The authors of the new book Hollowing Out the Middle talk about rural brain drain, and how to address it.

Courtesy hollowingoutthemiddle.com – A Family in “Ellis” (a pseudonym).

By Christina Gillham | Newsweek Web Exclusive

The future of rural America looks increasingly bleak: fueled by the rise of agribusiness and the corresponding decline of family farms, the loss of manufacturing jobs, and the flight of young people to urban centers, rural communities have been losing their populations for decades, and now they’re close to the breaking point. Since 1980, more than 700 rural counties—most of them in the middle of the nation, running from North Dakota down to Texas—have lost 10 percent or more of their population. In response, a number of rural areas have enacted initiatives to help lure residents back. In 2003, Ellsworth County, Kans., for example, began offering free 15,000-square-foot lots to families who could get preapproved by a bank and begin building their home on the lot within a year. But in an intriguing new book, Hollowing Out the Middle, husband-and-wife authors Patrick J. Carr and Maria J. Kefalas argue that it will take more than just free land initiatives to reverse rural America’s brain drain—it will require that the towns themselves adopt a new way of thinking.

How should they do this? First, by changing their attitudes toward their high-school graduates. Small towns traditionally put all their efforts behind the smart students (whom the authors label “Achievers”), pushing them out to four-year universities in cities, where they are much more likely to succeed and, unfortunately for the town, much more likely to stay. Students who are less accomplished or driven are given little support, but they are also the ones who are most likely to remain in their small towns post-graduation. In order to make sure these kids succeed, and thus benefit the community, the authors argue, they need to be better trained in areas such as computer technology, health care, sustainable agriculture, and green energy, areas geared toward the modern global economy. Rural towns should also capitalize on the federal stimulus package by investing in green agriculture and energy, say the authors, and work on attracting immigrant populations, who can help revive dying towns through their sheer numbers.

To research the decline of rural America, Carr and Kefalas spent six months in a 2,000-resident town in northeastern Iowa (given the pseudonym Ellis in the book), where they interviewed hundreds of current and former residents, whom they categorized as Achievers (those who leave), Stayers (those who remain), Seekers (those who leave to travel or join the military), and Returners (those who leave and come back). They spoke to NEWSWEEK about their experience there and about what they believe can be done to stop the emigration from this country’s heartland.

Why is it important that we care about rural America’s brain drain?
Carr: A nation is really only strongest when all of its parts can contribute and all of its parts are healthy. Rural America has a hugely symbolic resonance for the rest of America. More fundamentally, this is a place where most of our food comes from; it’s also a place that disproportionately has people serving in the armed forces.

But if the brain drain forces these towns to die out, wouldn’t those qualities just get shifted elsewhere?
Carr: The argument you’re making is sort of akin to the boom-and-bust argument. Frontier towns died and the country was fine because that’s just the cycle. That’s true to a certain extent, but what’s different here is [that] the scale of it is pretty massive. Not every small town is at the same stage of hollowing-out, but the fact is the majority of these towns are tending towards the hollowing-out stage, and unless it’s addressed, it’s going to get worse. We’re talking not just the Midwest, but throughout the Texas panhandle, Appalachia, in Louisiana, in Maine, in West Virginia, and Vermont. The other thing that makes it different is that this has been a slow-burning issue. Boom-and-bust towns grow traumatically and they contract just as traumatically—they flourish and they die. But [in this case] it’s gone under the radar because of the slow-burning nature of it.

A lot of people have argued that these small towns’ demise is inevitable. Isn’t there a case for letting these places die?
Kefalas: Sixty million Americans [one in five] live in rural America. I strongly believe we wouldn’t be asking the question, should we let the inner city die? Should we let other communities wither and fall by the wayside? I think we have a moral obligation to these communities, an economic need to sustain them—this area is where our food comes from, and it’s going to be ground zero for the renewable-energy revolution, so I don’t think it’s good for America or for these communities to say, “Well, let’s just go through some Darwinian process of natural selection and the strong will survive and the weak will die.” With an investment, with a plan, with renewed energy, it will be great for America and the region. We won’t be able to save all of the small towns, but saving a number of them will be good for the country as a whole.

