycles should be closely monitored, and the cycles that produce too many oocytes should be canceled, Dr. Dickey said.
The biggest obstacles to reducing twins in infertility treatment are not medical, experts said, but the lack of insurance coverage, as well as pressure from patients to be aggressive.
“People have to recognize that there’s a connection between cost and how the treatment is going to play out,” said Barbara Collura, executive director of Resolve, a patient advocacy organization for people with infertility. “If you have $10,000 that you’ve begged, borrowed and stolen for this one I.V.F. cycle, you’re not going to say, ‘Please just transfer one.’ ”
Even doctors in the vanguard of the trend face resistance from patients like Marie.
Despite her pregnancy loss, she said, “With all the hard work I put into getting pregnant, I’d just rather have a set of twins than a singleton.”
February 24, 2008
Colour-blind artist learns to paint by hearing
Neil Harbisson is officially the first Cyborg in Britain. The Dartington College student is completely colour-blind and has been fitted with a camera attached to a laptop, which converts colour to sound.
Image :1 of 14
Richard Brooks, Arts Editor
A COLOUR-BLIND artist who could only recognise black and white shades has learnt how to paint with a full palette by "hearing" the hues he cannot see.
Neil Harbisson, 25, has been fitted with a device called an Eyeborg, which converts 360 colours into different sounds.
Now he is to mount his first London exhibition, showing city scenes such as red phone boxes in London and brightly coloured recycling banks in Barcelona.
Harbisson, whose exhibition will arrive in London in April, after opening in Barcelona, said: "When I paint it is as if I am composing music on a canvas."
As an art student at Dartington College of Arts in Devon, he painted only in black and white because that is all he saw. But three years ago he met Adam Montandon, a cybernetics expert who came to give a lecture at the college.
After the talk, Montandon was told of Harbisson's condition and he took up the challenge of solving the problem, enabling Harbisson to paint in colour. The artist suffers from achromatopsia – or complete congenital colour blindness.
Montandon decided to harness the way in which different colours reflect light at different frequencies, with light vibrating fastest from violet and slowest from red.
The first device fitted to Harbisson's head was fairly primitive, letting him "hear" only six colours. His current model is far more sophisticated, giving him access to 360 colours.
Montandon created the Eyeborg system, manufactured by HMC Interactive, the design company in Plymouth that he co-founded. It is a head-mounted digital camera that reads the colours directly in front of it. The camera is connected to a laptop computer, carried in a backpack, which slows down the frequency of light waves to the frequency of sound waves. The computer then sends the "sound" of each colour to an earpiece worn by Harbisson. Montandon expects the system eventually to be as small as an MP3 player.
The device has made a huge difference to Harbisson's art, which is now his profession. Since wearing the Eyeborg he has expanded from just two or three, usually primary, colours to many more.
"I used to paint rather literally," he said. "I would stand in front of something and just paint what I saw immediately before me. Now I'm doing more abstracts and being much more free and liberal with my art."
His paint tubes have labels stating their colours and also have a sample of the colour itself on the outside so he knows through his ears which colour to pick.
Harbisson is fortunate in that he has both an art background (his Spanish mother is an amateur artist) and a musical one. He has played the piano since he was a youngster, and this has helped him to assimilate the sounds. "It's like the chords and scales of a piano and the different sounds they make," he said. "So it's as if I'm composing on the piano."
He also wears the Eyeborg in everyday life. "I've got used to all the sounds," he said. "It's noisy but probably not much more noisy than a very busy city street."
The sounds do not degenerate into a cacophony because the tiny camera picks up only what is directly ahead of him. For that reason he does not drive: traffic and car lights would be too distant for him to be happy using the device.
Harbisson, who lives in Barcelona, has travelled extensively for his city pictures, visiting Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary and Croatia as well as travelling around Britain. One work-in-progress involves representing each capital city in Europe as a square made up of two triangles of different colours. In Monaco, it was azure and salmon pink; in Bratislava it was yellow and turquoise; and in Andorra it was dark green and fuchsia.
He also tends to pick up and paint what he "sees" as the dominant colours of a place in his city-scapes. He said: "I wanted to go to cities because people used to tell me that cities were grey and drab. But they are not. They are very colourful."
Montandon hopes other people suffering from colour blindness or other vision disorders will now use his Eyeborg technology, whether or not they are artists.
How it works
1. Lens examines colour artist is looking at
2. Computer analyses colour and calculates an equivalent sound frequency
3. Earpiece emits a noise to tell artist which colour he is looking at
4. Artist has to learn which sounds identify particular colours
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/ ... 423446.ece
Colour-blind artist learns to paint by hearing
Neil Harbisson is officially the first Cyborg in Britain. The Dartington College student is completely colour-blind and has been fitted with a camera attached to a laptop, which converts colour to sound.
Image :1 of 14
Richard Brooks, Arts Editor
A COLOUR-BLIND artist who could only recognise black and white shades has learnt how to paint with a full palette by "hearing" the hues he cannot see.
Neil Harbisson, 25, has been fitted with a device called an Eyeborg, which converts 360 colours into different sounds.
Now he is to mount his first London exhibition, showing city scenes such as red phone boxes in London and brightly coloured recycling banks in Barcelona.
Harbisson, whose exhibition will arrive in London in April, after opening in Barcelona, said: "When I paint it is as if I am composing music on a canvas."
As an art student at Dartington College of Arts in Devon, he painted only in black and white because that is all he saw. But three years ago he met Adam Montandon, a cybernetics expert who came to give a lecture at the college.
After the talk, Montandon was told of Harbisson's condition and he took up the challenge of solving the problem, enabling Harbisson to paint in colour. The artist suffers from achromatopsia – or complete congenital colour blindness.
Montandon decided to harness the way in which different colours reflect light at different frequencies, with light vibrating fastest from violet and slowest from red.
The first device fitted to Harbisson's head was fairly primitive, letting him "hear" only six colours. His current model is far more sophisticated, giving him access to 360 colours.
Montandon created the Eyeborg system, manufactured by HMC Interactive, the design company in Plymouth that he co-founded. It is a head-mounted digital camera that reads the colours directly in front of it. The camera is connected to a laptop computer, carried in a backpack, which slows down the frequency of light waves to the frequency of sound waves. The computer then sends the "sound" of each colour to an earpiece worn by Harbisson. Montandon expects the system eventually to be as small as an MP3 player.
The device has made a huge difference to Harbisson's art, which is now his profession. Since wearing the Eyeborg he has expanded from just two or three, usually primary, colours to many more.
"I used to paint rather literally," he said. "I would stand in front of something and just paint what I saw immediately before me. Now I'm doing more abstracts and being much more free and liberal with my art."
His paint tubes have labels stating their colours and also have a sample of the colour itself on the outside so he knows through his ears which colour to pick.
Harbisson is fortunate in that he has both an art background (his Spanish mother is an amateur artist) and a musical one. He has played the piano since he was a youngster, and this has helped him to assimilate the sounds. "It's like the chords and scales of a piano and the different sounds they make," he said. "So it's as if I'm composing on the piano."
He also wears the Eyeborg in everyday life. "I've got used to all the sounds," he said. "It's noisy but probably not much more noisy than a very busy city street."
The sounds do not degenerate into a cacophony because the tiny camera picks up only what is directly ahead of him. For that reason he does not drive: traffic and car lights would be too distant for him to be happy using the device.
Harbisson, who lives in Barcelona, has travelled extensively for his city pictures, visiting Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary and Croatia as well as travelling around Britain. One work-in-progress involves representing each capital city in Europe as a square made up of two triangles of different colours. In Monaco, it was azure and salmon pink; in Bratislava it was yellow and turquoise; and in Andorra it was dark green and fuchsia.
He also tends to pick up and paint what he "sees" as the dominant colours of a place in his city-scapes. He said: "I wanted to go to cities because people used to tell me that cities were grey and drab. But they are not. They are very colourful."
Montandon hopes other people suffering from colour blindness or other vision disorders will now use his Eyeborg technology, whether or not they are artists.
How it works
1. Lens examines colour artist is looking at
2. Computer analyses colour and calculates an equivalent sound frequency
3. Earpiece emits a noise to tell artist which colour he is looking at
4. Artist has to learn which sounds identify particular colours
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/ ... 423446.ece
Gene that blocks spread of HIV discovered
U of A researchers' find offers 'hope' to patients
Jodie Sinnema
Edmonton Journal
Friday, February 29, 2008
Researchers at the University of Alberta have made what might be a major discovery in the fight against AIDS -- a gene that blocks the HIV virus from spreading.
The watershed discovery made by Barr and his team is a gene and protein called TRIM22. It's part of the body's natural defence system and blocks late-stage HIV from multiplying and spreading.
Other scientists have discovered proteins that block HIV in the beginning of its life cycle in the body, but Barr said the highly adaptable virus found ways to change itself and evolve to overcome those proteins.
"It represents a significant advance in HIV research, definitely," said Stephen Barr, a researcher in the medical microbiology and immunology department at the U of A and lead author of the paper published in the Public Library of Science Pathogens journal.
"This provides hope to HIV patients."
This is the first time scientists have found a gene that -- at least in a cell culture in a laboratory -- keeps late-stage viruses from leaving cells and infecting healthy cells.
"Although this particular gene can't stop the virus from coming into cells, it can stop it from leaving cells," said Barr, who began his work with a scientist at the University of Pennsylvania before moving to Edmonton in 2005.
"It could prevent the onset of AIDS because if the virus can't get out of cells, it can't infect other cells and then that's where the problem comes from AIDS. It decimates the immune system, so if you prevent the virus from leaving cells, it basically locks it into cells and it can't spread."
He said much more work needs to be done to find out why TRIM22 isn't working in people with HIV. He isn't sure if the virus turns the gene off, or if the gene is mutated in HIV-positive people.
With more understanding of how the gene works -- research that will take several years before it reaches the stage of human trials -- Barr aims to figure out how to turn the gene back on with new drugs or vaccines.
"This provides hope to HIV patients because it identifies a different part of the life cycle (of HIV) that drugs can be designed for, and perhaps a vaccine, as well," Barr said.
"It adds more hope because the whole area of HIV has received a little bit of a gloomy outlook with an emerging drug-resistant virus and failed vaccine trials. This identifies a new target for therapy."
Approximately 33.2 million people around the world were living with HIV or AIDS in 2007 -- 22.5 million of them in sub-Saharan Africa, the World Health Organization reports. In Canada, 58,000 are living with the virus.
While anti-retroviral drugs can suppress the virus, the virus can become resistant to the drugs and flare up if people don't follow a strict drug regime.
There is no cure for the disease, though scientists hope to discover an effective vaccine.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
U of A researchers' find offers 'hope' to patients
Jodie Sinnema
Edmonton Journal
Friday, February 29, 2008
Researchers at the University of Alberta have made what might be a major discovery in the fight against AIDS -- a gene that blocks the HIV virus from spreading.
The watershed discovery made by Barr and his team is a gene and protein called TRIM22. It's part of the body's natural defence system and blocks late-stage HIV from multiplying and spreading.
Other scientists have discovered proteins that block HIV in the beginning of its life cycle in the body, but Barr said the highly adaptable virus found ways to change itself and evolve to overcome those proteins.
"It represents a significant advance in HIV research, definitely," said Stephen Barr, a researcher in the medical microbiology and immunology department at the U of A and lead author of the paper published in the Public Library of Science Pathogens journal.
"This provides hope to HIV patients."
This is the first time scientists have found a gene that -- at least in a cell culture in a laboratory -- keeps late-stage viruses from leaving cells and infecting healthy cells.
"Although this particular gene can't stop the virus from coming into cells, it can stop it from leaving cells," said Barr, who began his work with a scientist at the University of Pennsylvania before moving to Edmonton in 2005.
"It could prevent the onset of AIDS because if the virus can't get out of cells, it can't infect other cells and then that's where the problem comes from AIDS. It decimates the immune system, so if you prevent the virus from leaving cells, it basically locks it into cells and it can't spread."
He said much more work needs to be done to find out why TRIM22 isn't working in people with HIV. He isn't sure if the virus turns the gene off, or if the gene is mutated in HIV-positive people.
With more understanding of how the gene works -- research that will take several years before it reaches the stage of human trials -- Barr aims to figure out how to turn the gene back on with new drugs or vaccines.
"This provides hope to HIV patients because it identifies a different part of the life cycle (of HIV) that drugs can be designed for, and perhaps a vaccine, as well," Barr said.
"It adds more hope because the whole area of HIV has received a little bit of a gloomy outlook with an emerging drug-resistant virus and failed vaccine trials. This identifies a new target for therapy."
Approximately 33.2 million people around the world were living with HIV or AIDS in 2007 -- 22.5 million of them in sub-Saharan Africa, the World Health Organization reports. In Canada, 58,000 are living with the virus.
While anti-retroviral drugs can suppress the virus, the virus can become resistant to the drugs and flare up if people don't follow a strict drug regime.
There is no cure for the disease, though scientists hope to discover an effective vaccine.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Study could unlock 'salt gene'
Hypertension may become thing of the past
Don Butler
Canwest News Service
Monday, March 03, 2008
Researchers at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute are trying to identify a "salt gene" that would help doctors recognize and treat patients at risk of developing high blood pressure because of dietary salt.
If successful, doctors could someday use a simple blood test to determine whether long-term salt intake will raise an individual's blood pressure, said Dr. Frans Leenen, the study's co-leader.
Ultimately, they also may be able to devise better interventions, including "turning off" the gene. "It absolutely could happen," said Leenen, director of the heart institute's hypertension unit.
The health payoff could be enormous, both in improved health and in savings to the health care system. On average, Canadians now ingest more than double the recommended daily dose of salt, primarily through processed food and restaurant meals.
