Science, Engineering, & Technology in the News

SUTG said:

Any geek should be able to appreciate a wooden mirror.

That DEPTHX is really cool...

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Evidence seen backing ancient Mars ocean shoreline

By Will Dunham, Reuters
Wed Jun 13, 1:18 PM ET

Long, undulating features on the northern plains of Mars probably are remnants of shorelines of an ocean that covered a third of the planet's surface at least 2 billion years ago, scientists said on Wednesday.

The geological features, stretching thousands of miles (kilometers), were first revealed in the 1980s in Viking spacecraft images. But topographical data collected by NASA's Mars Global Surveyor in the 1990s cast doubt on whether the features truly marked a long-gone sea coast.

The Global Surveyor found big, mountain-sized variations in elevation along the suspected shorelines, whereas a shoreline should be a constant elevation matching sea level.

But scientists writing in the journal Nature said the movement of the Martian poles and also the planet's spin axis by roughly 2,000 miles in the past 2 billion to 3 billion years would have triggered deformation of surface features just like that seen in the suspected coastlines.

"The pole moves and it warps the shorelines," planetary scientist Taylor Perron of Harvard University, the study's lead author, said in a telephone interview.

"We have don't have direct confirmation that there were oceans because, of course, the water isn't there any more. But what we've done is to eliminate one of the main reasons to doubt that they were ever there."

Earth's poles also have moved in the past.

At some point, a big shift of mass on Mars caused its north pole to shift 50 degrees toward its present location and the planet's change in orientation changed the topography of the shorelines, said physicist Jerry Mitrovica of the University of Toronto, one of the researchers.

A MARTIAN PACIFIC

The ocean may have covered a third of the Martian surface during the first half of the planet's history before disappearing at least 2 billion years ago for unknown reasons, the researchers said.

"Relative to the size of the planet, this ocean would have been about the same with respect to Mars as the Pacific Ocean is with respect to Earth," Perron said.

Some water is retained as ice at the Martian poles and some scientists believe much more is trapped underground.

Beyond adding to the understanding of Earth's next-door neighbor in our solar system, evidence of water also is critical to the issue of whether Mars has ever harbored life as we know it.

"It is certainly true that the issue of life is inextricably linked to the question of water. So, at least indirectly, we have shown that there were once huge bodies of water on Mars," Mitrovica said by e-mail.

Scientists have named the two features suspected of being ancient shorelines Arabia and Deuteronilus. The long lines on the Martian surface rise and fall in a way resembling a sea wave.

The elevation of the Arabia shoreline changes by 1.5 miles , while the Deuteronilus shoreline varies by four-tenths of a mile.

The researchers said another important Martian geological feature -- the volcano Tharsis, the biggest in the solar system -- lends support to their hypothesis on polar movement.

Tharsis is so massive it would always keep itself on the spinning planet's equator, they said. They calculated that the suspected path taken by the moving poles would have preserved the volcano's equatorial position.

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Jet engine tested at 10 times speed of sound

Reuters
Fri Jun 15, 9:28 AM ET

An experimental jet engine has been successfully tested at speeds of up to 11,000 km (6,835 miles) per hour, or 10 times the speed of sound, during trials in Australia's outback, defense scientists said on Friday.

The experimental scramjet engine is an air-breathing supersonic combustion engine being developed by Australian and U.S. defense scientists that researchers hope will lead to super-high speed flight.

Scientists from Australia's defense Science and Technology Organization and the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), used a conventional rocket to launch the scramjet high above the Woomera test site.

The engine was then tested as it reached speeds of Mach 10.

Scramjets need a rocket to propel the vehicle to high-speed before the engine can take over. They also need to operate in the thin atmosphere far above the altitude of commercial airliners.

"All the indications are it was a success, and we have some very happy scientists," an Australian defense spokesman told Reuters on Friday.

Flight data will be examined over coming weeks and compared to ground tests conducted in the United States, DARPA chief researcher Steven Walker said in a statement.

"We are pleased with this joint effort between the U.S. and Australia and believe that a hypersonic airplane could be a reality in the not too distant future," Walker said.