What about turning these areas into “Buffalo Commons”-type spaces, as proposed by Frank and Deborah Popper more than two decades ago, which would revert depopulated lands to their natural wildlife habitats? Even big cities like Detroit are proposing demolishing some areas and replacing them with green space.
Kefalas: There’s some legitimacy to that argument. That is happening in the northern plains of Kansas, for example, where this was not very viable, arable land, where these areas were not very populated. So they have been evacuating these areas, almost, and reimagining them as these “Buffalo Commons.” I think creating these green zones and letting the land go back to a more sustainable and natural state is potentially quite good and useful. Certainly some of those communities will have to face that decision, but I think many more have so much to contribute.

Article Continues - http://www.newsweek.com/id/220216

Intel and Numonyx pave the way for scalable, higher density phase change memory

by Darren Murph

Both Intel and Numonyx have been talking up phase change memory for years now, but for some reason, we’re slightly more inclined to believe that the latest breakthrough is actually one that’ll matter to consumers. In a joint release, the two have announced a new non-volatile memory technology that supposedly “paves the way for scalable, higher density phase change memory products.” Put as simply as possible, researchers have been testing a 64Mb chip that “enables the ability to stack, or place, multiple layers of PCM arrays within a single die,” and the two are calling the discovery PCMS (phase change memory and switch). We know, you’re drowning in technobabble here, but if these two can really apply Moore’s Law to density scaling, you’ll be thanking ‘em as you pick up your $50 6TB hard drive in 2014.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/30/intel-and-numonyx-pave-the-way-for-scalable-higher-density-phas/

U.S. Lags Behind World with Its Patchwork Approach to Curbing E-Waste

E-WASTELAND: A sea of television housings, cathode ray tubes, computers, monitors, and other imported electronic waste not salable at the Alaba Market in Lagos, Nigeria, is dumped here in a nearby swamp.

One of the world’s largest producers of electronic refuse, the U.S. imposes no federal restrictions on what materials can be used to make electronic devices or how they can be discarded

By Larry Greenemeier

Lurking behind the introduction of each new touch-screen computer, high-definition television and digital music player is the stark reality that some once-prized electronic gadgets from a previous techno-generation will get kicked to the curb, ending up in a toxic trash heap thousands of miles from its former owner. The reasons for this digital dumping are many, including ignorance of recycling options and indifference to the environmental impact. The remedy is straightforward—stricter governmental oversight, by the U.S. federal government in particular, of what goes into making these devices and how and where they are discarded, a team of University of California researchers posit in a study to be published Friday in Science.

Although the U.S. is one the world’s largest producers of electronic waste (e-waste), it is hardly a leader in addressing this problem, given that the country has “no legally enforceable federal policies requiring comprehensive recycling of e-waste or elimination of hazardous substances from electronic products,” the researchers say. Instead, the U.S. government has largely delegated e-waste decision making to the states, where only 19 have e-waste laws (rules are pending in 14 others).

“When you have different states having different policies, it’s very difficult to give manufacturers guidance regarding how to design their products or create take-back programs,” says Oladele Ogunseitan, chair of the University of California, Irvine’s Department of Population Health and Disease Prevention and a researcher on the project. The National Science Foundation awarded Ogunseitan and his colleagues a five-year, $1.5-million grant in 2005 for their work.

Deteriorating Conditions
The researchers express concern that without a cohesive national policy, the e-waste problem will get worse. They estimate that obsolete devices in U.S. households add up to 747 million pieces of potential e-waste—more than 1.36 million metric tons. They are destined for countries such as Africa, China and India, where markets thrive for second-hand electronics and the devices’ valuable source materials (such as copper and iron). Recycling of the components, however, is typically not done properly, exposing many people to toxic chemicals.