This high salt consumption "really explains the epidemic of hypertension we have in our society in the older population," Leenen said. Among Canadians 60 and older, between 60 and 70 per cent have high blood pressure.
That proportion could be cut to less than 20 per cent, Leenen said, if everyone ingested the optimal daily dose of sodium, which ranges from 1,000 to 1,500 milligrams, depending on age.
Hypertension is closely linked to cardiovascular diseases such as stroke and heart disease. The Canadian Stroke Network estimates 30 Canadians die every day because of high levels of sodium in their diets.
Half of those with high blood pressure are on medication, and primary care doctors earn more from treating hypertense patients than from any other source, Leenen said.
Studies have found about half of Canadians are salt sensitive, meaning their blood pressure rises when they shift from low-salt to high-salt diets. The rest are unaffected.
Leenen's study began last fall. The first phase, already underway, will analyze 400 patients with a family history of hypertension. A second phase, starting next year, will study 3,000 other patients, half with high blood pressure and half in the normal blood pressure range. It will take up to five years before final results are published.
The institute's genetics research centre will play a critical role in the project, with new technology that allows it to analyze a million gene sequences at a time using a blood sample on a chip.
As a result, "we can much more accurately now assess the individual genetic variation in one person," said Leenen. "That is an enormous shift."
Researchers will collect information about subjects' blood pressure, using 24-hour monitors that take readings every 10-to-15 minutes to collect the most accurate data possible. The team will also periodically ask subjects to save their urine over a 24-hour period.
Once the data is collected, the researchers will turn the results over to the genetics lab for analysis, looking for common patterns among those whose blood pressures rise with salt intake.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Hypertension may become thing of the past
Don Butler
Canwest News Service
Monday, March 03, 2008
Researchers at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute are trying to identify a "salt gene" that would help doctors recognize and treat patients at risk of developing high blood pressure because of dietary salt.
If successful, doctors could someday use a simple blood test to determine whether long-term salt intake will raise an individual's blood pressure, said Dr. Frans Leenen, the study's co-leader.
Ultimately, they also may be able to devise better interventions, including "turning off" the gene. "It absolutely could happen," said Leenen, director of the heart institute's hypertension unit.
The health payoff could be enormous, both in improved health and in savings to the health care system. On average, Canadians now ingest more than double the recommended daily dose of salt, primarily through processed food and restaurant meals.
This high salt consumption "really explains the epidemic of hypertension we have in our society in the older population," Leenen said. Among Canadians 60 and older, between 60 and 70 per cent have high blood pressure.
That proportion could be cut to less than 20 per cent, Leenen said, if everyone ingested the optimal daily dose of sodium, which ranges from 1,000 to 1,500 milligrams, depending on age.
Hypertension is closely linked to cardiovascular diseases such as stroke and heart disease. The Canadian Stroke Network estimates 30 Canadians die every day because of high levels of sodium in their diets.
Half of those with high blood pressure are on medication, and primary care doctors earn more from treating hypertense patients than from any other source, Leenen said.
Studies have found about half of Canadians are salt sensitive, meaning their blood pressure rises when they shift from low-salt to high-salt diets. The rest are unaffected.
Leenen's study began last fall. The first phase, already underway, will analyze 400 patients with a family history of hypertension. A second phase, starting next year, will study 3,000 other patients, half with high blood pressure and half in the normal blood pressure range. It will take up to five years before final results are published.
The institute's genetics research centre will play a critical role in the project, with new technology that allows it to analyze a million gene sequences at a time using a blood sample on a chip.
As a result, "we can much more accurately now assess the individual genetic variation in one person," said Leenen. "That is an enormous shift."
Researchers will collect information about subjects' blood pressure, using 24-hour monitors that take readings every 10-to-15 minutes to collect the most accurate data possible. The team will also periodically ask subjects to save their urine over a 24-hour period.
Once the data is collected, the researchers will turn the results over to the genetics lab for analysis, looking for common patterns among those whose blood pressures rise with salt intake.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
March 4, 2008
The DNA Age
Gene Map Becomes a Luxury Item
By AMY HARMON
On a cold day in January, Dan Stoicescu, a millionaire living in Switzerland, became the second person in the world to buy the full sequence of his own genetic code.
He is also among a relatively small group of individuals who could afford the $350,000 price tag.
Mr. Stoicescu is the first customer of Knome, a Cambridge-based company that has promised to parse his genetic blueprint by spring. A Chinese executive has signed on for the same service with Knome’s partner, the Beijing Genomics Institute, the company said.
Scientists have so far unraveled only a handful of complete human genomes, all financed by governments, foundations and corporations in the name of medical research. But as the cost of genome sequencing goes from stratospheric to merely very expensive, it is piquing the interest of a new clientele.
“I’d rather spend my money on my genome than a Bentley or an airplane,” said Mr. Stoicescu, 56, a biotechnology entrepreneur who retired two years ago after selling his company. He says he will check discoveries about genetic disease risk against his genome sequence daily, “like a stock portfolio.”
But while money may buy a full readout of the six billion chemical units in an individual’s genome, biologists say the superrich will have to wait like everyone else to learn how the small variations in their sequence influence appearance, behavior, abilities, disease susceptibility and other traits.
“I was in someone’s Bentley once — nice car,” said James D. Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, whose genome was sequenced last year by a company that donated the $1.5 million in costs to demonstrate its technology. “Would I rather have my genome sequenced or have a Bentley? Uh, toss up.”
He would probably pick the genome, Dr. Watson said, because it could reveal a disease-risk gene that one had passed on to one’s children, though in his case, it did not. What is needed, he said, is a “Chevrolet genome” that is affordable for everyone.
Biologists have mixed feelings about the emergence of the genome as a luxury item. Some worry that what they have dubbed “genomic elitism” could sour the public on genetic research that has long promised better, individualized health care for all. But others see the boutique genome as something like a $20 million tourist voyage to space — a necessary rite of passage for technology that may soon be within the grasp of the rest of us.
“We certainly don’t want a world where there’s a great imbalance of access to comprehensive genetic tests,” said Richard A. Gibbs, director of the human genome sequencing center at Baylor College of Medicine. “But to the extent that this can be seen as an idiosyncratic exercise of curious individuals who can afford it, it could be quite a positive phenomenon.”
It was the stream of offers from wealthy individuals to pay the Harvard laboratory of George M. Church for their personal genome sequences that led Dr. Church to co-found Knome last year (most people pronounce it “nome,” though he prefers “know-me”).
“It was distracting for an academic lab,” Dr. Church said. “But it made me think it could be a business.”
Scientists say they need tens of thousands of genome sequences to be made publicly available to begin to make sense of human variation.
Knome, however, expects many of its customers to insist on keeping their dearly bought genomes private, and provides a decentralized data storage system for that purpose.
Mr. Stoicescu said he worried about being seen as self-indulgent (though he donates much more each year to philanthropic causes), egotistical (for obvious reasons) or stupid (the cost of the technology, he knows, is dropping so fast that he would have certainly paid much less by waiting a few months).
But he agreed to be identified to help persuade others to participate. With only four complete human genome sequences announced by scientists around the world — along with the Human Genome Project, which finished assembling a genome drawn from several individuals at a cost of about $300 million in 2003 — each new one stands to add considerably to the collective knowledge.
“I view it as a kind of sponsorship,” he said. “In a way you can also be part of this adventure, which I believe is going to change a lot of things.”
Mr. Stoicescu, who has a Ph.D. in medicinal chemistry, was born in Romania and lived in the United States in the early 1990s before founding Sindan, an oncology products company that he ran for 15 years. Now living with his wife and 12-year-old son in a village outside Geneva, he describes himself as a “transhumanist” who believes that life can be extended through nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, as well as diet and lifestyle adaptations. His genome sequence, he reasons, might give him a better indication of just what those should be. Last fall, Mr. Stoicescu paid $1,000 to get a glimpse of his genetic code from deCODE Genetics. That service, and a similar one offered by 23andMe, looks at close to a million nucleotides on the human genome where DNA is known to differ among people.
But Mr. Stoicescu was intrigued by the idea of a more complete picture. “It is only a part of the truth,” he said. “Having the full sequence decoded you can be closer to reality.”
How close is a matter of much debate. Knome is using a technology that reads the genome in short fragments that can be tricky to assemble. All of the existing sequencing methods have a margin of error, and the fledgling industry has no agreed-on quality standards.
Knome is not the only firm in the private genome business. Illumina, a sequencing firm in San Diego, plans to sell whole genome sequencing to the “rich and famous market” this year, said its chief executive, Jay Flatley. If competition drives prices down, the personal genome may quickly lose its exclusivity. The nonprofit X Prize Foundation is offering $10 million to the first group to sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days, for $10,000 or less per genome. The federal government is supporting technology development with an eye to a $1,000 genome in the next decade.
But for now, Knome’s prospective customers are decidedly high-end. The company has been approached by hedge fund managers, Hollywood executives and an individual from the Middle East who could be contacted only through a third party, said Jorge Conde, Knome’s chief executive.
“I feel like everyone’s going to have to get it done at some point, so why not be one of the first?” said Eugene Katchalov, 27, a money manager in Manhattan who has met with Mr. Conde twice.
Mr. Stoicescu, who wants to create an open database of genomic information seeded with his own sequence, hopes others will soon join him.
A few days after he wired his $175,000 deposit to the company, a Knome associate flew in from Cambridge to meet him at a local clinic.
“What the heck am I doing?” Mr. Stoicescu recalls wondering. “And how many children in Africa might have been fed?”
Then he offered up his arm and gave her three test tubes of his blood.
The DNA Age
Gene Map Becomes a Luxury Item
By AMY HARMON
On a cold day in January, Dan Stoicescu, a millionaire living in Switzerland, became the second person in the world to buy the full sequence of his own genetic code.
He is also among a relatively small group of individuals who could afford the $350,000 price tag.
Mr. Stoicescu is the first customer of Knome, a Cambridge-based company that has promised to parse his genetic blueprint by spring. A Chinese executive has signed on for the same service with Knome’s partner, the Beijing Genomics Institute, the company said.
Scientists have so far unraveled only a handful of complete human genomes, all financed by governments, foundations and corporations in the name of medical research. But as the cost of genome sequencing goes from stratospheric to merely very expensive, it is piquing the interest of a new clientele.
“I’d rather spend my money on my genome than a Bentley or an airplane,” said Mr. Stoicescu, 56, a biotechnology entrepreneur who retired two years ago after selling his company. He says he will check discoveries about genetic disease risk against his genome sequence daily, “like a stock portfolio.”
But while money may buy a full readout of the six billion chemical units in an individual’s genome, biologists say the superrich will have to wait like everyone else to learn how the small variations in their sequence influence appearance, behavior, abilities, disease susceptibility and other traits.
“I was in someone’s Bentley once — nice car,” said James D. Watson, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, whose genome was sequenced last year by a company that donated the $1.5 million in costs to demonstrate its technology. “Would I rather have my genome sequenced or have a Bentley? Uh, toss up.”
He would probably pick the genome, Dr. Watson said, because it could reveal a disease-risk gene that one had passed on to one’s children, though in his case, it did not. What is needed, he said, is a “Chevrolet genome” that is affordable for everyone.
Biologists have mixed feelings about the emergence of the genome as a luxury item. Some worry that what they have dubbed “genomic elitism” could sour the public on genetic research that has long promised better, individualized health care for all. But others see the boutique genome as something like a $20 million tourist voyage to space — a necessary rite of passage for technology that may soon be within the grasp of the rest of us.
“We certainly don’t want a world where there’s a great imbalance of access to comprehensive genetic tests,” said Richard A. Gibbs, director of the human genome sequencing center at Baylor College of Medicine. “But to the extent that this can be seen as an idiosyncratic exercise of curious individuals who can afford it, it could be quite a positive phenomenon.”
It was the stream of offers from wealthy individuals to pay the Harvard laboratory of George M. Church for their personal genome sequences that led Dr. Church to co-found Knome last year (most people pronounce it “nome,” though he prefers “know-me”).
“It was distracting for an academic lab,” Dr. Church said. “But it made me think it could be a business.”
Scientists say they need tens of thousands of genome sequences to be made publicly available to begin to make sense of human variation.
Knome, however, expects many of its customers to insist on keeping their dearly bought genomes private, and provides a decentralized data storage system for that purpose.
Mr. Stoicescu said he worried about being seen as self-indulgent (though he donates much more each year to philanthropic causes), egotistical (for obvious reasons) or stupid (the cost of the technology, he knows, is dropping so fast that he would have certainly paid much less by waiting a few months).
But he agreed to be identified to help persuade others to participate. With only four complete human genome sequences announced by scientists around the world — along with the Human Genome Project, which finished assembling a genome drawn from several individuals at a cost of about $300 million in 2003 — each new one stands to add considerably to the collective knowledge.
“I view it as a kind of sponsorship,” he said. “In a way you can also be part of this adventure, which I believe is going to change a lot of things.”
Mr. Stoicescu, who has a Ph.D. in medicinal chemistry, was born in Romania and lived in the United States in the early 1990s before founding Sindan, an oncology products company that he ran for 15 years. Now living with his wife and 12-year-old son in a village outside Geneva, he describes himself as a “transhumanist” who believes that life can be extended through nanotechnology and artificial intelligence, as well as diet and lifestyle adaptations. His genome sequence, he reasons, might give him a better indication of just what those should be. Last fall, Mr. Stoicescu paid $1,000 to get a glimpse of his genetic code from deCODE Genetics. That service, and a similar one offered by 23andMe, looks at close to a million nucleotides on the human genome where DNA is known to differ among people.
But Mr. Stoicescu was intrigued by the idea of a more complete picture. “It is only a part of the truth,” he said. “Having the full sequence decoded you can be closer to reality.”