Scientists say the scramjet engine could lead to high-speed flights on long-range missions, as well as new low-cost ways to launch satellites into space.

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Hopes Dashed for Life on Distant Planet

Ker Than, Staff Writer
SPACE.com
Mon Jun 18, 2007

Scientists earlier this year announced they had found a small, rocky planet located just far enough from its star to sustain liquid water on its surface, and thus possibly support life.

Turns out the scientists might have picked the right star for hosting a habitable world, but got the planet wrong. The world known as Gliese 581c is probably too hot to support liquid water or life, new computer models suggest, but conditions on its neighbor, Gliese 581d, might be just right.


The findings are detailed in the May 25 issue of the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.


So much promise


Gliese 581c, discovered in April by a team led by Stephane Udry of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, is about 50 percent bigger than Earth and about five times more massive. It is located about 20.5 light-years away, and circles a dim red dwarf star called Gliese 581.


Of the more than 200 extrasolar planets, or "exoplanets," discovered since 1995, Gliese 581c was the first found that resides within the habitable zone of its star, if only barely. The habitable, or "Goldilocks" zone is the region around a star where the temperature is neither too hot nor too cold, so water can exist on a planet's surface in its liquid state. Water is a key ingredient for life as we know it.


But new simulations of the climate on Gliese 581c created by Werner von Bloh of the Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and his team suggest the planet is no Earthly paradise, but rather a faraway Venus, where carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere create a runaway greenhouse effect that warms the planet well above 212 degrees Fahrenheit (100 Celsius), boiling away liquid water and with it any promise of life.


Another contender


But the same greenhouse effect that squashes prospects for life on Gliese 581c raises the same hope for another planet in the system, a world of eight Earth-masses called Gliese 581d, which was also discovered by Udry's team.


"This planet is actually outside the habitable zone," said Manfred Cuntz, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Arlington and a member of von Bloh's team. "It appears at first sight too cold. However, based on the greenhouse effect, physical processes can occur which are heating up the planet to a temperature that allows for fluid water."


And where this is fluid water, there is the chance of life as well. The researchers speculate that "at least some primitive forms of life" might exist on Gliese 581d. There is no evidence to support that speculation, however.


Jury still out


David Charbonneau, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) who was not involved in the study, said the results from von Bloh's team are "probably a sound calculation but we don't actually know if it's correct."


Gliese 581d demonstrates the importance of taking a planet's atmospheric conditions into account when considering its potential for habitability. The concept of a habitable zone "is a very useful thing because it does inform us a great deal, and it explains a lot in the solar system. But it's not the whole story," Charbonneau said.


Jaymie Matthews, an astronomer at the University of British Columbia in Canada, doesn't treat the new findings as conclusive, but finds them "interesting as an illustration of how we can use remote exoplanetary environments as possible test beds for climate models."


The models made by von Bloh's team could be tested if scientists can measure thermal emissions and the reflectivity, or "albedo," of the planets, Matthews said.


Scientists "have done this already for HD 209458b, a hot Jupiter, but we will need to do this for possibly 'Earthy' planets to truly assess their habitability," he added.


A stable star

Matthews own research, recently presented at the annual meeting of the Canadian Astronomical Society, suggests one reason Gliese 581 is such a promising star for finding habitable planets is that it is similar to our own sun in that it is remarkably stable.

Matthews and his team used a Canadian space telescope called MOST to monitor Gliese 581 for six weeks. During that time, they observed very few instances of the powerful solar flares common among red dwarf stars.

"If the star showed significant variations in brightness during the weeks we monitored it, that would at least complicate the thermal equilibrium of the planets around it," Matthews explained.

The stability of the light also suggests Gliese 581 is old and that is has been around for at least a few billion years.

"Young stars, like young people, can have bad cases of acne (large starspots and activity) and spin around," Matthews said in an email interview. "Older stars like the sun have relatively clear complexions and rotate rather sedately."

Gliese 581's advanced age is good news for scientists hoping to find signs of life in the system.

"We know it took about three and a half billion years for life on Earth to reach the level of complexity that we call human," Matthews said, "so it's more encouraging for the prospects of complex life on any planet around Gliese 581 if it's been around for at least as long."