In Europe several laws govern the use and disposal of toxic materials in electronics. The European Union’s (E.U.) Restriction on the Use of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) bans new electronics containing more than agreed-to levels of lead, cadmium, mercury, hexavalent chromium, and polybrominated biphenyl (PBB) as well as polybrominated diphenyl ether (PBDE) flame retardants. The European Community’s Registration, Evaluation, Authorization and Restriction of Chemicals (REACH) program addresses manufacturers’ responsibilities to manage risks from chemicals in their products. And the E.U.’s Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directs e-waste management. China has its own WEEE regulations scheduled to take effect in 2011.

Late Start for U.S.
Both the Senate and House are only now considering versions of a proposed federal law to fund electronic device recycling research, development and demonstration projects. Called the Electronic Device Recycling Research and Development Act, it is “the first real attempt by Congress to address the situation,” Ogunseitan says.

Laws are important because they add substance to otherwise vacuous claims that technology is “green,” Ogunseitan adds. “Unless it’s a uniform standard, it hurts because it confuses everyone.”

Meanwhile, the U.S. is the only member country of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development that has not ratified the Basel Convention, which regulates the movement of hazardous wastes across international borders and has the support of 169 of the 192 United Nations member countries.

The U.S. is a linchpin to worldwide e-waste prevention and management efforts. “When we say you can’t sell a product in the U.S. that contains toxic components,” Ogunseitan says, “that has a big economic impact.”

States Lead the Way
More successful have been state efforts to address e-waste. California, in particular, has enacted the RoHS-like Electronic Waste Recycling Act, and the broader, REACH-like, California Green Chemistry Initiative. Regulation, however, works better at the federal level, says Jean-Daniel Saphores, an associate professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California’s Institute of Transportation Studies who worked with Ogunseitan on the project. Otherwise, manufacturers have to adhere to a patchwork of requirements, which would drive up costs and create an inconsistent set of rules.

Although a successful policy must include a combination of calling for manufacturers to use more environmentally benign materials and for consumers to recycle these products, the steps that manufacturers take to eliminate toxic chemicals from their products is the more important of the two, Saphores says.

Saphores doesn’t accuse technology companies of maliciously placing toxic materials in their products. “It’s been a learning process,” he says. “We were slow to learn about the impact of our choice of materials.”

Safer materials may not initially perform better than proved, albeit toxic, materials, which means electronics-makers will have to innovate to keep delivering faster, smaller and cheaper products, Saphores acknowledges. This goal shouldn’t be a stretch though, he adds, given that innovation is how these companies manage to stay in business in the first place.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=electronic-waste-control

‘Moonlighting’ Molecules Discovered; Researchers Uncover New Kink In Gene Control

DNA double helix. (Credit: Courtesy of NIH/National Human Genome Research Institute)

Since the completion of the human genome sequence, a question has baffled researchers studying gene control: How is it that humans, being far more complex than the lowly yeast, do not proportionally contain in our genome significantly more gene-control proteins?

Now, a collaborative effort at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine to examine protein-DNA interactions across the whole genome has uncovered more than 300 proteins that appear to control genes, a newly discovered function for all of these proteins previously known to play other roles in cells. The results, which appear in the October 30 issue of Cell, provide a partial explanation for human complexity over yeast but also throw a curve ball in what we previously understood about protein functions.

“Everyone knows that transcription factors bind to DNA and everyone knows that they bind in a sequence-specific manner,” says Heng Zhu, Ph.D., an assistant professor in pharmacology and molecular sciences and a member of the High Throughput Biology Center. “But you only find what you look for, so we looked beyond and discovered proteins that essentially moonlight as transcription factors.”

The team suspects that many more proteins encoded by the human genome might also be moonlighting to control genes, which brings researchers to the paradox that less complex organisms, such as plants, appear to have more transcription factors than humans. “Maybe most of our genes are doing double, triple or quadruple the work,” says Zhu. “This may be a widespread phenomenon in humans and the key to how we can be so complex without significantly more genes than organisms like plants.”