How close is a matter of much debate. Knome is using a technology that reads the genome in short fragments that can be tricky to assemble. All of the existing sequencing methods have a margin of error, and the fledgling industry has no agreed-on quality standards.
Knome is not the only firm in the private genome business. Illumina, a sequencing firm in San Diego, plans to sell whole genome sequencing to the “rich and famous market” this year, said its chief executive, Jay Flatley. If competition drives prices down, the personal genome may quickly lose its exclusivity. The nonprofit X Prize Foundation is offering $10 million to the first group to sequence 100 human genomes in 10 days, for $10,000 or less per genome. The federal government is supporting technology development with an eye to a $1,000 genome in the next decade.
But for now, Knome’s prospective customers are decidedly high-end. The company has been approached by hedge fund managers, Hollywood executives and an individual from the Middle East who could be contacted only through a third party, said Jorge Conde, Knome’s chief executive.
“I feel like everyone’s going to have to get it done at some point, so why not be one of the first?” said Eugene Katchalov, 27, a money manager in Manhattan who has met with Mr. Conde twice.
Mr. Stoicescu, who wants to create an open database of genomic information seeded with his own sequence, hopes others will soon join him.
A few days after he wired his $175,000 deposit to the company, a Knome associate flew in from Cambridge to meet him at a local clinic.
“What the heck am I doing?” Mr. Stoicescu recalls wondering. “And how many children in Africa might have been fed?”
Then he offered up his arm and gave her three test tubes of his blood.
March 10, 2008
India Nurtures Business of Surrogate Motherhood
By AMELIA GENTLEMAN
MUMBAI — Yonatan Gher and his partner, who are Israeli, plan eventually to tell their child about being made in India, in the womb of a stranger, with the egg of a Mumbai housewife they picked from an Internet lineup.
The embryo was formed in January in an Indian fertility clinic about 2,500 miles from the couple’s home in Tel Aviv, produced by doctors who have begun specializing in surrogacy services for couples from around the world.
“The child will know early on that he or she is unique, that it came into the world in a very special way,” said Mr. Gher, 29, a communications officer for the environmental group Greenpeace.
An enterprise known as reproductive outsourcing is a new but rapidly expanding business in India. Clinics that provide surrogate mothers for foreigners say they have recently been inundated with requests from the United States and Europe, as word spreads of India’s mix of skilled medical professionals, relatively liberal laws and low prices.
Commercial surrogacy, which is banned in some states and some European countries, was legalized in India in 2002. The cost comes to about $25,000, roughly a third of the typical price in the United States. That includes the medical procedures; payment to the surrogate mother, which is often, but not always, done through the clinic; plus air tickets and hotels for two trips to India (one for the fertilization and a second to collect the baby).
“People are increasingly exposed to the idea of surrogacy in India; Oprah Winfrey talked about it on her show,” said Dr. Kaushal Kadam at the Rotunda clinic in Mumbai. Just an hour earlier she had created an embryo for Mr. Gher and his partner with sperm from one of them (they would not say which) and an egg removed from a donor just minutes before in another part of the clinic.
The clinic, known more formally as Rotunda — The Center for Human Reproduction, does not permit contact between egg donor, surrogate mother or future parents. The donor and surrogate are always different women; doctors say surrogates are less likely to bond with the babies if there is no genetic connection.
There are no firm statistics on how many surrogacies are being arranged in India for foreigners, but anecdotal evidence suggests a sharp increase.
Rudy Rupak, co-founder and president of PlanetHospital, a medical tourism agency with headquarters in California, said he expected to send at least 100 couples to India this year for surrogacy, up from 25 in 2007, the first year he offered the service.
“Every time there is a success story, hundreds of inquiries follow,” he said.
In Anand, a city in the eastern state of Gujarat where the practice was pioneered in India, more than 50 surrogate mothers are pregnant with the children of couples from the United States, Britain and elsewhere. Fifteen of them live together in a hostel attached to the clinic there.
Dr. Naina Patel, who runs the Anand clinic, said that even Americans who could afford to hire surrogates at home were coming to her for women “free of vices like alcohol, smoking and drugs.” She said she gets about 10 e-mailed inquiries a day from couples abroad.
Under guidelines issued by the Indian Council of Medical Research, surrogate mothers sign away their rights to any children. A surrogate’s name is not even on the birth certificate.
This eases the process of taking the baby out of the country. But for many, like Lisa Switzer, 40, a medical technician from San Antonio whose twins are being carried by a surrogate mother from the Rotunda clinic, the overwhelming attraction is the price. “Doctors, lawyers, accountants, they can afford it, but the rest of us — the teachers, the nurses, the secretaries — we can’t,” she said. “Unless we go to India.”
Surrogacy is an area fraught with ethical and legal uncertainties. Critics argue that the ease with which relatively rich foreigners are able to “rent” the wombs of poor Indians creates the potential for exploitation. Although the government is actively promoting India as a medical tourism destination, what some see as an exchange of money for babies has made many here uncomfortable.
The Ministry of Women and Child Development said in February that it was weighing recommending legislation to govern surrogacy, but it is not imminent.
An article published in The Times of India in February questioned how such a law would be enforced: “In a country crippled by abject poverty,” it asked, “how will the government body guarantee that women will not agree to surrogacy just to be able to eat two square meals a day?”
Even some of those involved in the business of organizing surrogates want greater regulation.
“There must be protection for the surrogates,” Mr. Rupak said. “Inevitably, people are going to smell the money, and unscrupulous operators will get into the game. I don’t trust the industry to police itself.”
He said that the few doctors offering the service now were ethical and took good care of the surrogates but that he was concerned this might change as the business expanded.
Mr. Gher and his partner, who asked not to be named to preserve his privacy, have worked through their doubts and are certain they are doing a good thing.
“People can believe me when I say that if I could bear the baby myself I would,” he said. “But this is a mutually beneficial answer. The surrogate gets a fair amount of money for being part of the process.”
They are paying about $30,000, of which the surrogate gets about $7,500.
“Surrogates do it to give their children a better education, to buy a home, to start up a small business, a shop,” Dr. Kadam said. “This is as much money as they could earn in maybe three years. I really don’t think that this is exploiting the women. I feel it is two people who are helping out each other.”
Mr. Gher agreed. “You cannot ignore the discrepancies between Indian poverty and Western wealth,” he said. “We try our best not to abuse this power. Part of our choice to come here was the idea that there was an opportunity to help someone in India.”
In the Mumbai clinic, it is clear that an exchange between rich and poor is under way. On some contracts, the thumbprint of an illiterate surrogate stands out against the clients’ signatures.
Although some Indian clinics allow surrogates and clients to meet, Mr. Gher said he preferred anonymity. When his surrogate gives birth later this year, he and his partner will be in the hospital, but not in the ward where she is in labor, and will be handed the baby by a nurse.
The surrogate mother does not know that she is working for foreigners, Dr. Kadam said, and has not been told that the future parents are both men. Gay sex is illegal in India.
Israel legalized adoption by same-sex couples in February, but such couples are not permitted to hire surrogates in Israel to become parents. A fertility doctor recommended Rotunda, which made news in November when its doctors delivered twins for another gay Israeli couple.
Rotunda did not allow interviews with its surrogate mothers, but a 32-year-old woman at a fertility clinic in Delhi explained why she is planning on her second surrogacy in two years.
Separated from her husband, she found that her monthly wages of 2,800 rupees, about $69, as a midwife were not enough to raise her 9-year-old son. With the money she earned from the first surrogacy, more than $13,600, she bought a house. She expects to pay for her son’s education with what she earns for the second, about $8,600. (Fees are typically fixed by the doctor and can vary.) “I will save the money for my child’s future,” she said.
The process requires a degree of subterfuge in this socially conservative country. She has told her mother, who lives with her, but not her son or their neighbors. She has told the few who have asked her outright that she is bearing a child for a relative.
So far, for the Israeli couple, the experience of having a baby has been strangely virtual. They perused profiles of egg donors that were sent by e-mail (“We picked the one with the highest level of education,” Mr. Gher said). From information that followed, they rejected a factory worker in favor of a housewife, who they thought would have a less stressful lifestyle.
Mr. Gher posts updates about the process on Facebook. And soon the clinic will start sending ultrasound images of their developing child by e-mail. Highly pixelated, blown-up passport photos of the egg donor and surrogate mother adorn a wall of their apartment in Israel.
“We’ve been trying to half close our eyes and look at it in a more holistic way to imagine what she would actually look like,” Mr. Gher said of the donor’s blurred image. “These are women we don’t know, will never know, who will become in a way part of our lives.”
India Nurtures Business of Surrogate Motherhood
By AMELIA GENTLEMAN
MUMBAI — Yonatan Gher and his partner, who are Israeli, plan eventually to tell their child about being made in India, in the womb of a stranger, with the egg of a Mumbai housewife they picked from an Internet lineup.
The embryo was formed in January in an Indian fertility clinic about 2,500 miles from the couple’s home in Tel Aviv, produced by doctors who have begun specializing in surrogacy services for couples from around the world.
“The child will know early on that he or she is unique, that it came into the world in a very special way,” said Mr. Gher, 29, a communications officer for the environmental group Greenpeace.
An enterprise known as reproductive outsourcing is a new but rapidly expanding business in India. Clinics that provide surrogate mothers for foreigners say they have recently been inundated with requests from the United States and Europe, as word spreads of India’s mix of skilled medical professionals, relatively liberal laws and low prices.
Commercial surrogacy, which is banned in some states and some European countries, was legalized in India in 2002. The cost comes to about $25,000, roughly a third of the typical price in the United States. That includes the medical procedures; payment to the surrogate mother, which is often, but not always, done through the clinic; plus air tickets and hotels for two trips to India (one for the fertilization and a second to collect the baby).
“People are increasingly exposed to the idea of surrogacy in India; Oprah Winfrey talked about it on her show,” said Dr. Kaushal Kadam at the Rotunda clinic in Mumbai. Just an hour earlier she had created an embryo for Mr. Gher and his partner with sperm from one of them (they would not say which) and an egg removed from a donor just minutes before in another part of the clinic.
The clinic, known more formally as Rotunda — The Center for Human Reproduction, does not permit contact between egg donor, surrogate mother or future parents. The donor and surrogate are always different women; doctors say surrogates are less likely to bond with the babies if there is no genetic connection.
There are no firm statistics on how many surrogacies are being arranged in India for foreigners, but anecdotal evidence suggests a sharp increase.
Rudy Rupak, co-founder and president of PlanetHospital, a medical tourism agency with headquarters in California, said he expected to send at least 100 couples to India this year for surrogacy, up from 25 in 2007, the first year he offered the service.
“Every time there is a success story, hundreds of inquiries follow,” he said.
In Anand, a city in the eastern state of Gujarat where the practice was pioneered in India, more than 50 surrogate mothers are pregnant with the children of couples from the United States, Britain and elsewhere. Fifteen of them live together in a hostel attached to the clinic there.
Dr. Naina Patel, who runs the Anand clinic, said that even Americans who could afford to hire surrogates at home were coming to her for women “free of vices like alcohol, smoking and drugs.” She said she gets about 10 e-mailed inquiries a day from couples abroad.
Under guidelines issued by the Indian Council of Medical Research, surrogate mothers sign away their rights to any children. A surrogate’s name is not even on the birth certificate.
This eases the process of taking the baby out of the country. But for many, like Lisa Switzer, 40, a medical technician from San Antonio whose twins are being carried by a surrogate mother from the Rotunda clinic, the overwhelming attraction is the price. “Doctors, lawyers, accountants, they can afford it, but the rest of us — the teachers, the nurses, the secretaries — we can’t,” she said. “Unless we go to India.”
Surrogacy is an area fraught with ethical and legal uncertainties. Critics argue that the ease with which relatively rich foreigners are able to “rent” the wombs of poor Indians creates the potential for exploitation. Although the government is actively promoting India as a medical tourism destination, what some see as an exchange of money for babies has made many here uncomfortable.
The Ministry of Women and Child Development said in February that it was weighing recommending legislation to govern surrogacy, but it is not imminent.
An article published in The Times of India in February questioned how such a law would be enforced: “In a country crippled by abject poverty,” it asked, “how will the government body guarantee that women will not agree to surrogacy just to be able to eat two square meals a day?”
Even some of those involved in the business of organizing surrogates want greater regulation.
“There must be protection for the surrogates,” Mr. Rupak said. “Inevitably, people are going to smell the money, and unscrupulous operators will get into the game. I don’t trust the industry to police itself.”
He said that the few doctors offering the service now were ethical and took good care of the surrogates but that he was concerned this might change as the business expanded.
Mr. Gher and his partner, who asked not to be named to preserve his privacy, have worked through their doubts and are certain they are doing a good thing.
“People can believe me when I say that if I could bear the baby myself I would,” he said. “But this is a mutually beneficial answer. The surrogate gets a fair amount of money for being part of the process.”
They are paying about $30,000, of which the surrogate gets about $7,500.
“Surrogates do it to give their children a better education, to buy a home, to start up a small business, a shop,” Dr. Kadam said. “This is as much money as they could earn in maybe three years. I really don’t think that this is exploiting the women. I feel it is two people who are helping out each other.”
Mr. Gher agreed. “You cannot ignore the discrepancies between Indian poverty and Western wealth,” he said. “We try our best not to abuse this power. Part of our choice to come here was the idea that there was an opportunity to help someone in India.”
In the Mumbai clinic, it is clear that an exchange between rich and poor is under way. On some contracts, the thumbprint of an illiterate surrogate stands out against the clients’ signatures.
Although some Indian clinics allow surrogates and clients to meet, Mr. Gher said he preferred anonymity. When his surrogate gives birth later this year, he and his partner will be in the hospital, but not in the ward where she is in labor, and will be handed the baby by a nurse.