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Simulated trip to Mars is planned

By ELAINE GANLEY, Associated Press Writer
Thu Jun 21, 5:54 PM ET



If you have planetary vision, want to be on the cutting edge and don't get bored easily, the European Space Agency may be looking for you. It is looking for 12 volunteers for a simulated mission to Mars that will last up to 520 days in "extreme isolation and confinement."

Despite the rigorous conditions, more than 2,000 applications have been received in two days, project manager Jennifer Ngo-Anh said Thursday.

"The reaction has been really overwhelming. My mailbox is full," she said in a telephone interview.

Candidates must be citizens of one of 15 European countries or Canada, be highly motivated and speak English and Russian, among other requirements.

Unlike the adventurous spirits attracted to the desert island prospects of reality TV, only the "serious" need apply for this simulated interplanetary voyage, the space agency said. The payoff is likely less glamorous, too. Remuneration is "in line with international standards" for clinical studies, is all it would say.

The Paris-based agency, known as ESA, is working on the Mars500 project with the Institute for Biomedical Problems in Moscow and the simulated mission will be conducted there and include Russians. The Russian participants will be chosen separately in Russia.

The volunteers will investigate the "human factor" of a trip to the Red Planet — "a journey with no way out once the spaceship is on a direct path to Mars," ESA says.

The experiment will emphasize psychological factors, including stress resistance. The goal is to test how the volunteers hold up in nearly a year-and-a-half of close confinement, in cramped quarters with others and when communications with Earth can take 20 minutes to reach their destination — each way.

The simulation is to take place in a series of connected modules, mimicking life in a spacecraft on a trip to Mars, including once it has landed on the planet. The routine includes scientific experiments.

It doesn't include full-time weightlessness, however. "Except for weightlessness and radiation, the simulations will be as close to a real Mars mission as possible," the ESA said in its call for candidates.

The living quarters will include 30-square-foot rooms for each crew member, a kitchen-dining room, living room — and one toilet. No shower is included, and water supply will be limited.

Food will be "predefined and carefully rationed," the ESA warns. Smoking and drinking is not allowed.

Special training that precedes the simulations will be as similar as possible to that given to astronauts, said Ngo-Anh.

Not all volunteers will have to take part in the final 520-day simulation, which will have a crew of six: four Russians and two Europeans or Canadians. But two pilot studies of about 100 days are to precede the big one. With two volunteers in each of the three projects, plus backups, a full dozen are needed, ESA says.

Launch date for the first of the shorter simulation voyages is mid-2008, and late 2008 or early 2009 for the full simulated trip to Mars.

ESA has a history of carrying out isolation studies, but this is the longest by any space organization, officials said. The agency, with 17 member states, has also carried out confinement studies in the name of space science — like confining a group of women volunteers to bed for 60 days in 2005.

Calls for candidates for the Mars mission went out Tuesday. By Thursday afternoon, Ngo-Anh, speaking from ESA's Science and Technology Center in the Dutch town of Noordwijk, said she had received over 2,000 applications. That's a good thing, she added.

"It will be hard to find exactly those people who fit" the profile, Ngo-Anh said.

Candidates must be 25 to 50 years old, in good health with work experience in one of several scientific fields, such as medicine, biology, computer engineering or mechanical engineering, the application says. Citizens of Austria, Belgium, Switzerland, Germany, Denmark, Spain, France, Greece, Italy, Ireland, Norway, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, Britain and Canada will be considered.

What if something goes wrong in the living module that the medical module can't help resolve?

"Every crew (member) can leave the tank at any point in time without giving reasons," said Ngo-Anh said. "But by our selection process, we try to find those candidates likely to endure the whole mission."

Potential candidates have all summer to make up their minds whether to apply: The deadline is September 30.

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Crater Could Solve 1908 Tunguska Meteor Mystery

Dave Mosher
Staff Writer
SPACE.com
Tue Jun 26, 6:46 AM ET

In late June of 1908, a fireball exploded above the remote Russian forests of Tunguska, Siberia, flattening more than 800 square miles of trees. Researchers think a meteor was responsible for the devastation, but neither its fragments nor any impact craters have been discovered.