The team set out to figure out which proteins encoded by the genome bind to which DNA sequences. It had been predicted by examining the human genome sequence that about 1,400 to 1,700 of encoded proteins are so-called transcription factors — proteins that bind to specific sequences in DNA to turn a gene on or off. The researchers also included in their study, in addition to these proteins, other types that are known to maintain chromosome structure and bind to structurally different RNA. Also included were proteins that normally relay information within a cell and are not thought to directly come in contact with DNA. In total, they collected nearly 4,200 human proteins together on a protein microarray, or protein “chip.”

To identify proteins on that chip that bound DNA directly, the group first reviewed previously published scientific literature and catalogued 460 different, short sequences of DNA that are known or predicted to bind proteins.

One at a time, the team tested each of the 460 DNA sequences against the 4,200 protein-containing chip. In addition to finding many protein-DNA interactions for transcription factors, some confirming previously known interactions, the team found 367 new unconventional DNA binding proteins — proteins known to do other cellular jobs.

“This nearly doubled the number of known protein-DNA interactions,” says Jiang Qian, Ph.D., an assistant professor of ophthalmology at Hopkins. “But we only looked at about a fifth of all the proteins in the human genome — there could be hundreds, even thousands more of these unconventional transcription factors that we don’t yet know about.”

One of the unconventional transcription factors discovered was the protein MAP Kinase 1, also known as ERK2, a protein long studied for its ability to control cell growth and development via its ability to add phosphate groups to other molecules.

“It’s one of the best studied proteins out there, but no one ever thought ERK2 could directly regulate gene expression by actually binding to DNA,” says Seth Blackshaw, Ph.D., an assistant professor of neuroscience and a member of the High Throughput Biology Center and the Neuroregeneration Program at the Institute for Cell Engineering.

To be certain that ERK2 really does bind DNA and control genes in living cells, the team tested the protein in human cells. They found that ERK2 mutated to no longer bind DNA causes specific genes to be turned on, while both normal ERK2 and ERK2 that’s no longer able to chemically modify proteins turn off those same genes. “It clearly acts to repress specific genes,” says Blackshaw. “Maybe this will help clear up some of the puzzles that have arisen in ERK2 experiments over the years.”

A central question in understanding how genes are controlled is hich of the 20,000 proteins encoded by our genome act on which segments of DNA. “It’s not possible to predict this a priori,” Blackshaw says. “Someone has to do the experiment — because we just don’t know enough about how proteins bind to DNA — patterns have surfaced in this field’s 45 year history, but not enough yet to establish any rules.”

This study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, a National Eye Institute Vision Core grant, a W. M. Keck Foundation Distinguished Young Investigator in Medical Research Award, a grant from the Ruth and Milton Steinbach Fund and a generous gift from Mr. and Mrs. Robert and Clarice Smith

Authors on the paper are Shaohui Hu, Zhi Xie, Akishi Onishi, Xueping Yu, Lizhi Jiang, Jimmy Lin, Hee-Sool Rho, Crystal Woodard, Hong Wang, Jun-Seop Jeong, Shunyou Long, Xiaofei He, Herschel Wade, Blackshaw, Qian, and Zhu, all of Johns Hopkins.

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Adapted from materials provided by Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091029125536.htm

Magnetic Mixing Creates Quite A Stir

Kyle Solis, a graduate student intern in Nanomaterials Sciences, prepares a sample for mixing using a new approach called vortex field mixing. (Credit: Randy Montoya)

Sandia researchers have developed a process that can mix tiny volumes of liquid, even in complicated spaces.

Researchers currently use all types of processes to try and create mixing, with only “mixed” success. “In small devices,” says Sandia materials scientist Jim Martin “people have tried all kinds of pillars and mixing cells to initiate mixing, but these approaches don’t work well.” Researchers need simpler and more reliable ways to mix in tiny places such as micrometer-sized channels, Martin said.