The surrogate mother does not know that she is working for foreigners, Dr. Kadam said, and has not been told that the future parents are both men. Gay sex is illegal in India.
Israel legalized adoption by same-sex couples in February, but such couples are not permitted to hire surrogates in Israel to become parents. A fertility doctor recommended Rotunda, which made news in November when its doctors delivered twins for another gay Israeli couple.
Rotunda did not allow interviews with its surrogate mothers, but a 32-year-old woman at a fertility clinic in Delhi explained why she is planning on her second surrogacy in two years.
Separated from her husband, she found that her monthly wages of 2,800 rupees, about $69, as a midwife were not enough to raise her 9-year-old son. With the money she earned from the first surrogacy, more than $13,600, she bought a house. She expects to pay for her son’s education with what she earns for the second, about $8,600. (Fees are typically fixed by the doctor and can vary.) “I will save the money for my child’s future,” she said.
The process requires a degree of subterfuge in this socially conservative country. She has told her mother, who lives with her, but not her son or their neighbors. She has told the few who have asked her outright that she is bearing a child for a relative.
So far, for the Israeli couple, the experience of having a baby has been strangely virtual. They perused profiles of egg donors that were sent by e-mail (“We picked the one with the highest level of education,” Mr. Gher said). From information that followed, they rejected a factory worker in favor of a housewife, who they thought would have a less stressful lifestyle.
Mr. Gher posts updates about the process on Facebook. And soon the clinic will start sending ultrasound images of their developing child by e-mail. Highly pixelated, blown-up passport photos of the egg donor and surrogate mother adorn a wall of their apartment in Israel.
“We’ve been trying to half close our eyes and look at it in a more holistic way to imagine what she would actually look like,” Mr. Gher said of the donor’s blurred image. “These are women we don’t know, will never know, who will become in a way part of our lives.”
Stem cell transplant helps young MS patient
'I haven't felt this good since before I was diagnosed'
Darah Hansen
Canwest News Service
Friday, March 14, 2008
A midnight flight from Ottawa to Vancouver delivered something of a miracle to Jacky and Tom Telder of Surrey, B.C.
There she was, the Telders' youngest child, Leah, walking towards them in the airport lobby late Monday amidst the disembarking passengers, grinning and waving a greeting.
"That was amazing. She walked off.
. . . I mean, there she was, actually walking," said Jacky of the moment.
Months earlier Leah, 24, had taken a similar flight, in the opposite direction.
That time, she was among the last to board the plane, hobbling unsteadily on a walker like an old woman.
The multiple sclerosis that has afflicted her since her teens had, by that point, robbed her of most of her independence, blurred her vision, muddled her thinking and sapped her strength.
"It was hard to use a knife and fork to even cut my own food," said Leah.
At its worst, the disease -- a highly unpredictable auto-immune disorder -- had temporarily confined the former ballet dancer to a wheelchair. "Her body just fell apart," said her mother.
Hope for Leah came last October, when she became only the 17th -- and the youngest -- MS patient in Canada to undergo a stem cell transplant specifically aimed at curbing the progress of the disease.
Two weeks earlier, she'd checked into the Ottawa Hospital to take part in an experimental medical study, led by Ontario neurologist Dr. Mark Freedman and Dr. Harold Atkins, a bone-marrow transplant specialist. Like the patients before her, Leah underwent heavy doses of chemotherapy -- enough to completely wipe out her immune system and cause her shoulder-length hair to fall out in chunks. Twice, she endured an uncomfortable six-hour procedure during which she was strapped to a chair, unable to even flinch, as a team of specialists carefully siphoned stem cells from her blood.
"If she moved even a little, alarms would beep," said Jacky of the extremely delicate procedure.
The stem cells were then sent to a laboratory where they were "cleaned" before being pumped back into her body.
The theory behind the $4-million study is that pure stem cells will find their way into the bone marrow and build up a new immune system in the patient, free of MS. The trial began in 2001 and is funded by the MS Scientific Research Foundation.
Qualifying patients are all between the ages of 18 and 50 and have either failed conventional MS drug therapy, or like Leah, been too sick to ever begin conventional treatment. Patients must show a rapid progression of the disease, yet must still have enough strength to walk, at least with a cane.
Study co-ordinator Marjorie Bowman said early results of the trial -- which aims to treat 24 patients in total -- will be published this summer.
According to Bowman, one patient died as a result of the chemotherapy (which is so strong, patients have a one in 20 chance of dying). Of the 16 living patients, three have reported some progression of the disease since undergoing treatment, while the remaining 13 have experienced health improvements.
Leah is lucky enough to be in the latter category. "I haven't felt this good since before I was diagnosed," she said.
She can walk on her own again and talk without difficulty. She can make a cup of coffee -- something she hasn't been able to do since she was 21.
And the majority of her vision has been restored.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
'I haven't felt this good since before I was diagnosed'
Darah Hansen
Canwest News Service
Friday, March 14, 2008
A midnight flight from Ottawa to Vancouver delivered something of a miracle to Jacky and Tom Telder of Surrey, B.C.
There she was, the Telders' youngest child, Leah, walking towards them in the airport lobby late Monday amidst the disembarking passengers, grinning and waving a greeting.
"That was amazing. She walked off.
. . . I mean, there she was, actually walking," said Jacky of the moment.
Months earlier Leah, 24, had taken a similar flight, in the opposite direction.
That time, she was among the last to board the plane, hobbling unsteadily on a walker like an old woman.
The multiple sclerosis that has afflicted her since her teens had, by that point, robbed her of most of her independence, blurred her vision, muddled her thinking and sapped her strength.
"It was hard to use a knife and fork to even cut my own food," said Leah.
At its worst, the disease -- a highly unpredictable auto-immune disorder -- had temporarily confined the former ballet dancer to a wheelchair. "Her body just fell apart," said her mother.
Hope for Leah came last October, when she became only the 17th -- and the youngest -- MS patient in Canada to undergo a stem cell transplant specifically aimed at curbing the progress of the disease.
Two weeks earlier, she'd checked into the Ottawa Hospital to take part in an experimental medical study, led by Ontario neurologist Dr. Mark Freedman and Dr. Harold Atkins, a bone-marrow transplant specialist. Like the patients before her, Leah underwent heavy doses of chemotherapy -- enough to completely wipe out her immune system and cause her shoulder-length hair to fall out in chunks. Twice, she endured an uncomfortable six-hour procedure during which she was strapped to a chair, unable to even flinch, as a team of specialists carefully siphoned stem cells from her blood.
"If she moved even a little, alarms would beep," said Jacky of the extremely delicate procedure.
The stem cells were then sent to a laboratory where they were "cleaned" before being pumped back into her body.
The theory behind the $4-million study is that pure stem cells will find their way into the bone marrow and build up a new immune system in the patient, free of MS. The trial began in 2001 and is funded by the MS Scientific Research Foundation.
Qualifying patients are all between the ages of 18 and 50 and have either failed conventional MS drug therapy, or like Leah, been too sick to ever begin conventional treatment. Patients must show a rapid progression of the disease, yet must still have enough strength to walk, at least with a cane.
Study co-ordinator Marjorie Bowman said early results of the trial -- which aims to treat 24 patients in total -- will be published this summer.
According to Bowman, one patient died as a result of the chemotherapy (which is so strong, patients have a one in 20 chance of dying). Of the 16 living patients, three have reported some progression of the disease since undergoing treatment, while the remaining 13 have experienced health improvements.
Leah is lucky enough to be in the latter category. "I haven't felt this good since before I was diagnosed," she said.
She can walk on her own again and talk without difficulty. She can make a cup of coffee -- something she hasn't been able to do since she was 21.
And the majority of her vision has been restored.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
April 5, 2008
Editorial Observer
The Already Big Thing on the Internet: Spying on Users
By ADAM COHEN
In 1993, the dawn of the Internet age, the liberating anonymity of the online world was captured in a well-known New Yorker cartoon. One dog, sitting at a computer, tells another: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Fifteen years later, that anonymity is gone.
It’s not paranoia: they really are spying on you.
Technology companies have long used “cookies,” little bits of tracking software slipped onto your computer, and other means, to record the Web sites you visit, the ads you click on, even the words you enter in search engines — information that some hold onto forever. They’re not telling you they’re doing it, and they’re not asking permission. Internet service providers are now getting into the act. Because they control your connection, they can keep track of everything you do online, and there have been reports that I.S.P.’s may have started to sell the information they collect.
The driving force behind this prying is commerce. The big growth area in online advertising right now is “behavioral targeting.” Web sites can charge a premium if they are able to tell the maker of an expensive sports car that its ads will appear on Web pages clicked on by upper-income, middle-aged men.
The information, however, gets a lot more specific than age and gender — and more sensitive. Tech companies can keep track of when a particular Internet user looks up Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, visits adult Web sites, buys cancer drugs online or participates in anti-government discussion groups.
Serving up ads based on behavioral targeting can itself be an invasion of privacy, especially when the information used is personal. (“Hmm ... I wonder why I always get those drug-rehab ads when I surf the Internet on Jane’s laptop?”)
The bigger issue is the digital dossiers that tech companies can compile. Some companies have promised to keep data confidential, or to obscure it so it cannot be traced back to individuals. But it’s hard to know what a particular company’s policy is, and there are too many to keep track of. And privacy policies can be changed at any time.
There is also no guarantee that the information will stay with the company that collected it. It can be sold to employers or insurance companies, which have financial motives for wanting to know if their workers and policyholders are alcoholics or have AIDS.
It could also end up with the government, which needs only to serve a subpoena to get it (and these days that formality might be ignored).
If George Orwell had lived in the Internet age, he could have painted a grim picture of how Web monitoring could be used to promote authoritarianism. There is no need for neighborhood informants and paper dossiers if the government can see citizens’ every Web site visit, e-mail and text message.
The public has been slow to express outrage — not, as tech companies like to claim, because they don’t care about privacy, but simply because few people know all that is going on. That is changing. “A lot of people are creeped-out by this,” says Ari Schwartz, a vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology. He says the government is under increasing pressure to act.
The Federal Trade Commission has proposed self-regulatory guidelines for companies that do behavioral targeting. Anything that highlights the problem is good, but self-regulation is not enough. One idea starting to gain traction in Congress is a do-not-track list, similar to the federal do-not-call list, which would allow Internet users to opt out of being spied on. That would be a clear improvement over the status quo, but the operating principle should be “opt in” — companies should not be allowed to track Internet activities unless they get the user’s expressed consent.
The founders wrote the Fourth Amendment — guaranteeing protection against illegal search and seizure — at a time when people were most concerned about protecting the privacy of their homes and bodies. The amendment, and more recent federal laws, have been extended to cover telephone communications. Now work has to be done to give Internet activities the same level of privacy protection.
Editorial Observer
The Already Big Thing on the Internet: Spying on Users
By ADAM COHEN
In 1993, the dawn of the Internet age, the liberating anonymity of the online world was captured in a well-known New Yorker cartoon. One dog, sitting at a computer, tells another: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Fifteen years later, that anonymity is gone.
It’s not paranoia: they really are spying on you.
Technology companies have long used “cookies,” little bits of tracking software slipped onto your computer, and other means, to record the Web sites you visit, the ads you click on, even the words you enter in search engines — information that some hold onto forever. They’re not telling you they’re doing it, and they’re not asking permission. Internet service providers are now getting into the act. Because they control your connection, they can keep track of everything you do online, and there have been reports that I.S.P.’s may have started to sell the information they collect.
The driving force behind this prying is commerce. The big growth area in online advertising right now is “behavioral targeting.” Web sites can charge a premium if they are able to tell the maker of an expensive sports car that its ads will appear on Web pages clicked on by upper-income, middle-aged men.
The information, however, gets a lot more specific than age and gender — and more sensitive. Tech companies can keep track of when a particular Internet user looks up Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, visits adult Web sites, buys cancer drugs online or participates in anti-government discussion groups.
Serving up ads based on behavioral targeting can itself be an invasion of privacy, especially when the information used is personal. (“Hmm ... I wonder why I always get those drug-rehab ads when I surf the Internet on Jane’s laptop?”)
The bigger issue is the digital dossiers that tech companies can compile. Some companies have promised to keep data confidential, or to obscure it so it cannot be traced back to individuals. But it’s hard to know what a particular company’s policy is, and there are too many to keep track of. And privacy policies can be changed at any time.
There is also no guarantee that the information will stay with the company that collected it. It can be sold to employers or insurance companies, which have financial motives for wanting to know if their workers and policyholders are alcoholics or have AIDS.
It could also end up with the government, which needs only to serve a subpoena to get it (and these days that formality might be ignored).
If George Orwell had lived in the Internet age, he could have painted a grim picture of how Web monitoring could be used to promote authoritarianism. There is no need for neighborhood informants and paper dossiers if the government can see citizens’ every Web site visit, e-mail and text message.
The public has been slow to express outrage — not, as tech companies like to claim, because they don’t care about privacy, but simply because few people know all that is going on. That is changing. “A lot of people are creeped-out by this,” says Ari Schwartz, a vice president of the Center for Democracy and Technology. He says the government is under increasing pressure to act.
The Federal Trade Commission has proposed self-regulatory guidelines for companies that do behavioral targeting. Anything that highlights the problem is good, but self-regulation is not enough. One idea starting to gain traction in Congress is a do-not-track list, similar to the federal do-not-call list, which would allow Internet users to opt out of being spied on. That would be a clear improvement over the status quo, but the operating principle should be “opt in” — companies should not be allowed to track Internet activities unless they get the user’s expressed consent.