Astronomers have been left to guess whether the object was an asteroid or a comet, and figuring out what it was would allow better modeling of potential future calamities.

Italian researchers now think they've found a smoking gun: The 164-foot-deep Lake Cheko, located just 5 miles northwest of the epicenter of destruction.

"When we looked at the bottom of the lake, we measured seismic waves reflecting off of something," said Giuseppe Longo, a physicist at the University of Bologna in Italy and co-author of the study. "Nobody has found this before. We can only explain that and the shape of the lake as a low-velocity impact crater."

Should the team turn up conclusive evidence of an asteroid or comet on a later expedition, when they obtain a deeper core sample beneath the lake, remaining mysteries surrounding the Tunguska event may be solved.

The findings are detailed in this month's online version of the journal Terra Nova.

Submerged evidence

During a 1999 expedition, Longo's team didn't plan to investigate Lake Cheko as an impact crater, but rather to look for meteoroid dust in its submerged sediments. While sonar-scanning the lake's topography, they were struck by its cone-like features.

"Expeditions in the 1960s concluded the lake was not an impact crater, but their technologies were limited," Longo said. With the advent of better sonar and computer technologies, he explained, the lake took shape.

Going a step further, Longo's team dove to the bottom and took 6-foot core samples, revealing fresh mud-like sediment on top of "chaotic deposits" beneath. Still, Longo explained the samples are inconclusive of a meteorite impact.

"To really find out if this is an impact crater," Long said, "we need a core sample 10 meters (33 feet) into the bottom" in order to investigate a spot where the team detected a "reflecting" anomaly with their seismic instruments. They think this could be where the ground was compacted by an impact or where part of the meteorite itself lays: The object, if found, could be more than 30 feet in diameter and weigh almost 1,700 tons-the weight of about 42 fully-loaded semi-trailers.

Caution for now

From a UFO crash to a wandering black hole, wild (and wildly unsupported) explanations for the Tunguska event have been proposed. Alan Harris, a planetary scientist at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said the proposal by Longo's team isn't one of them.

"I was impressed by their work and I don't think it's something you can wave off," said Harris, who was not involved in the research.

Longo and his team "are among the recognized authorities on Tunguska" in the world, Harris told SPACE.com. "It would be thrilling to dig up chunks of the meteor body, if they can manage to. It would lay the question to rest whether or not Tunguska was a comet or asteroid."

Some researchers, however, are less confident in the team's conclusions.

"We know from the entry physics that the largest and most energetic objects penetrate deepest," said David Morrison, an astronomer with NASA's Ames Research Center. That only a fragment of the main explosion reached the ground and made a relatively small crater, without creating a larger main crater, seems contradictory to Morrison.

Harris agreed that physics could work against Longo's explanation, but did note that similar events-with impact craters-have been documented all over the world.

"In 1947, the Russian Sikhote-Alin meteorite created 100 small craters. Some were 20 meters (66 feet) across," Harris said. A site in Poland also exists, he explained, where a large meteor exploded and created a series of small lakes. "If the fragment was traveling slowly enough, there's actually a good chance (Longo's team) will unearth some meteorite material," Harris said.

Longo's team plans to return to Lake Cheko next summer, close to the 100th anniversary of the Tunguska Event. "This is important work because we can make better conclusions about how cosmic bodies impact the Earth, and what they're made of," Longo said. "And it could help us find ways to protect our planet from future impacts of this kind."

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European rail to compete with airlines

By AOIFE WHITE
AP Business Writer
Mon Jul 2, 11:25 AM ET

London to Frankfurt by train? It's possible, it can be as fast and as easy as flying and it's far better for the environment, a group of European high-speed rail companies claimed Monday.

Eurostar, Germany's Deutsche Bahn AG and France's SNCF joined Dutch, Austrian, Swiss and Belgian train companies to form a rail alliance, Railteam, that aims to make international train bookings far easier and simpler by building a single online reservation system.

They want to attract at least 25 million travelers by 2010 — 10 million more than now — taking a 5 percent chunk out of the short-haul airline market by promoting four-hour business trips and up to six-hour leisure journeys across western Europe.