“Mixing liquids in tiny volumes,” Martin said, “is surprisingly difficult.” When fluid is pushed down a big pipe, eddies are generated that create mixing. But if fluid is pushed down a small pipe no eddies are generated and mixing does not occur unless you subject the fluid to tremendous pressure, which isn’t usually easy or feasible, he said.

Martin’s discovery of how to mix tiny liquid volumes arose from LDRD-funded research directed at improving the sensitivity of the chemical sensors developed in his lab. That project, “Field-Structured Composite Studies,” was a joint effort with Rod Williamson (now retired). While their LDRD project did not lead to the expected results, Martin and Williamson were surprised by the wide variety of physical effects they discovered along the way, including magnetic mixing. These effects, Martin said, ended up being much more interesting and important than the original goal.

Since the project began, Department of Energy’s Division of Material Science and Engineering, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, has started a new project whose goal is to better understand the fundamental science of field-structured composites. So the program succeeded even as it failed, and eventually Martin and graduate student intern Doug Read developed better ways to increase sensor sensitivity.

In the new method of mixing, when one turns on a particular kind of magnetic field, the magnetic particles suspended in the fluid form chains like strings of pearls. The chains start swirling around and that’s what does the mixing. The particles are then removed magnetically, leaving a nice mixed-up liquid.

More technically, the new mixing method, which Jim calls vortex field mixing, subjects a suspension of microscopic, magnetizable particles to a magnetic field whose direction is constantly spinning in a motion similar to a spinning top as it is about to collapse on its side, but much faster. In this “vortex field” the particles assemble into countless microscopic chains that follow the field motion, stirring every nook and cranny of the fluid. The vortex field stirs the liquid vigorously, and surprising fluid effects are possible, such as a kind of washing machine agitation where the spinning direction alternates periodically.

Currently, Martin, Lauren Rohwer, and graduate intern Kyle Solis work with the vortex field mixing, among other projects. Their experimental report, recently appearing in the July issue of Physical Review, has generated interest, including a Physical Review Focus article and a Research Highlight in the September MRS Bulletin.

This type of magnetic mixing with particles that assemble into micro-stir bars isn’t like the magnetic mixing done in high school chemistry class.

“In your high school chemistry class,” Martin says “when you mixed a beaker of water on a stir plate, underneath the plate was a permanent magnet spinning around to make the stir bar spin. If that hidden magnet suddenly became twice as strong, the magnetic field would double but you wouldn’t see any increase in the stirring at all.

“With our process,” Martin said “if we make the magnetic field twice as strong, the stirring becomes four times as strong because the stronger field makes the particle chains longer.”

With conventional stir-bar mixing you can increase the mixing torque by increasing the speed of the stir bar instead. It’s easy to feel this effect by simply holding the beaker slightly above the stir plate. In vortex field mixing increasing the speed of the wobbling doesn’t help, because the chains simply break into smaller pieces and the mixing torque doesn’t change at all.

Vortex field mixing stirs just as effectively with magnetic nanoparticles as with traditional micrometer-size powders. In fact, excellent mixing torques have been obtained using 100 nanometer particles. This means even the tiniest fluid volumes can be mixed, as well as the largest.

As strange as these effects are, they were initially predicted by Martin in a theory paper published in the January 2009 issue of Physical Review. This paper also explains why a simple rotating magnetic field doesn’t induce mixing, and predicts the optimal wobbling angle of the magnetic field.

Vortex field mixing requires only the modest magnetic fields provided by simple wire coils that can be scaled to the size of the fluid cavity. After mixing, a researcher can trap the particles with a permanent magnet, decant the mixed liquid and recycle the particles endlessly.

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Adapted from materials provided by DOE/Sandia National Laboratories.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091027132957.htm

Physicist Makes New High-resolution Panorama Of Milky Way

Full sky panorama of the Milky Way.