The founders wrote the Fourth Amendment — guaranteeing protection against illegal search and seizure — at a time when people were most concerned about protecting the privacy of their homes and bodies. The amendment, and more recent federal laws, have been extended to cover telephone communications. Now work has to be done to give Internet activities the same level of privacy protection.
April 13, 2008
Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?
By SARA CORBETT
If you need to reach Jan Chipchase, the best, and sometimes only, way to get him is on his cellphone. The first time I spoke to him last fall, he was at home in his apartment in Tokyo. The next time, he was in Accra, the capital of Ghana, in West Africa. Several weeks after that, he was in Uzbekistan, by way of Tajikistan and China, and in short order he and his phone visited Helsinki, London and Los Angeles. If you decide not to call Jan Chipchase but rather to send e-mail, the odds are fairly good that you'll get an "out of office" reply redirecting you back to his cellphone, with a notation about his current time zone — "GMT +9" or "GMT -8" — so that when you do call, you may do so at a courteous hour.
Keep in mind, though, that Jan Chipchase will probably be too busy with his job to talk much anyway. He could be bowling in Tupelo, Miss., or he could be rummaging through a woman's purse in Shanghai. He might be busy examining the advertisements for prostitutes stuck up in a São Paulo phone booth, or maybe getting his ear hairs razored off at a barber shop in Vietnam. It really depends on the moment.
Chipchase is 38, a rangy native of Britain whose broad forehead and high-slung brows combine to give him the air of someone who is quick to be amazed, which in his line of work is something of an asset. For the last seven years, he has worked for the Finnish cellphone company Nokia as a "human-behavior researcher." He's also sometimes referred to as a "user anthropologist." To an outsider, the job can seem decidedly oblique. His mission, broadly defined, is to peer into the lives of other people, accumulating as much knowledge as possible about human behavior so that he can feed helpful bits of information back to the company — to the squads of designers and technologists and marketing people who may never have set foot in a Vietnamese barbershop but who would appreciate it greatly if that barber someday were to buy a Nokia.
What amazes Chipchase is not the standard stuff that amazes big multinational corporations looking to turn an ever-bigger profit. Pretty much wherever he goes, he lugs a big-bodied digital Nikon camera with a couple of soup-can-size lenses so that he can take pictures of things that might be even remotely instructive back in Finland or at any of Nokia's nine design studios around the world. Almost always, some explanation is necessary. A Mississippi bowling alley, he will say, is a social hub, a place rife with nuggets of information about how people communicate. A photograph of the contents of a woman's handbag is more than that; it's a window on her identity, what she considers essential, the weight she is willing to bear. The prostitute ads in the Brazilian phone booth? Those are just names, probably fake names, coupled with real cellphone numbers — lending to Chipchase's theory that in an increasingly transitory world, the cellphone is becoming the one fixed piece of our identity.
Last summer, Chipchase sat through a monsoon-season downpour inside the one-room home of a shoe salesman and his family, who live in the sprawling Dharavi slum of Mumbai. Using an interpreter who spoke Tamil, he quizzed them about the food they ate, the money they had, where they got their water and their power and whom they kept in touch with and why. He was particularly interested in the fact that the family owned a cellphone, purchased several months earlier so that the father, who made the equivalent of $88 a month, could run errands more efficiently for his boss at the shoe shop. The father also occasionally called his wife, ringing her at a pay phone that sat 15 yards from their house. Chipchase noted that not only did the father carry his phone inside a plastic bag to keep it safe in the pummeling seasonal rains but that they also had to hang their belongings on the wall in part because of a lack of floor space and to protect them from the monsoon water and raw sewage that sometimes got tracked inside. He took some 800 photographs of the salesman and his family over about eight hours and later, back at his hotel, dumped them all onto a hard drive for use back inside the corporate mother ship. Maybe the family's next cellphone, he mused, should have some sort of hook as an accessory so it, like everything else in the home, could be suspended above the floor.
This sort of on-the-ground intelligence-gathering is central to what's known as human-centered design, a business-world niche that has become especially important to ultracompetitive high-tech companies trying to figure out how to write software, design laptops or build cellphones that people find useful and unintimidating and will thus spend money on. Several companies, including Intel, Motorola and Microsoft, employ trained anthropologists to study potential customers, while Nokia's researchers, including Chipchase, more often have degrees in design. Rather than sending someone like Chipchase to Vietnam or India as an emissary for the company — loaded with products and pitch lines, as a marketer might be — the idea is to reverse it, to have Chipchase, a patently good listener, act as an emissary for people like the barber or the shoe-shop owner's wife, enlightening the company through written reports and PowerPoint presentations on how they live and what they're likely to need from a cellphone, allowing that to inform its design.
More: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/magaz ... nted=print
Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?
By SARA CORBETT
If you need to reach Jan Chipchase, the best, and sometimes only, way to get him is on his cellphone. The first time I spoke to him last fall, he was at home in his apartment in Tokyo. The next time, he was in Accra, the capital of Ghana, in West Africa. Several weeks after that, he was in Uzbekistan, by way of Tajikistan and China, and in short order he and his phone visited Helsinki, London and Los Angeles. If you decide not to call Jan Chipchase but rather to send e-mail, the odds are fairly good that you'll get an "out of office" reply redirecting you back to his cellphone, with a notation about his current time zone — "GMT +9" or "GMT -8" — so that when you do call, you may do so at a courteous hour.
Keep in mind, though, that Jan Chipchase will probably be too busy with his job to talk much anyway. He could be bowling in Tupelo, Miss., or he could be rummaging through a woman's purse in Shanghai. He might be busy examining the advertisements for prostitutes stuck up in a São Paulo phone booth, or maybe getting his ear hairs razored off at a barber shop in Vietnam. It really depends on the moment.
Chipchase is 38, a rangy native of Britain whose broad forehead and high-slung brows combine to give him the air of someone who is quick to be amazed, which in his line of work is something of an asset. For the last seven years, he has worked for the Finnish cellphone company Nokia as a "human-behavior researcher." He's also sometimes referred to as a "user anthropologist." To an outsider, the job can seem decidedly oblique. His mission, broadly defined, is to peer into the lives of other people, accumulating as much knowledge as possible about human behavior so that he can feed helpful bits of information back to the company — to the squads of designers and technologists and marketing people who may never have set foot in a Vietnamese barbershop but who would appreciate it greatly if that barber someday were to buy a Nokia.
What amazes Chipchase is not the standard stuff that amazes big multinational corporations looking to turn an ever-bigger profit. Pretty much wherever he goes, he lugs a big-bodied digital Nikon camera with a couple of soup-can-size lenses so that he can take pictures of things that might be even remotely instructive back in Finland or at any of Nokia's nine design studios around the world. Almost always, some explanation is necessary. A Mississippi bowling alley, he will say, is a social hub, a place rife with nuggets of information about how people communicate. A photograph of the contents of a woman's handbag is more than that; it's a window on her identity, what she considers essential, the weight she is willing to bear. The prostitute ads in the Brazilian phone booth? Those are just names, probably fake names, coupled with real cellphone numbers — lending to Chipchase's theory that in an increasingly transitory world, the cellphone is becoming the one fixed piece of our identity.
Last summer, Chipchase sat through a monsoon-season downpour inside the one-room home of a shoe salesman and his family, who live in the sprawling Dharavi slum of Mumbai. Using an interpreter who spoke Tamil, he quizzed them about the food they ate, the money they had, where they got their water and their power and whom they kept in touch with and why. He was particularly interested in the fact that the family owned a cellphone, purchased several months earlier so that the father, who made the equivalent of $88 a month, could run errands more efficiently for his boss at the shoe shop. The father also occasionally called his wife, ringing her at a pay phone that sat 15 yards from their house. Chipchase noted that not only did the father carry his phone inside a plastic bag to keep it safe in the pummeling seasonal rains but that they also had to hang their belongings on the wall in part because of a lack of floor space and to protect them from the monsoon water and raw sewage that sometimes got tracked inside. He took some 800 photographs of the salesman and his family over about eight hours and later, back at his hotel, dumped them all onto a hard drive for use back inside the corporate mother ship. Maybe the family's next cellphone, he mused, should have some sort of hook as an accessory so it, like everything else in the home, could be suspended above the floor.
This sort of on-the-ground intelligence-gathering is central to what's known as human-centered design, a business-world niche that has become especially important to ultracompetitive high-tech companies trying to figure out how to write software, design laptops or build cellphones that people find useful and unintimidating and will thus spend money on. Several companies, including Intel, Motorola and Microsoft, employ trained anthropologists to study potential customers, while Nokia's researchers, including Chipchase, more often have degrees in design. Rather than sending someone like Chipchase to Vietnam or India as an emissary for the company — loaded with products and pitch lines, as a marketer might be — the idea is to reverse it, to have Chipchase, a patently good listener, act as an emissary for people like the barber or the shoe-shop owner's wife, enlightening the company through written reports and PowerPoint presentations on how they live and what they're likely to need from a cellphone, allowing that to inform its design.
More: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/magaz ... nted=print
May 2, 2008
Congress Passes Bill to Bar Bias Based on Genes
By AMY HARMON
Correction Appended
A bill that would prohibit discrimination by health insurers and employers based on the information that people carry in their genes won final approval in Congress on Thursday by an overwhelming vote.
The legislation, which President Bush has indicated he will sign, speaks both to the mounting hope that genetic research may greatly improve health care and the fear of a dystopia in which people’s own DNA could be turned against them.
On the House floor on Thursday, Democrats and Republicans alike cited anecdotes and polls illustrating that people feel they should not be penalized because they happened to be born at higher risk for a given disease.
“People know we all have bad genes, and we are all potential victims of genetic discrimination,” said Representative Louise M. Slaughter, Democrat of New York, who first proposed the legislation. The measure passed the House on Thursday by a 414-to-1 vote, and the Senate by 95-to-0 a week earlier.
If the bill is signed into law, more people are expected to take advantage of genetic testing and to participate in genetic research. Still, some experts said people should think twice before revealing their genetic information.
Doctors say a fear of discrimination on the part of patients has prevented thousands at risk of genetic disease from taking advantage of tests that might help them make better health care choices. Some patients worry that they may be denied jobs or face higher insurance premiums if a genetic red flag shows up in their medical records.
Many who do learn that they are at higher risk for a disease opt not to ask their insurance companies to cover the costs of the genetic test, to keep the information secret. Some try to persuade medical professionals not to enter the test results in their health records; others keep the information from even their own doctors.
The measure did not always have such overwhelming support. Similar legislation had floundered for over a decade in the face of opposition from employers and insurers and skepticism from lawmakers over its necessity: virtually no cases of genetic discrimination have ever been documented.
But with the mapping of the human genome and the rapid discovery of genetic variants that contribute to risk of common diseases like breast cancer, colon cancer, diabetes and heart disease, the number of people who might benefit from learning what risks lie in their genes is growing quickly.
Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, who had blocked the bill for months, agreed to let it go forward after the addition of language to protect employers from lawsuits that stem solely from insurance company violations of the law.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce still opposed it, arguing that the fines were excessive and that its limits on the collection of medical information would complicate even routine practices, like recording a request by an employee to take a leave to take care of a parent with cancer.
The legislation, known as the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, prohibits health insurance companies from using genetic information to deny benefits or raise premiums for individual policies. (It is already illegal to exclude individuals from a group plan because of their genetic profile.) Employers who use genetic information to make decisions about hiring, firing or compensation could be fined as much as $300,000 for each violation.
“This clears away what in many people’s mind had been a real cloud on the horizon,” said Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health. “Families with a strong history of genetic disease will have one less worry about the circumstances they find themselves in, and hooray for that.”
While the intent of the law is to prohibit discrimination by insurance companies based on genetic tests, the bill does allow the companies urge patients take them. The goal would be not to deny coverage but to help find the best, and least expensive, therapy for a patient.
“This legislation will strengthen patients’ privacy protections while preserving their access to health insurance plans’ innovative prevention and coordination programs,” Karen Ignagni, chief executive of America’s Health Insurance Plans said in a statement.
The health insurance measure would not go into effect until a year after it becomes law, and the employment measure would take effect only after 18 months. Even then, there may be reason to be cautious. The bill may be hard to enforce, some experts say, and it does not address discrimination by long-term care insurers or life insurers.
“This gives us a weapon and a tool and a voice to try to push people to do what they should, but health care costs are soaring, and the urge to discriminate still exists,” said Nancy Wexler, president of the Hereditary Disease Foundation. “It’s very hard to prove why somebody is firing you.”
For health insurers, the bill may avert the need to compete in a complex game of calibrating policies to an ever-changing set of genetic risk probabilities. But as genetic tests provide ever more information at lower costs, the entire notion of insuring against unknown risk that has long defined the industry may be upended.
It may also give ammunition to those who argue for universal health care. “Ultimately unlocking all these genetic secrets will make the whole idea of private health insurance obsolete,” said Karen Pollitz, director of the Health Policy Institute at Georgetown University.
In the meantime, the use of genetic information that the bill is likely to encourage may raise still more questions about how it should be used.
“Just like we’ve begun to mitigate discrimination in race and gender in this society we’re going to have to go through the same thing for genetics,” said Sharon Terry, president of the Genetic Alliance, an advocacy group for people with genetic conditions that supported the bill. “Do we as a society start to make decisions like, ‘I don’t want kids who are going to get arthritis or who aren’t going to be great basketball players?’ This is only the beginning.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 3, 2008
Because of an editing error, an article on Friday about the passage of a bill to prohibit genetic discrimination by health insurers gave an incorrect vote count for the Senate in some editions. It passed by 95 to 0, not 95 to 5.
Congress Passes Bill to Bar Bias Based on Genes
By AMY HARMON
Correction Appended
A bill that would prohibit discrimination by health insurers and employers based on the information that people carry in their genes won final approval in Congress on Thursday by an overwhelming vote.