They said rail travel can and will compete with low-fare airlines such as Ryanair and easyJet that have revolutionized European travel by encouraging people to fly more often and take weekend trips away.

"People can go anywhere on the network and get there more quickly than air. We do believe people will choose to make those journey because it's more environmentally friendly," said Eurostar Chief Executive Richard Brown.

"Our fares are already a lot more competitive than most travelers understand," he said. "One of the objectives of having the Railteam (booking) broker is to have that information on those fares easily available to all passengers so they can make a direct comparison on a single Web site, which isn't possible now."

Cheap fares will be available on the joint booking system, the companies said. SNCF Chief Executive Guillaume Pepy said at least one-tenth of French fares are offered at the lowest prices and that can be as many as 100 seats on double-decker trains that carry 1,000 passengers.

Lower-stress, lower carbon emission rail journeys are already attracting people away from airlines, the rail companies claim, after extra security checks lengthened lines at airports.

Eurostar, which runs trains from London to Paris and Brussels, said it already saw a 39 percent jump in the first three months of this year for sales of tickets that connect its services to French high-speed services that bring travelers to the Mediterranean and the Alps.

It said more corporate clients have been asking them to compare the carbon footprint of train and air travel and have calculated that their trains, on average, release 10 times less CO2 than flying. Eurostar is also aiming to make its trains carbon neutral, offsetting emissions that it can't reduce.

The western European high-speed rail network already links 100 cities and 120 million people, from Paris to Berlin and London to Vienna, but many travelers are unaware that they can travel abroad by train — and many are unable to find information on rail links, prices and bookings outside their own country.

Railteam aims to change that — but slowly. From 2009, it plans to offer point-to-point tickets that could be bought over the Internet. Timetables will be sent by text message. If travelers miss a connection, their tickets will let them take the next available train.

Changing the ticket distribution system will cost €30 million (US$40.5 million), the companies said, but it will provide information and prices for all train journeys — high speed and normal rail — in France, Britain, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland.

Business travelers will get many of the trappings of air travel: business lounges and eventually "trainmile" points for frequent travel.

By 2020, the high-speed network should stretch to Spain and Italy as mountain tunnels are completed. In November this year, Eurostar trains in Britain will speed up to 208 miles per hour (335 kilometers per hour) as a faster line is laid.

A rapid link between Belgium and the Netherlands will come onstream next year and one between Brussels and Cologne, Germany, will cut journey times in early 2009.

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Takeoffs a problem for giant bird

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID
AP Science Writer
Mon Jul 2, 11:00 PM ET

Weighing in at 150 pounds or more, the all-time biggest bird couldn't just hop into the air and fly away, researchers say. A team led by Sankar Chatterjee of Texas Tech University used computer programs originally designed for aircraft to analyze the probable flight characteristics of Argentavis magnificens, a giant bird that lived in South America 6 million years ago. Like today's condors and other large birds, Argentavis would have had to rely on updrafts to remain in the air.

Doing so, it could have soared for long distances, they conclude in a paper in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Remains of Argentavis have been found both in the plains of northern Argentina, called pampas, and also in the foothills of the Andes.

With a wingspan of about 23 feet, Argentavis is the largest known flying bird, the researchers said.

By measuring the size of the bones they determined how large its flight muscles would have been, and calculated that it would not have been capable of takeoff or of sustained flight just by flapping its wings.

"Gliding would not be a problem, it would be the takeoff, that is the main limiting factor," Chatterjee said in a telephone interview. "In the mountains, takeoff was not a problem, but sooner or later it would come to the plain."

As far as getting airborne there, Chatterjee suggested the birds could launch from a high point in the foothills. In addition, with a slight headwind and as little as a 10-degree downhill slope they would probably have been able to take off in a running start, the researchers said.

But it looks like this was just about the size limit for a flying bird, he said.

A steady east wind blowing from the Atlantic Ocean and rising in the foothills of the mountains would have created ideal conditions for soaring flight, in which they estimated the giant hunter could reach 40 mph.

"Large broad-winged landbirds, such as eagles, buzzards, storks and vultures with slotted wings are masters of thermals and travel cross-country by gliding in circles," they researchers said.