Cobbling together 3000 individual photographs, a physicist has made a new high-resolution panoramic image of the full night sky, with the Milky Way galaxy as its centerpiece. Axel Mellinger, a professor at Central Michigan University, describes the process of making the panorama in the November issue of Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

“This panorama image shows stars 1000 times fainter than the human eye can see, as well as hundreds of galaxies, star clusters and nebulae,” Mellinger said. Its high resolution makes the panorama useful for both educational and scientific purposes, he says.

Mellinger spent 22 months and traveled over 26,000 miles to take digital photographs at dark sky locations in South Africa, Texas and Michigan. After the photographs were taken, “the real work started,” Mellinger said.

Simply cutting and pasting the images together into one big picture would not work. Each photograph is a two-dimensional projection of the celestial sphere. As such, each one contains distortions, in much the same way that flat maps of the round Earth are distorted. In order for the images to fit together seamlessly, those distortions had to be accounted for. To do that, Mellinger used a mathematical model — and hundreds of hours in front of a computer.

Another problem Mellinger had to deal with was the differing background light in each photograph.

“Due to artificial light pollution, natural air glow, as well as sunlight scattered by dust in our solar system, it is virtually impossible to take a wide-field astronomical photograph that has a perfectly uniform background,” Mellinger said.

To fix this, Mellinger used data from the Pioneer 10 and 11 space probes. The data allowed him to distinguish star light from unwanted background light. He could then edit out the varying background light in each photograph. That way they would fit together without looking patchy.

The result is an image of our home galaxy that no star-gazer could ever see from a single spot on earth. Mellinger plans to make the giant 648 megapixel image available to planetariums around the world.

An interactive version of the picture can viewed on Mellinger’s website.

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Adapted from materials provided by University of Chicago Press Journals.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/10/091028112758.htm

Voices of long-dead stars haunt the galaxy

Some neutron stars only appear as radio blips (Image: NASA/NRAO/AUI/NSF)

by David Shiga

Mysterious radio blips that come from apparently empty regions of space may be the voices of long-dead stars.

Thirteen unexplained radio blips have turned up in radio telescope observations since the 1980s. They emerged in spots where there are no stars or galaxies to be seen, last anywhere from hours to days, and do not seem to repeat. The blips could be traces of a vast population of stellar corpses – neutron stars that roam the universe largely unseen, suggests a team led by Eran Ofek of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena.

Most of the galaxy’s estimated billion neutron stars are invisible. Some of the newly formed ones have been detected because their rapid rotation sends radio pulses our way multiple times per second. These are thought to fade with age.

Gassy burps

If each of the neutron stars produces a radio burst every few months, perhaps after absorbing interstellar gas, the close ones would be detected at the rate observed, the team calculates.

“Neutron stars are a good possibility as the explanation for these events,” says Geoffrey Bower of the University of California, Berkeley, whose team found seven of the outbursts in archived data from the Very Large Array telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory near Socorro, New Mexico. “They are ubiquitous throughout the galaxy.”

Bower and his colleagues plan to scrutinise the locations of the radio blips using the orbiting Chandra X-ray Observatory, looking for X-ray emissions characteristic of neutron stars.

See more: Ghostly gallery: Spooky images from space

Journal reference: arxiv.org/abs/0910.3676

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427324.500-voices-of-longdead-stars-haunt-the-galaxy.html

Russia Proposes Nuclear Spaceship for Manned Mars Mission: Mimics 1960’s NASA Project Orion

Anatoly Perminov, Russia’s space chief, in a replay of the early 1960’s NASA Orion Project,  proposes building a nuclear-powered ship with a megawatt-class nuclear reactor at a government meeting Wednesday but didn’t explain its purpose. President Dmitry Medvedev backed the project and urged the government to find the money.

The 1960s Project Orion project was a nuclear-pulse rocket the size of the Empire State building fueled by atomic bombs with the power to destroy half of Planet Earth. The mission was to take us to Saturn in five years. The project lives today in limbo at NASA possibly to be activated should an asteroid arrive with our name on it.