The legislation, which President Bush has indicated he will sign, speaks both to the mounting hope that genetic research may greatly improve health care and the fear of a dystopia in which people’s own DNA could be turned against them.
On the House floor on Thursday, Democrats and Republicans alike cited anecdotes and polls illustrating that people feel they should not be penalized because they happened to be born at higher risk for a given disease.
“People know we all have bad genes, and we are all potential victims of genetic discrimination,” said Representative Louise M. Slaughter, Democrat of New York, who first proposed the legislation. The measure passed the House on Thursday by a 414-to-1 vote, and the Senate by 95-to-0 a week earlier.
If the bill is signed into law, more people are expected to take advantage of genetic testing and to participate in genetic research. Still, some experts said people should think twice before revealing their genetic information.
Doctors say a fear of discrimination on the part of patients has prevented thousands at risk of genetic disease from taking advantage of tests that might help them make better health care choices. Some patients worry that they may be denied jobs or face higher insurance premiums if a genetic red flag shows up in their medical records.
Many who do learn that they are at higher risk for a disease opt not to ask their insurance companies to cover the costs of the genetic test, to keep the information secret. Some try to persuade medical professionals not to enter the test results in their health records; others keep the information from even their own doctors.
The measure did not always have such overwhelming support. Similar legislation had floundered for over a decade in the face of opposition from employers and insurers and skepticism from lawmakers over its necessity: virtually no cases of genetic discrimination have ever been documented.
But with the mapping of the human genome and the rapid discovery of genetic variants that contribute to risk of common diseases like breast cancer, colon cancer, diabetes and heart disease, the number of people who might benefit from learning what risks lie in their genes is growing quickly.
Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, who had blocked the bill for months, agreed to let it go forward after the addition of language to protect employers from lawsuits that stem solely from insurance company violations of the law.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce still opposed it, arguing that the fines were excessive and that its limits on the collection of medical information would complicate even routine practices, like recording a request by an employee to take a leave to take care of a parent with cancer.
The legislation, known as the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act, prohibits health insurance companies from using genetic information to deny benefits or raise premiums for individual policies. (It is already illegal to exclude individuals from a group plan because of their genetic profile.) Employers who use genetic information to make decisions about hiring, firing or compensation could be fined as much as $300,000 for each violation.
“This clears away what in many people’s mind had been a real cloud on the horizon,” said Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health. “Families with a strong history of genetic disease will have one less worry about the circumstances they find themselves in, and hooray for that.”
While the intent of the law is to prohibit discrimination by insurance companies based on genetic tests, the bill does allow the companies urge patients take them. The goal would be not to deny coverage but to help find the best, and least expensive, therapy for a patient.
“This legislation will strengthen patients’ privacy protections while preserving their access to health insurance plans’ innovative prevention and coordination programs,” Karen Ignagni, chief executive of America’s Health Insurance Plans said in a statement.
The health insurance measure would not go into effect until a year after it becomes law, and the employment measure would take effect only after 18 months. Even then, there may be reason to be cautious. The bill may be hard to enforce, some experts say, and it does not address discrimination by long-term care insurers or life insurers.
“This gives us a weapon and a tool and a voice to try to push people to do what they should, but health care costs are soaring, and the urge to discriminate still exists,” said Nancy Wexler, president of the Hereditary Disease Foundation. “It’s very hard to prove why somebody is firing you.”
For health insurers, the bill may avert the need to compete in a complex game of calibrating policies to an ever-changing set of genetic risk probabilities. But as genetic tests provide ever more information at lower costs, the entire notion of insuring against unknown risk that has long defined the industry may be upended.
It may also give ammunition to those who argue for universal health care. “Ultimately unlocking all these genetic secrets will make the whole idea of private health insurance obsolete,” said Karen Pollitz, director of the Health Policy Institute at Georgetown University.
In the meantime, the use of genetic information that the bill is likely to encourage may raise still more questions about how it should be used.
“Just like we’ve begun to mitigate discrimination in race and gender in this society we’re going to have to go through the same thing for genetics,” said Sharon Terry, president of the Genetic Alliance, an advocacy group for people with genetic conditions that supported the bill. “Do we as a society start to make decisions like, ‘I don’t want kids who are going to get arthritis or who aren’t going to be great basketball players?’ This is only the beginning.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: May 3, 2008
Because of an editing error, an article on Friday about the passage of a bill to prohibit genetic discrimination by health insurers gave an incorrect vote count for the Senate in some editions. It passed by 95 to 0, not 95 to 5.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/13/scien ... 0XbBFyd0kA
May 13, 2008
Two New Ways to Explore the Virtual Universe, in Vivid 3-D
By STEVE LOHR
The skies may be the next frontier in travel, yet not even the wealthiest space tourist can zoom out to, say, the Crab Nebula, the Trapezium Cluster or Eta Carinae, a star 100 times more massive than the Sun and 7,500 light-years away.
But those galactic destinations and thousands of others can now be toured and explored at the controls of a computer mouse, with the constellations, stars and space dust displayed in vivid detail and animated imagery across the screen. The project, the WorldWide Telescope, is the culmination of years of work by researchers at Microsoft, and the Web site and free downloadable software are available starting on Tuesday, at www.WorldWideTelescope.org.
There are many online astronomy sites, but astronomers say the Microsoft entry sets a new standard in three-dimensional representation of vast amounts data plucked from space telescopes, the ease of navigation, the visual experience and features like guided tours narrated by experts.
“Exploring the virtual universe is incredibly smooth and seamless like a top-of-the-line computer game, but also the science is correct,” said Alexander Szalay, a professor of astronomy and physics at Johns Hopkins. “No sacrifices have been made. It just feels as if you are in it.”
The WorldWide Telescope project spans astronomy, education and computing. Educators hope its rich images, animation and design for self-navigation will help entice computer-gaming young people into astronomy and science in general. The space service, astronomers say, could also become valuable in scientific discovery, especially with a professional version being developed with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Like many fields of science, astronomy has become digitized and data rich in recent years, making it an ideal proving ground for advanced computing techniques in data mining, visualization and searching.
So it is scarcely surprising that the other major company with an ambitious astronomy service online is Google. The Internet search giant first layered astronomical data and images onto Google Earth last August.
The switch to astronomy in Google Sky amounts to looking out into space instead of down on Earth. Two months ago, Google introduced a Web-based version of Google Sky, layering space images on its searchable map service.
Microsoft and Google are spirited competitors and antagonists in the rough-and-tumble commercial markets of Internet search and software. Yet in online astronomy, both sides proclaim mutual respect and say their sole rivalry is in scientific discovery and public education. They say they have no plans to sell advertising on the astronomy sites.
Scientists and educators applaud the interest and investment by the two.
“It’s really encouraging that both Microsoft and Google are there, pushing these powerful tools for science education forward,” said Daniel Atkins, director of the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure, which focuses on using new technology in learning and research.
There may be no space war between Microsoft and Google, but their offerings reflect their different cultures. The WorldWide Telescope results from careful planning and lengthy development in a research division. It has the richer graphics and it created special software to present the images of spherical space objects with less polar distortion. WorldWide Telescope requires downloading a hefty piece of software, and it runs only on Microsoft Windows.
Google Sky started as a Google “20 percent” project, in which engineers can spend time on anything they choose. Google Earth, where Google Sky began, requires a software download, but its Web-based version, which came out in March, does not. The Google culture encourages engineers to put new things onto the Internet quickly and keep improving them, a philosophy geared to constant evolution instead of finished products.
Despite differences, the companies share motivations. Lior Ron, Google Sky product manager, said the astronomy focus “says a lot about the interests of the people in both companies.” At Google, Mr. Ron, 31, is one of a group of astronomy enthusiasts. He built his own telescope as a teenager and went to astronomy camps in his native Israel. He said he almost joined private space industry last year instead of Google.
A personal fascination in astronomy has also energized work at Microsoft. Jonathan Fay, 42, the lead software engineer on the project, has built an observatory, with a dome eight feet in diameter, in his backyard in suburban Seattle.
The inspiration for the WorldWide Telescope, and much of the early work, came from Jim Gray, a renowned computer scientist who disappeared last year while sailing alone off northern California. Mr. Gray had long been intrigued by the computing challenges of presenting map and satellite images online. His project to show aerial map images of the world, TerraServer, went up in June 1998, a few months before Google was founded. Mr. Gray then worked for years with astronomers on the concept he presented in Science in September 2001, “The World-wide Telescope.” Mr. Szalay was co-author.
Mr. Gray’s vision was largely about making the flood of astronomical data accessible and usable for scientists. The project began to take on its current look and design in fall 2006, when Curtis Wong started working on it full time. Mr. Wong, another amateur astronomer, heads a new media research group at Microsoft, which he joined in 1998. He is the creator of award-winning multimedia CD-ROMs on subjects like the Barnes art collection, Leonardo da Vinci and the making of the atomic bomb.
When he came to the astronomy project, Mr. Wong recalled telling Mr. Gray, “This is great, but let’s bring all this data and make it available, accessible and engaging to the public.”
A conversation with Mr. Wong, 54, is different from most around the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash., which is mainly populated by engineers, marketers and business managers. Mr. Wong speaks of the WorldWide Telescope’s allowing citizen explorers to make and post virtual tours. One tour on the site is by a 6-year-old boy from Toronto. “What we’re starting with is just a foundation,” Mr. Wong said. “When it really gets interesting is when more and more stories populate the WorldWide Telescope.”
Young people today are used to sharing stories, on MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and elsewhere. Educators hope that the WorldWide Telescope can entice them to take an interest in astronomy. “Science has a bad rap because it is seen as a dry accumulation of facts,” said Roy R. Gould, a science education expert at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “But this is a visually beautiful environment where you can explore, create and share.”
May 13, 2008
Two New Ways to Explore the Virtual Universe, in Vivid 3-D
By STEVE LOHR
The skies may be the next frontier in travel, yet not even the wealthiest space tourist can zoom out to, say, the Crab Nebula, the Trapezium Cluster or Eta Carinae, a star 100 times more massive than the Sun and 7,500 light-years away.
But those galactic destinations and thousands of others can now be toured and explored at the controls of a computer mouse, with the constellations, stars and space dust displayed in vivid detail and animated imagery across the screen. The project, the WorldWide Telescope, is the culmination of years of work by researchers at Microsoft, and the Web site and free downloadable software are available starting on Tuesday, at www.WorldWideTelescope.org.
There are many online astronomy sites, but astronomers say the Microsoft entry sets a new standard in three-dimensional representation of vast amounts data plucked from space telescopes, the ease of navigation, the visual experience and features like guided tours narrated by experts.
“Exploring the virtual universe is incredibly smooth and seamless like a top-of-the-line computer game, but also the science is correct,” said Alexander Szalay, a professor of astronomy and physics at Johns Hopkins. “No sacrifices have been made. It just feels as if you are in it.”
The WorldWide Telescope project spans astronomy, education and computing. Educators hope its rich images, animation and design for self-navigation will help entice computer-gaming young people into astronomy and science in general. The space service, astronomers say, could also become valuable in scientific discovery, especially with a professional version being developed with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Like many fields of science, astronomy has become digitized and data rich in recent years, making it an ideal proving ground for advanced computing techniques in data mining, visualization and searching.
So it is scarcely surprising that the other major company with an ambitious astronomy service online is Google. The Internet search giant first layered astronomical data and images onto Google Earth last August.
The switch to astronomy in Google Sky amounts to looking out into space instead of down on Earth. Two months ago, Google introduced a Web-based version of Google Sky, layering space images on its searchable map service.
Microsoft and Google are spirited competitors and antagonists in the rough-and-tumble commercial markets of Internet search and software. Yet in online astronomy, both sides proclaim mutual respect and say their sole rivalry is in scientific discovery and public education. They say they have no plans to sell advertising on the astronomy sites.
Scientists and educators applaud the interest and investment by the two.
“It’s really encouraging that both Microsoft and Google are there, pushing these powerful tools for science education forward,” said Daniel Atkins, director of the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure, which focuses on using new technology in learning and research.
There may be no space war between Microsoft and Google, but their offerings reflect their different cultures. The WorldWide Telescope results from careful planning and lengthy development in a research division. It has the richer graphics and it created special software to present the images of spherical space objects with less polar distortion. WorldWide Telescope requires downloading a hefty piece of software, and it runs only on Microsoft Windows.
Google Sky started as a Google “20 percent” project, in which engineers can spend time on anything they choose. Google Earth, where Google Sky began, requires a software download, but its Web-based version, which came out in March, does not. The Google culture encourages engineers to put new things onto the Internet quickly and keep improving them, a philosophy geared to constant evolution instead of finished products.
Despite differences, the companies share motivations. Lior Ron, Google Sky product manager, said the astronomy focus “says a lot about the interests of the people in both companies.” At Google, Mr. Ron, 31, is one of a group of astronomy enthusiasts. He built his own telescope as a teenager and went to astronomy camps in his native Israel. He said he almost joined private space industry last year instead of Google.
A personal fascination in astronomy has also energized work at Microsoft. Jonathan Fay, 42, the lead software engineer on the project, has built an observatory, with a dome eight feet in diameter, in his backyard in suburban Seattle.
The inspiration for the WorldWide Telescope, and much of the early work, came from Jim Gray, a renowned computer scientist who disappeared last year while sailing alone off northern California. Mr. Gray had long been intrigued by the computing challenges of presenting map and satellite images online. His project to show aerial map images of the world, TerraServer, went up in June 1998, a few months before Google was founded. Mr. Gray then worked for years with astronomers on the concept he presented in Science in September 2001, “The World-wide Telescope.” Mr. Szalay was co-author.