Thermals are areas of rising warm air and can often be easily determined from a distance because cumulus clouds develop above them when the moisture in that air cools and condenses.

In every culture there are tales of large birds, whether local Indians, Hindus or others, Chatterjee observed.

"Now we can show that they actually existed," he said, though this bird lived millions of years before humans walked the planet.

And with a skull nearly two feet long, Argentavis "was catching sizable prey with its formidable beak."

The research was funded by the National Geographic Society and Texas Tech University.

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Boeing to unveil first 787 Sunday

By ELIZABETH M. GILLESPIE
AP Business Writer
Fri Jul 6, 1:13 PM ET



More than a decade after its last all-new airliner took to the skies, Boeing Co. is poised to unveil the first of its prized 787s on Sunday.

Airlines, leasing companies and other plane buyers have ordered more than 600 Dreamliners over the last few years, eager to hold Boeing to its promise that the midsize, long-haul jet will burn less fuel, be cheaper to maintain and offer more passenger comforts than comparable planes flying today.

It will be the world's first large commercial airplane made mostly of carbon-fiber composites, which are lighter and more durable than aluminum.

Final assembly of first 787 started in late May, after a gigantic, specially outfitted superfreighter started flying wings, fuselage sections and other major parts to Boeing's widebody plant, where they essentially get snapped together piece by huge piece.

Once production hits full speed, the company each plane to spend just three days in final assembly, but this time Boeing workers spent several weeks installing electrical wiring and other innards that suppliers will eventually stuff into their sections of the plane before they're delivered to the assembly plant.

Boeing decided to handle that work in-house for the first few planes rather than risk any production delays.

Despite a few snags the company says it anticipated, including an industrywide shortage of airplane fasteners, Boeing officials say nothing so far has threatened to bump the 787 behind schedule.

The first test flight is expected to take place between late August and late September. The plane is set to enter commercial service next May after Japan's All Nippon Airways Co. receives the first of its 50 Dreamliners.

The 787 debuting on Sunday will serve as the first of six flight test airplanes, while two other planes will be used for static and fatigue tests. The ninth plane off the assembly line will be the first one delivered to All Nippon Airways.

Boeing hired former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw to emcee the Sunday afternoon 787 premiere, which the company is broadcasting live on the Internet and on satellite television in nine languages to more than 45 countries.

Boeing has estimated roughly 15,000 will attend the premiere at the plant where the 787 and its other widebody planes are assembled.

The company invited thousands of its employees and retirees to watch the premiere via satellite at the NFL stadium where the Seattle Seahawks play, and is hosting viewing parties for 787 customers, suppliers in dozens of other locations around the globe.

The 787 is Boeing's first all-new jet since the 777, a larger long-range plane which airlines began flying in 1995.

To date, Boeing has won 642 orders for the 787, selling out delivery positions through 2013, the year rival Airbus SAS expects to roll out its competing A350 XWB.

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The Berean said:

atrol:*****************CRAZY BUT COOL IDEA ALERT!!!!!!*********************atrol:

Who wants to "sky dive" from 60 miles up?!!!! :jawdrop:

Read this article.

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kmoney said:

Sweet!

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U.S. asteroid probe misses summer launch window

By Irene Klotz, Reuters
Sun Jul 8, 9:59 AM ET

A science probe making NASA's first foray into the asteroid belt missed its summer launch window, jeopardizing NASA's first attempt to orbit two bodies with a single spacecraft, officials said on Sunday.

The Dawn spacecraft was originally scheduled to fly on June 20 but assembly of the Boeing Delta 2 rocket at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station was delayed after a crane failure.

Then the spacecraft needed minor repairs to one of its solar wing panels.

The mission was rescheduled for Saturday, but poor weather at the launch site delayed rocket fueling and then an airplane needed to help track the spacecraft after liftoff developed mechanical problems.

Unable to get firm commitments for launch dates later in the month, due to previously scheduled missions at Cape Canaveral, NASA gave up for the summer and reset Dawn's liftoff for September.

"A September launch for Dawn maintains all the science goals," said NASA spokesman George Diller.

September will be NASA's last chance for 15 years to explore its two targets, Vesta and Ceres. After that, the two bodies will begin moving apart from each other and the spacecraft will no longer be able to reach both.