The propulsion system advocated for the Orion spacecraft was based on an idea first put forward by Stanislaw Ulam and Cornelius Everett in a classified paper in 1955. Ulam and Everett suggested releasing atomic bombs behind a spacecraft, followed by disks made of solid propellant. The bombs would explode, vaporizing the material of the disks and converting it into hot plasma. As this plasma rushed out in all directions, some of it would catch up with the spacecraft, impinge upon a pusher plate, and so drive the vehicle forward.

Fast forward to Moscow, 2009: Perminov said the nuclear spaceship should be used for human flights to Mars and other planets. He said the project is challenging technologically, but could capitalize on the Soviet and Russian experience in the field, with a preliminary design ready by 2012.

“The project is aimed at implementing large-scale space exploration programs, including a manned mission to Mars, interplanetary travel, the creation and operation of planetary outposts,” Perminov’s Web statement said. Associated Press reports that “the ambitious plans contrast with Russia’s slow progress on building a replacement to its mainstay spacecraft – the Soyuz.

Russia is using Soyuz booster rockets and capsules, developed 40 years ago, to send crews to the International Space Station.”

Despite its continuing reliance on the old technology, Russia stands to take a greater role in space exploration in the coming years. NASA’s plan to retire its shuttle fleet next year will force the United States and other nations to rely on the Russian spacecraft to ferry their astronauts to and from the International Space Station until NASA’s new manned ship becomes available.

Igor Lisov, a Moscow-based expert on Russian space program, said the prospective ship would use a nuclear reactor to run an electric rocket engine. “It will be quite efficient for flight to Mars,” he told The Associated Press on Thursday. Lisov said Soviet work on a nuclear-powered electric rocket engine dates back to the 1960s when Soviet engineers began developing plans for a manned flight to Mars.

Stanley Borowski, a senior engineer at NASA specializing in nuclear rocket engines, said they have many advantages for deep space missions, such as to take astronauts and gear to Mars. In deep space, nuclear rockets are twice as fuel-efficient as conventional rockets, he said.

NASA has used small amounts of plutonium in deep space probes, including those to Jupiter, Saturn, Pluto and heading out of the solar system.

The only planetary mission currently considered by Russia is a plan to send a probe to one of Mars’ twin moons, Phobos. It was set to launch this year, but was delayed.

Casey Kazan

Sources: Associated Press and Physorg.com

Follow link for Video – http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/10/russias-nuclear-spaceship-for-manned-mars-mission-mimics-1960s-nasa-project-orion-video.html

BioHacking: The Plot for the Next Real-life Blockbuster Thriller?

Solitary citizens are toiling over test-tubes, sacrificing their time and money to create brand new lifeforms – but this isn’t a science fiction movie, it’s a hobby.  “DIY Biochemistry” sees private citizens converting their dining rooms into DNA labs.  It’s only a pity that Michael Crichton has passed on, because we’ve got the plot of his next book right here.

With a wealth of online guides, biochemical supply companies and even craigslist cryogenic equipment, hobbyists or collectives like the Cambridge group “DIYbio” are enabling determined individuals to engineer their own organisms.  The self-titled “biohackers” paint a picture of “citizen scientists”, freeing genetic engineering from the stuffy confines of university and corporate labs.  We would point out that anybody keen on freeing anything from a containment lab might not have a full understanding of what they’re doing.

The almost anti-scientist sentiment that “regular people should be able to do this without years of study” is fundamentally flawed – those years of study are what enable professionals to know what they’re at. These people demand “Why shouldn’t we be allowed to do this in our own homes?”, and if you have to even ask that question you truly don’t know the answer.

We don’t doubt that many useful results will come out of the DIY DNA diversion, and anything which increases the public’s knowledge of this crucial branch of science has a good side.  The sheer spectrum of ideas that can come from hobbyists has been proved time and again by the internet, and harnessed safely by such mass-simulations as FoldIt. Also unquestionable is that the vast majority of these projects will be only beneficial, at worst failures which achieve nothing, and any imagined terrorist threats are vastly overstated.