Mr. Gray’s vision was largely about making the flood of astronomical data accessible and usable for scientists. The project began to take on its current look and design in fall 2006, when Curtis Wong started working on it full time. Mr. Wong, another amateur astronomer, heads a new media research group at Microsoft, which he joined in 1998. He is the creator of award-winning multimedia CD-ROMs on subjects like the Barnes art collection, Leonardo da Vinci and the making of the atomic bomb.
When he came to the astronomy project, Mr. Wong recalled telling Mr. Gray, “This is great, but let’s bring all this data and make it available, accessible and engaging to the public.”
A conversation with Mr. Wong, 54, is different from most around the Microsoft campus in Redmond, Wash., which is mainly populated by engineers, marketers and business managers. Mr. Wong speaks of the WorldWide Telescope’s allowing citizen explorers to make and post virtual tours. One tour on the site is by a 6-year-old boy from Toronto. “What we’re starting with is just a foundation,” Mr. Wong said. “When it really gets interesting is when more and more stories populate the WorldWide Telescope.”
Young people today are used to sharing stories, on MySpace, Facebook, YouTube and elsewhere. Educators hope that the WorldWide Telescope can entice them to take an interest in astronomy. “Science has a bad rap because it is seen as a dry accumulation of facts,” said Roy R. Gould, a science education expert at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “But this is a visually beautiful environment where you can explore, create and share.”
Researchers pinpoint protein in cancer fight
Janet French
Canwest News Service
Friday, May 16, 2008
If cancer has an off-button, some Canadian scientists just got a lot closer to putting their fingers on it.
Researchers at the University of Saskatchewan have discovered a biochemical link that could be a new target for cancer drugs.
Microbiology and immunology professor Wei Xiao and his research team have found a way to activate a protein complex dubbed 9-1-1 that clamps onto damaged DNA strands and tells them to stop dividing and replicating.
Xiao's team discovered that when 9-1-1 is active, it also sends out a rallying call for the cell to create hundreds of other proteins involved in repairing DNA.
Carcinogens are thought to introduce mistakes into the DNA sequence when it is copied. Sometimes pieces of the DNA code are missing, or the wrong code is used.
DNA repair is vital to fighting cancer, and Xiao's team has found a protein that might switch on 9-1-1's damage-repair mode. The team's research paper, published in the journal Cell, says 9-1-1 is activated when another molecule in the cellular soup tacks a protein called ubiquitin onto it.
University of Alberta biochemistry professor Michael Ellison, who did not work on the study, calls the findings a "cornerstone" in the understanding of the DNA repair process.
"It opens up enormous avenues for research and for medicine," he said.
Although the lab found the link in yeast, human cells have all the same parts, Xiao said. Now researchers know how to turn on and off the 9-1-1 gene repair complex.
On its own, that's no cure -- you couldn't prevent cancers by turning on 9-1-1 all the time, because the body's cells would stop dividing and you would slowly fall apart, Xiao said.
But the discovery opens up potential new avenues for the diagnosis and treatment of cancer, he said. All researchers have to do is come up with drugs to activate and deactivate the 9-1-1 repair proteins on demand.
"If there's something partially defective, we can possibly look at some drugs to stabilize this protein that can bypass the requirement of these genes," Xiao said.
That could take a while. Scientists are still seeking all the factors that influence 9-1-1, and new drugs require vigorous testing to ensure safety.
"This is really the beginning of understanding a process," Ellison said. "There is no magic bullet. There is no immediate cure that comes out of work like this."
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Janet French
Canwest News Service
Friday, May 16, 2008
If cancer has an off-button, some Canadian scientists just got a lot closer to putting their fingers on it.
Researchers at the University of Saskatchewan have discovered a biochemical link that could be a new target for cancer drugs.
Microbiology and immunology professor Wei Xiao and his research team have found a way to activate a protein complex dubbed 9-1-1 that clamps onto damaged DNA strands and tells them to stop dividing and replicating.
Xiao's team discovered that when 9-1-1 is active, it also sends out a rallying call for the cell to create hundreds of other proteins involved in repairing DNA.
Carcinogens are thought to introduce mistakes into the DNA sequence when it is copied. Sometimes pieces of the DNA code are missing, or the wrong code is used.
DNA repair is vital to fighting cancer, and Xiao's team has found a protein that might switch on 9-1-1's damage-repair mode. The team's research paper, published in the journal Cell, says 9-1-1 is activated when another molecule in the cellular soup tacks a protein called ubiquitin onto it.
University of Alberta biochemistry professor Michael Ellison, who did not work on the study, calls the findings a "cornerstone" in the understanding of the DNA repair process.
"It opens up enormous avenues for research and for medicine," he said.
Although the lab found the link in yeast, human cells have all the same parts, Xiao said. Now researchers know how to turn on and off the 9-1-1 gene repair complex.
On its own, that's no cure -- you couldn't prevent cancers by turning on 9-1-1 all the time, because the body's cells would stop dividing and you would slowly fall apart, Xiao said.
But the discovery opens up potential new avenues for the diagnosis and treatment of cancer, he said. All researchers have to do is come up with drugs to activate and deactivate the 9-1-1 repair proteins on demand.
"If there's something partially defective, we can possibly look at some drugs to stabilize this protein that can bypass the requirement of these genes," Xiao said.
That could take a while. Scientists are still seeking all the factors that influence 9-1-1, and new drugs require vigorous testing to ensure safety.
"This is really the beginning of understanding a process," Ellison said. "There is no magic bullet. There is no immediate cure that comes out of work like this."
© The Calgary Herald 2008
There are related and striking multimedia and a video linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/scien ... 0mars.html#
May 20, 2008
Phoenix Lander Is Ready for Risky Descent to Mars
By WARREN E. LEARY
To get to the ice, you have to go through the fire.
A spacecraft now completing a nine-month journey from Earth to Mars must survive a fiery, risky descent to the Red Planet to have a chance to scoop up water ice believed buried under an arctic plain.
After traveling 422 million miles since its launching last Aug. 4, NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander is aiming for a touchdown on Sunday in the unexplored northern regions of Mars. But first, it must survive what its developers call the final “seven minutes of terror” to reach the surface.
“There are many, many risks and uncertainties,” said Dr. Edward Weiler, associate administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration science division. Since the start of planetary exploration, 55 percent of spacecraft sent to land on Mars have failed, he said.
Although the Phoenix lander, a conglomeration of parts from two earlier failed missions, has been tested and rechecked to correct all known design flaws and potential errors, Dr. Weiler said, “there are always the unknown unknowns.”
If all goes as planned, the lander is to set down on Vastitas Borealis, the arctic planes of Mars roughly equivalent to northern Canada on Earth, about 15 minutes before mission control receives confirmation at 7:53 p.m. Eastern time. The first picture from the spacecraft, expected to be an image of its deployed solar power panels, should arrive about two hours later, mission managers said.
Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said that for him the most hair-raising part of the journey will begin about 14 minutes before touchdown, when the spacecraft reaches the beginnings of the thin Mars atmosphere, jettisons the cruise stage that has nurtured it since leaving Earth and experiences three minutes of radio silence as it turns its heat shield toward Mars.
Then, with seven minutes remaining, Phoenix is to plunge into the atmosphere at 12,750 miles an hour, where friction will slow it, heating the shield to 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit. At 8 miles in altitude and 1,000 miles an hour, the spacecraft will deploy its parachute for the next three minutes of descent, when it is to jettison the heat shield, extend its three landing legs and begin using its radar to gather readings on its speed and distance from the surface.
At six-tenths of a mile above the surface and 125 miles an hour, Phoenix is to separate from its parachute and the back shell that holds it and begin the sequential firing of 12 rocket thrusters that slow it to landing at 5 1/2 miles an hour 40 seconds later.
It has been 32 years since NASA, with the twin Viking landers in 1976, has put a craft on the Martian surface using rockets to slow the descent. The last previous attempt was the 1999 Mars Polar Lander, which crashed when its engines cut off prematurely.
The later Mars Pathfinder and the two robot rovers, the Opportunity and the Spirit, which have operated for three years in the equatorial region, landed using air bags to cushion the impact. Mr. Goldstein said air bags were not practical for heavier craft like the Phoenix because the added weight of bigger bags would severely cut into the scientific payload.
Unlike the wheeled rovers, the Mars Phoenix Lander is to stay in one spot and dig for evidence of water and other conditions that could have supported primitive life.
Although there are ample indications that Mars had surface water billions of years ago — in some cases, evidence suggests that water may have flowed in some gullies and channels within the last few millions of years or later — conditions today, including an atmosphere 1 percent as dense as Earth’s, do not allow for liquid water, scientists said. But, instruments on the Mars Odyssey orbiter discovered in 2002 that plentiful water ice lay just beneath the surface throughout much of high-latitude Mars.
The target landing area for the Phoenix, surveyed in detail by the high-resolution camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, is a permafrost region with few rocks or deep slopes that could threaten the lander, said Dr. Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis, chairman of the landing-site working group. “This is one of the least rocky areas on all of Mars,” he said.
Dr. Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, the principal scientist for the $420 million mission, said that the area was covered with polar ice in winter, but that the Phoenix was to land in early summer, when the frozen surface is mostly clear and the soil is exposed for study. The 770-pound lander, with a 121-pound science payload, is to spend at least three months examining the surface with a trench-digging robot arm.
The Phoenix is named after the mythical bird that rose from its ashes, because the spacecraft is made up of parts from two earlier attempts to explore Mars. The spacecraft has the skeleton and some instruments from the 2001 Mars Surveyor lander, which remained grounded because of cost overruns, as well as instruments that are based on those aboard the unsuccessful Mars Polar Lander.
Dr. Smith said scientists and engineers went through the castoff parts system by system, found almost two dozen potentially fatal flaws that could doom a mission and fixed them. “We re-engineered the spacecraft without rebuilding it,” he said. “We think it’s as good as it can be.”
If the Phoenix survives its landing, it will wait 20 minutes for debris at the site to settle before unfurling two circular solar power arrays that will make its width 18 feet across. Next, two stereoscopic color cameras will rise on a mast that extends seven feet above the surface to record panoramic views of the surroundings. Then a four-foot mast bearing temperature, wind and other sensors is to extend from an onboard weather station supplied by the Canadian Space Agency.
The spacecraft, sterilized to prevent contamination by Earth organisms, is to use its 7.7-foot-long robot arm like a backhoe to dig a series of trenches more than 20 inches into the surface with a movable metal scoop that has sharp prongs on the end to break and scrape expected hard surface, Dr. Smith said.
Using a camera on the end of the scoop, scientists will select samples for detailed study aboard the lander. In one experiment, samples will be dropped into a hopper to feed eight tiny one-use ovens. Each is about a half-inch long and one-eighth inch in diameter.
The sample will be slowly heated to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit to study the transition from solid to liquid to gas, and the vapors analyzed by a mass spectrometer to measure the mass and composition of specific molecules.
This laboratory also contains two microscopes to examine the fine structure of soil and ice samples, scrutinizing features as small as one one-thousandth the width of a human hair that might be evidence of past liquid water on the planet. The Phoenix is designed to operate in the Martian summer, but scientists hope that it survives into at least mid-November. Winter brings months of darkness and no power to protect the spacecraft from a fatal deep freeze before the Sun returns, they said.
“It’s extraordinarily unlikely the vehicle will survive,” said Mr. Goldstein, the project manager. But on the outside chance that spring sunlight recharges the craft next year, he said, it has been programmed with a “Lazarus mode” to signal that it has risen from the dead.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/20/scien ... 0mars.html#
May 20, 2008
Phoenix Lander Is Ready for Risky Descent to Mars
By WARREN E. LEARY
To get to the ice, you have to go through the fire.
A spacecraft now completing a nine-month journey from Earth to Mars must survive a fiery, risky descent to the Red Planet to have a chance to scoop up water ice believed buried under an arctic plain.
After traveling 422 million miles since its launching last Aug. 4, NASA’s Phoenix Mars Lander is aiming for a touchdown on Sunday in the unexplored northern regions of Mars. But first, it must survive what its developers call the final “seven minutes of terror” to reach the surface.
“There are many, many risks and uncertainties,” said Dr. Edward Weiler, associate administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration science division. Since the start of planetary exploration, 55 percent of spacecraft sent to land on Mars have failed, he said.
Although the Phoenix lander, a conglomeration of parts from two earlier failed missions, has been tested and rechecked to correct all known design flaws and potential errors, Dr. Weiler said, “there are always the unknown unknowns.”
If all goes as planned, the lander is to set down on Vastitas Borealis, the arctic planes of Mars roughly equivalent to northern Canada on Earth, about 15 minutes before mission control receives confirmation at 7:53 p.m. Eastern time. The first picture from the spacecraft, expected to be an image of its deployed solar power panels, should arrive about two hours later, mission managers said.
Barry Goldstein, Phoenix project manager from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said that for him the most hair-raising part of the journey will begin about 14 minutes before touchdown, when the spacecraft reaches the beginnings of the thin Mars atmosphere, jettisons the cruise stage that has nurtured it since leaving Earth and experiences three minutes of radio silence as it turns its heat shield toward Mars.
Then, with seven minutes remaining, Phoenix is to plunge into the atmosphere at 12,750 miles an hour, where friction will slow it, heating the shield to 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit. At 8 miles in altitude and 1,000 miles an hour, the spacecraft will deploy its parachute for the next three minutes of descent, when it is to jettison the heat shield, extend its three landing legs and begin using its radar to gather readings on its speed and distance from the surface.
At six-tenths of a mile above the surface and 125 miles an hour, Phoenix is to separate from its parachute and the back shell that holds it and begin the sequential firing of 12 rocket thrusters that slow it to landing at 5 1/2 miles an hour 40 seconds later.