Dawn is intended to be a low-cost mission to explore two of the largest bodies in the asteroid belt, a vast area between Mars and Jupiter littered with primordial remains from the solar system's formation.

The spacecraft will be the first able to go into orbit around more than one target, thanks to its innovative ion-powered engines that can be stopped and restarted during flight using a fraction of the fuel of conventional chemical thrusters.

NASA last year canceled Dawn, citing budget pressures and technical issues, but scientists appealed and won an additional $100 million to continue the program. Total mission costs will now be about $450 million.

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First brain cancer vaccine approved in Switzerland

AFP
Mon Jul 9, 4:12 AM ET

Northwest Biotherapeutics, a US-based biotech company, said Monday it had won approval for commercial use of the world's first vaccine against brain cancer in Switzerland.

The company, which is listed in London, intends to begin making DCVax-Brain available to patients before the end of September, according to a statement.

Under the Swiss approval plan, Northwest is able to manufacture the vaccine in the United States and make it available for the treatment of patients with brain cancer at select centres in Switzerland.

"We are delighted to be the first company to reach the market with a personalized therapeutic vaccine for brain cancers, which carry a very bleak prognosis for patients," said Alton Boynton, president and chief executive of Northwest Biotherapeutics.

"Switzerland is an attractive place to begin commercialisation, due to its highly respected regulatory oversight, and its growing experience with cellular therapies.

Boynton added: "We look forward to being able to bring DCVax-Brain to patients in additional countries, and to applying our DCVax technology to many other cancers."

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CHARLES DARWIN's theory of evolution has been the source of much controversy since its publication in 1859, most recently involving the intelligent design (ID) lobby in the US. Now the theory is fuelling another debate, although for once the battle lines have nothing to do with religion.

Instead of pitting God against science, the emerging spat centres on evolutionary algorithms (EAs), which mimic the processes of natural selection and random mutation by "breeding", selecting and re-breeding possible designs to produce the fittest ones.

EAs take two parent designs - for a boat hull, say - and blend components of each, perhaps taking the surface area of one and the curvature of another, to produce multiple hull offspring that combine the features of the parents in different ways. Then the algorithm selects those offspring it considers are worth re-breeding - in this case those with the right combination of parameters to make a better hull. The EA then repeats the process. Although many offspring will be discarded, after thousands of generations or more, useful features accumulate in the same design, and get combined in ways that likely would not have occurred to a human designer. This is because a human does not have the time to combine all the possibilities for each feature and evaluate them, but an EA does. "Human engineers usually design stuff by tweaking a few parameters," says Steve Manos of University College London, who has created optical fibres using EAs.

Proponents of EAs say they could replace traditional methods in many fields from designing exotic new types of optical fibre and USB memory sticks to more aesthetic computer-generated art. Critics argue that the technique may lead to designs that can't be properly evaluated since no human understands which trade-offs were made and therefore where failure is likely.

Another stumbling block is a problem of perception. "To mainstream engineers there is a disbelief that a self-organising process like an EA can produce designs that outperform those designed using conventional top-down, systematic, intelligent design," says Hod Lipson, a computer scientist specialising in evolutionary design at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. "That tension mirrors the tension between evolutionary biology and ID. That's the challenge we need to rise to in winning people over."

Lipson and other members of the US Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation (SIGEVO) worry that if they can't persuade their fellow engineers to use EAs, then evolved machines, systems and software that work fantastically well risk being lost.

EAs are nothing new. The automobile and aerospace industries have been using them since the late 1980s to evolve optimal wing, fin and flap profiles for aircraft, and streamlined shapes for cars. Pharmaceutical companies have also bred molecules to find drugs that bind to target proteins, and stock traders have used EAs to second-guess the stock markets (New Scientist, 30 May, p 42).

However, most of these applications require ultra-fast computers, both to breed the thousands, or even billions, of generations and to simulate the results to select those offspring that are fit for re-breeding. This has limited their use to a few niche applications.