But it only takes one.  A single amateur ecology-alterer managed to devastate Australia with a bag of rabbits back in the day, and he didn’t even have a biochem lab.  Caution is advised.

Proponents proudly point out how Apple and Google were started by similarly small-scale entrepreneurs.  The problem, of course, is that the first Apple computer couldn’t replicate uncontrollably and dominate the entire globe.  Likewise Google – well, okay, that did happen with Google but it seems to have worked out.  But we won’t have the same guarantee with gengineered bacteria.

Posted by Luke McKinney

DIY DNA

DIYbio  http://www.diybio.org

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/10/biohacking-will-it-provide-the-plot-for-the-next-realife-blockbuster-thriller.html

Unfinished Windows 7 feature turns laptops into Wi-Fi hotspots

Free app lets iPhones, other devices connect to Internet via software-based router

By Gregg Keizer

A Philadelphia developer has rooted out an unfinished feature of Windows 7 that turns any laptop into a wireless access point, allowing other Wi-Fi-enabled devices to share the connection without special software.

Nomadio, which specializes in military network consulting and development, used the new “Virtual Wi-Fi” feature in Windows 7 to create Connectify, a free application that it released as a beta last Friday.

Virtual Wi-Fi was crafted in Microsoft’s research group as a way to “virtualize” one wireless card as several separate adapters. The project was discontinued in 2006, but the work made its way into Windows 7 as “Native 802.11 Virtual Wireless Fidelity (Virtual Wi-Fi) object identifiers (OIDs)”.

“A year ago, Microsoft talked a lot about this as a big feature in Windows 7,” said Alex Gizis, the CEO of Nomadio. “But driver support didn’t get finished. The low-level code is in there, but the driver-level stuff isn’t. And there’s no app or setting in Windows to turn it on.”

Explaining that the feature was “half there” in Windows 7, Gizis said his company realized “we have the rest of the software here, in our networking work.”

The resulting Connectify differs from the Internet connection sharing that Windows already supports via an “ad hoc” network connection, which lets several Windows computers share a single connection. “For one thing, it shows up as a real wireless access point,” Gizis said. “Two, Internet connection sharing has issues. It returns to the default settings every time you shut down a connection. And three, you can join another wireless network and still run the Connectify Hotspot on the same Wi-Fi card.”

One application came immediately to mind, Gizis continued. “You’re sitting in a coffee shop that charges you for a wireless connection. With Connectify, I can pay for that connection, and still have all my other devices, like my iPhone, connected to the Internet.”

Connectify lets a Windows 7 laptop “tether” other wireless devices to a single Internet connection by effectively turning that PC into a software-based wireless router, added Gizis. “We’ve done a lot of military networking, including a lot of mesh networks,” he said, “where special routers connect to each other.” That technique, he said, was ideal for keeping in-the-field troops connected to the Internet.

Gizis has used his Connectify-equipped Windows 7 laptop as a wireless access point for his Apple iPhone, for example, and to provide a wireless connection to multiple PCs when only one Ethernet jack was available.

“There are a lot of neat scenarios where this comes in handy,” he said. “For example, people can use a wireless printer without any setup, which usually requires that you first plug the [wireless] printer into the computer with a USB cable so it can select the network.”

Although the Connectify beta is free to download, Gizis said that Nomadio would likely pin a price on the final, full-featured version when that’s ready to release in about six weeks. “I think we’ll end up with two-tier model, one that’s free, potentially ad-supported, and then sell a full version,” said Gizis.

Windows 7 is required on the notebook acting as a wireless hotspot, but any wireless-equipped device, including PCs running Windows XP or Vista, or even Mac laptops, can reach the Web through Connectify without any additional software. Connectify also encrypts the traffic to and from the software “hot spot” using WPA2-Personal (AES) encryption.

The beta of Connectify can be downloaded from Nomadio’s Web site.

Apple’s Mac OS X already offers a similar feature under the “Internet Sharing” preferences setting.

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9140133/Unfinished_Windows_7_feature_turns_laptops_into_Wi_Fi_hotspots