It has been 32 years since NASA, with the twin Viking landers in 1976, has put a craft on the Martian surface using rockets to slow the descent. The last previous attempt was the 1999 Mars Polar Lander, which crashed when its engines cut off prematurely.
The later Mars Pathfinder and the two robot rovers, the Opportunity and the Spirit, which have operated for three years in the equatorial region, landed using air bags to cushion the impact. Mr. Goldstein said air bags were not practical for heavier craft like the Phoenix because the added weight of bigger bags would severely cut into the scientific payload.
Unlike the wheeled rovers, the Mars Phoenix Lander is to stay in one spot and dig for evidence of water and other conditions that could have supported primitive life.
Although there are ample indications that Mars had surface water billions of years ago — in some cases, evidence suggests that water may have flowed in some gullies and channels within the last few millions of years or later — conditions today, including an atmosphere 1 percent as dense as Earth’s, do not allow for liquid water, scientists said. But, instruments on the Mars Odyssey orbiter discovered in 2002 that plentiful water ice lay just beneath the surface throughout much of high-latitude Mars.
The target landing area for the Phoenix, surveyed in detail by the high-resolution camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter spacecraft, is a permafrost region with few rocks or deep slopes that could threaten the lander, said Dr. Ray Arvidson of Washington University in St. Louis, chairman of the landing-site working group. “This is one of the least rocky areas on all of Mars,” he said.
Dr. Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, the principal scientist for the $420 million mission, said that the area was covered with polar ice in winter, but that the Phoenix was to land in early summer, when the frozen surface is mostly clear and the soil is exposed for study. The 770-pound lander, with a 121-pound science payload, is to spend at least three months examining the surface with a trench-digging robot arm.
The Phoenix is named after the mythical bird that rose from its ashes, because the spacecraft is made up of parts from two earlier attempts to explore Mars. The spacecraft has the skeleton and some instruments from the 2001 Mars Surveyor lander, which remained grounded because of cost overruns, as well as instruments that are based on those aboard the unsuccessful Mars Polar Lander.
Dr. Smith said scientists and engineers went through the castoff parts system by system, found almost two dozen potentially fatal flaws that could doom a mission and fixed them. “We re-engineered the spacecraft without rebuilding it,” he said. “We think it’s as good as it can be.”
If the Phoenix survives its landing, it will wait 20 minutes for debris at the site to settle before unfurling two circular solar power arrays that will make its width 18 feet across. Next, two stereoscopic color cameras will rise on a mast that extends seven feet above the surface to record panoramic views of the surroundings. Then a four-foot mast bearing temperature, wind and other sensors is to extend from an onboard weather station supplied by the Canadian Space Agency.
The spacecraft, sterilized to prevent contamination by Earth organisms, is to use its 7.7-foot-long robot arm like a backhoe to dig a series of trenches more than 20 inches into the surface with a movable metal scoop that has sharp prongs on the end to break and scrape expected hard surface, Dr. Smith said.
Using a camera on the end of the scoop, scientists will select samples for detailed study aboard the lander. In one experiment, samples will be dropped into a hopper to feed eight tiny one-use ovens. Each is about a half-inch long and one-eighth inch in diameter.
The sample will be slowly heated to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit to study the transition from solid to liquid to gas, and the vapors analyzed by a mass spectrometer to measure the mass and composition of specific molecules.
This laboratory also contains two microscopes to examine the fine structure of soil and ice samples, scrutinizing features as small as one one-thousandth the width of a human hair that might be evidence of past liquid water on the planet. The Phoenix is designed to operate in the Martian summer, but scientists hope that it survives into at least mid-November. Winter brings months of darkness and no power to protect the spacecraft from a fatal deep freeze before the Sun returns, they said.
“It’s extraordinarily unlikely the vehicle will survive,” said Mr. Goldstein, the project manager. But on the outside chance that spring sunlight recharges the craft next year, he said, it has been programmed with a “Lazarus mode” to signal that it has risen from the dead.
The up side to costly gas
Calgary Herald
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Since the 1973 OPEC oil crisis, each spike in the price of a barrel of crude has been accompanied by a dismayed chorus wondering, rhetorically, how high it can go.
It has to be rhetorical because nobody knows. But, sure enough, oil's rapid ascent to as much as $135 this week has stimulated the same kind of questions as it did when it reached $13 in 1979, $40 in 2004, $60 in 2005, $75 in 2006, $100 last year and $125 last month -- all of which can be reduced to a simple, "This is terrible, what are we going to do?"
The answer is nothing, yet. It all depends how high it goes, but even more on how fast.
However, of one thing we may be certain. Those who project existing trends forward without compensating for human adaptability are seldom proved right. Thus, anybody suggesting high-priced oil will force car cultures onto the bus, has failed to factor in the fact that when oil gets too costly, we will use something else.
Electrical generation offers a model. When coal-fired plants could produce power for four cents a kilowatt hour, wind at three times the price was only an option for true believers, and solar panels only made sense for light use where no power cables could be laid. However, with improved manufacturing methods and higher costs for new coal-fired plants, the area of competitiveness for both has been expanded.
Indeed, a few years ago, former CIA director Jim Wolsey floated what he called the perfect scenario to a Calgary audience, in which one plugged one's hybrid car to one's own personal solar or wind power-generator, and ran for nothing.
It was a joke, and he got his laugh. But, he added that one could certainly drive for a lot less, and that, "These things are occupying the minds of some very bright people, who have been doing other things up to now."
The price of oil then, will continue to increase until it becomes more costly than the alternatives -- whether they be derived from hydrogen, ethanol, biomass, or practical mechanics home projects.
At that point, people will switch as surely as 100 years ago they switched from horses to cars. The clever bit is getting to that point without societal trauma. For that, time is the key ingredient. Adjusted for inflation, today's oil prices are not ruinous. In 1980, oil briefly hit $38 US. We survived and once adjusted for inflation and changing currency exchange rates, today's $132 oil is within a few bucks, in 1980 dollars.
What does hurt is rapid change, which plays hell with business plans, and personal budgets. In that respect, the doubling of oil prices in two years is more cause for concern than the actual price today. It also makes North America peculiarly vulnerable to economic shocks, whether a consequence of forces of nature, or deliberate interruption of supplies by terrorists.
To the extent, therefore, that higher oil prices accelerate societal changes that many believe must come anyway, albeit sometimes for non-economic reasons related to climate, they may be thought of as a positive force. (And those who clamour for tax relief, while doubtless well-meaning, become obstacles to progress.)
Visionary public policy would therefore accept the inevitable, and move quickly to clear the way for new ways of doing things. Nobody likes shelling out more at the gas pumps, but in the long run the good news is that personal mobility should be with us for as long as anybody reading these words is likely to care -- and both Canada and the U.S. will be all the stronger for reduced dependence on offshore oil.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
Calgary Herald
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Since the 1973 OPEC oil crisis, each spike in the price of a barrel of crude has been accompanied by a dismayed chorus wondering, rhetorically, how high it can go.
It has to be rhetorical because nobody knows. But, sure enough, oil's rapid ascent to as much as $135 this week has stimulated the same kind of questions as it did when it reached $13 in 1979, $40 in 2004, $60 in 2005, $75 in 2006, $100 last year and $125 last month -- all of which can be reduced to a simple, "This is terrible, what are we going to do?"
The answer is nothing, yet. It all depends how high it goes, but even more on how fast.
However, of one thing we may be certain. Those who project existing trends forward without compensating for human adaptability are seldom proved right. Thus, anybody suggesting high-priced oil will force car cultures onto the bus, has failed to factor in the fact that when oil gets too costly, we will use something else.
Electrical generation offers a model. When coal-fired plants could produce power for four cents a kilowatt hour, wind at three times the price was only an option for true believers, and solar panels only made sense for light use where no power cables could be laid. However, with improved manufacturing methods and higher costs for new coal-fired plants, the area of competitiveness for both has been expanded.
Indeed, a few years ago, former CIA director Jim Wolsey floated what he called the perfect scenario to a Calgary audience, in which one plugged one's hybrid car to one's own personal solar or wind power-generator, and ran for nothing.
It was a joke, and he got his laugh. But, he added that one could certainly drive for a lot less, and that, "These things are occupying the minds of some very bright people, who have been doing other things up to now."
The price of oil then, will continue to increase until it becomes more costly than the alternatives -- whether they be derived from hydrogen, ethanol, biomass, or practical mechanics home projects.
At that point, people will switch as surely as 100 years ago they switched from horses to cars. The clever bit is getting to that point without societal trauma. For that, time is the key ingredient. Adjusted for inflation, today's oil prices are not ruinous. In 1980, oil briefly hit $38 US. We survived and once adjusted for inflation and changing currency exchange rates, today's $132 oil is within a few bucks, in 1980 dollars.
What does hurt is rapid change, which plays hell with business plans, and personal budgets. In that respect, the doubling of oil prices in two years is more cause for concern than the actual price today. It also makes North America peculiarly vulnerable to economic shocks, whether a consequence of forces of nature, or deliberate interruption of supplies by terrorists.
To the extent, therefore, that higher oil prices accelerate societal changes that many believe must come anyway, albeit sometimes for non-economic reasons related to climate, they may be thought of as a positive force. (And those who clamour for tax relief, while doubtless well-meaning, become obstacles to progress.)
Visionary public policy would therefore accept the inevitable, and move quickly to clear the way for new ways of doing things. Nobody likes shelling out more at the gas pumps, but in the long run the good news is that personal mobility should be with us for as long as anybody reading these words is likely to care -- and both Canada and the U.S. will be all the stronger for reduced dependence on offshore oil.
© The Calgary Herald 2008
May 27, 2008
NASA Spacecraft Ready to Dig on Mars
By KENNETH CHANG
PASADENA, Calif. — One day after a picture-perfect landing on Mars, NASA’s Phoenix lander seemed Monday to be in perfect health.
The spacecraft has redundant systems to survive the failure of some components, and mission controllers have drawn up contingency plans for possible problems.
“Up to this point, we haven’t needed any of it,” said Edward Sedivy, the Phoenix program manager at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver, which built the spacecraft.
At a news conference on Monday, NASA released a photograph made possible by another engineering tour de force. On Sunday, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, passing by at an altitude of 192 miles and traveling 7,600 miles per hour, snapped a picture of the Phoenix and its billowing parachute as it descended through the Martian air to its landing site.
“This is an engineer’s delight,” said Barry Goldstein, the mission’s project manager.
On Monday morning, a new set of instructions was sent to the Phoenix, and the results, including more photographs, were expected soon. After about a week of checking out the spacecraft and its systems, the science mission will begin by digging up a soil sample.
From the narrow swath of images seen so far, “we see a flat, barren landscape that is kind of lumpy,” said Peter H. Smith of the University of Arizona, the mission’s principal investigator.
The lumpiness is a result of polygon-shaped furrows in the landscape that are caused by repeated expansion and contraction of an underground layer of water ice. When temperatures drop, the ice contracts and cracks. Dust probably falls in the cracks, creating a shallow depression on the surface above. When temperatures rise, the ice expands again and, because the cracks have been filled, the centers of the polygons buckle upward.
When such cracks form in wetter parts of Earth’s Arctic region, “melted ice runs into the cracks and refreezes, so you end up getting what are called ice wedges,” Dr. Smith said. If this mission were to find ice wedges in the cracks on Mars, he added, “that would mean there was a very wet environment sometime in the past in this region, and that would be a major discovery for our science team.”
In 2002, an orbiting spacecraft detected vast amounts of ice not far below Mars’s surface. “But does the ice melt?” Dr. Smith asked. “That’s the real question.”
There is a related multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/scien ... 7nasa.html
NASA Spacecraft Ready to Dig on Mars
By KENNETH CHANG
PASADENA, Calif. — One day after a picture-perfect landing on Mars, NASA’s Phoenix lander seemed Monday to be in perfect health.
The spacecraft has redundant systems to survive the failure of some components, and mission controllers have drawn up contingency plans for possible problems.
“Up to this point, we haven’t needed any of it,” said Edward Sedivy, the Phoenix program manager at Lockheed Martin Space Systems in Denver, which built the spacecraft.
At a news conference on Monday, NASA released a photograph made possible by another engineering tour de force. On Sunday, the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, passing by at an altitude of 192 miles and traveling 7,600 miles per hour, snapped a picture of the Phoenix and its billowing parachute as it descended through the Martian air to its landing site.
“This is an engineer’s delight,” said Barry Goldstein, the mission’s project manager.
On Monday morning, a new set of instructions was sent to the Phoenix, and the results, including more photographs, were expected soon. After about a week of checking out the spacecraft and its systems, the science mission will begin by digging up a soil sample.
From the narrow swath of images seen so far, “we see a flat, barren landscape that is kind of lumpy,” said Peter H. Smith of the University of Arizona, the mission’s principal investigator.
The lumpiness is a result of polygon-shaped furrows in the landscape that are caused by repeated expansion and contraction of an underground layer of water ice. When temperatures drop, the ice contracts and cracks. Dust probably falls in the cracks, creating a shallow depression on the surface above. When temperatures rise, the ice expands again and, because the cracks have been filled, the centers of the polygons buckle upward.
When such cracks form in wetter parts of Earth’s Arctic region, “melted ice runs into the cracks and refreezes, so you end up getting what are called ice wedges,” Dr. Smith said. If this mission were to find ice wedges in the cracks on Mars, he added, “that would mean there was a very wet environment sometime in the past in this region, and that would be a major discovery for our science team.”
In 2002, an orbiting spacecraft detected vast amounts of ice not far below Mars’s surface. “But does the ice melt?” Dr. Smith asked. “That’s the real question.”
There is a related multimedia linked at:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/scien ... 7nasa.html