That is now changing with the availability of ever more powerful computers, the advent of distributed computing "grids", which pool the resources of thousands of PCs, and the emergence of multicore chips (New Scientist, 10 March, p 26), which suit EAs because it's easy to divide up the tasks between cores. As a result, designs can now be evolved in days rather than months or years and EAs are going mainstream.
Exotic technologies
"We can now undertake evolutionary problems that were previously too complicated or time-consuming," says John Koza, a computer scientist and EA pioneer from Stanford University in California. "Things we couldn't have done in the past, because it would have taken two months to run the genetic program, are now possible in days or less."

Some of these EAs are being used to come up with more exotic versions of existing technologies. Joe Sullivan at the University of Limerick in Ireland used an EA to make a USB flash memory stick that lasts far longer than those on the market today. Typically, memory sticks can be erased and rewritten about 10,000 times. Every time data is erased, residual charge is left on the storage transistors. Eventually, this builds up and prevents the memory being rewritten. Using large voltages to read, write and erase memory, and applying them for longer causes more residual charge. However, applying too little voltage for too little time could make the memory unreliable. To see if he could extend the lifetime without making the device less reliable, Sullivan created a genetic algorithm that varied the voltages and their timings. The result was a combination that meant the memory stick lasted 30 times longer.

To encourage more of this kind of work, SIGEVO runs the annual Human Competitiveness Awards, dubbed the "Humies". The idea is to reward designs produced by EAs that are "competitive with the work of creative and inventive humans". The winners were announced at the Genetic and Evolutionary Computing Conference (GECCO 2007) in London this month.

Manos walked off with the $5000 gold prize for combining EAs with the emerging field of "holey" optical fibres (New Scientist, 12 June 1999, p 36). These are shot through with tens of micrometre-wide holes whose exact pattern controls the wavelength of light that can be beamed down them. Previously the holes were arranged in a hexagonal pattern, which has limited the range of bandwidths. That changed when Manos's team at the University of Sydney, Australia, allowed an EA to breed exotic new hole patterns. One looked like a flower, with larger ovoids as "petals", and doubled the fibre's bandwidth. They have patented that fibre and founded a company to market it.

Other prizewinners used EAs to do what humans already do, but faster. Pierre Legrand and colleagues at the University of Bordeaux 2, France, developed an evolutionary system to configure the electrodes for cochlear implants. Up to 22 electrodes on the auditory nerve let cochlear implants restore lost hearing, but the voltages and timings of the signals applied to them are highly individual, requiring much adjustment for speech to be audible. Legrand's team took just one-and-a-half days to configure an optimal pattern for one patient whose doctors had not succeeded in 10 years.

Not content with aiming for top results however, another group of researchers is using EAs to produce designs that dodge patents on rival inventions. Koza took a 1-metre-tall, Wi-Fi antenna made by Cisco and attempted to create another that did a better job without infringing Cisco's patent. He used an EA that bred antennas by comparing offspring with how the Cisco patent works and weeding out ones that worked similarly. "Our genetic program engineered around the existing patent and created a novel design that didn't infringe it," says Koza. Not only would this allow a company to save money on licensing fees, the new design was also itself patentable.

Patents aren't the only aspect of human creativity that EAs are closing in on. David Oranchak, a computer scientist based in Roanoke, Virginia, is using EAs to create art. Over six months, he selected the photos voted most interesting by users of the photo sharing site Flickr. His algorithm then used the colours and textures in those photos to automatically select and breed images that humans might like.

Nonetheless, EAs face challenges. A common objection is that some electronic circuits and antennas work fine, but the mathematics behind them is intractable. And if you don't know how an evolved design works, how can you know when it might fail? But Koza calls that objection "self-serving and bogus". "Like any design you can test the hell of the one solution you settle on," he says.

Celebrated UK innovator James Dyson, inventor of the bagless vacuum cleaner, has a more emotional objection. "Evolutionary algorithms will mean the end of those exciting stories about how people made great inventions by accident," he says. "Human ingenuity and intuition should remain crucial in making a success of any product."

But that could change, says Manos. "Once you show them a design that's better than anything on the market that really starts to convince them," he says.

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The Berean said:

The wodden mirror is nothing short of genius. Please don't tell me an atheist designed it! :chuckle:

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