Luminist League: Archives: Relevant News Stories from Around the World

US prison population topped 7 million in 2006
By KASIE HUNT (AP)

A record 7 million people — or one in every 32 American adults — were behind bars, on probation or on parole by the end of last year, according to the Justice Department. Of those, 2.2 million were in prison or jail, an increase of 2.7 percent over the previous year, according to a report released Wednesday. More than 4.1 million people were on probation and 784,208 were on parole at the end of 2005. Prison releases are increasing, but admissions are increasing more. Men still far outnumber women in prisons and jails, but the female population is growing faster. Over the past year, the female population in state or federal prison increased 2.6 percent while the number of male inmates rose 1.9 percent. By year's end, 7 percent of all inmates were women. The gender figures do not include inmates in local jails.

“Today’s figures fail to capture incarceration's impact on the thousands of children left behind by mothers in prison,” Marc Mauer, the executive director of the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based group supporting criminal justice reform, said in a statement. “Misguided policies that create harsher sentences for nonviolent drug offenses are disproportionately responsible for the increasing rates of women in prisons and jails.”

From 1995 to 2003, inmates in federal prison for drug offenses have accounted for 49 percent of total prison population growth. The numbers are from the annual report from the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics. The report breaks down inmate populations for state and federal prisons and local jails. Racial disparities among prisoners persist. In the 25-29 age group, 8.1 percent of black men — about one in 13 — are incarcerated, compared with 2.6 percent of Hispanic men and 1.1 percent of white men. And it’s not much different among women. By the end of 2005, black women were more than twice as likely as Hispanics and over three times as likely as white women to be in prison. Certain states saw more significant changes in prison population. In South Dakota, the number of inmates increased 11 percent over the past year, more than any other state. Montana and Kentucky were next in line with increases of 10.4 percent and 7.9 percent, respectively. Georgia had the biggest decrease, losing 4.6 percent, followed by Maryland with a 2.4 percent decrease and Louisiana with a 2.3 percent drop.

Massive water ice deposit found on Mars
NASA press release, March 21, 2007

New measurements of Mars’ south polar region indicate extensive frozen water. The polar region contains enough frozen water to cover the whole planet in a liquid layer approximately 11 meters (36 feet) deep. A joint NASA-Italian Space Agency instrument on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express spacecraft provided these data. This new estimate comes from mapping the thickness of the ice. The Mars Express orbiter’s radar instrument has made more than 300 virtual slices through layered deposits covering the pole to map the ice. The radar sees through icy layers to the lower boundary, which is as deep as 3.7 kilometers (2.3 miles) below thesurface.

“The south polar layered deposits of Mars cover an area bigger than Texas. The amount of water they contain has been estimated before, but never with the level of confidence this radar makes possible,” said Jeffrey Plaut of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena Calif. Plaut is co-principal investigator for the radar and lead author of a new report on these findings published in the March 15 online edition of the journal Science.

The instrument, named the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding (MARSIS), also is mapping the thickness of similar layered deposits at the north pole of Mars.

“Our radar is doing its job extremely well,” said Giovanni Picardi, a professor at the University of Rome and principal investigator for the instrument. “MARSIS is showing itself to be a very powerful tool to probe underneath the Martian surface, and it's showing how our team's goals, such as probing the polar layered deposits, are being successfully achieved. Not only is MARSIS providing us with the first-ever views of Mars subsurface at those depths, but the details we are seeing are truly amazing. We expect even greater results when we have concluded an ongoing, sophisticated fine-tuning of our data processing methods. These should enable us to understand even better the surface and subsurface composition.”

Polar layered deposits hold most of the known water on modern Mars, though other areas of the planet appear to have been very wet at times in the past. Understanding the history and fate of water on Mars is a key to studying whether Mars has ever supported life, since all known life depends on liquid water. The polar layered deposits extend beyond and beneath a polar cap of bright-white frozen carbon dioxide and water at Mars’ south pole. Dust darkens many of the layers. However, the strength of the echo that the radar receives from the rocky surface underneath the layered deposits suggests the composition of the layered deposits is at least 90% frozen water. One area with an especially bright reflection from the base of the deposits puzzles researchers. It resembles what a thin layer of liquid water might look like to the radar instrument, but the conditions are so cold that the presence of melted water is deemed highly unlikely.

Detecting the shape of the ground surface beneath the ice deposits provides information about even deeper structures of Mars. “We didn’t really know where the bottom of the deposit was,” Plaut said. “Now we can see that the crust has not been depressed by the weight of the ice as it would be on the Earth. The crust and upper mantle of Mars are stiffer than the Earth’s, probably because the interior of Mars is so much colder.”

The MARSIS instrument on the European Space Agency's Mars Express orbiter was developed jointly by the Italian Space Agency and NASA, under the scientific supervision of the University of Rome, in partnership with JPL and the University of Iowa, Iowa City.

Study shows altruism in human infants
Lauran Neergaard, AP

Oops, the scientist dropped his clothespin. Not to worry — a wobbly toddler raced to help, eagerly handing it back. The simple experiment shows the capacity for altruism emerges as early as 18 months of age.

Toddlers’ endearing desire to help out actually signals fairly sophisticated brain development, and is a trait of interest to anthropologists trying to tease out the evolutionary roots of altruism and cooperation.

Psychology researcher Felix Warneken performed a series of ordinary tasks in front of toddlers, such as hanging towels with clothespins or stacking books. Sometimes he “struggled” with the tasks; sometimes he deliberately messed up. Over and over, whether Warneken dropped clothespins or knocked over his books, each of 24 toddlers offered help within seconds — but only if he appeared to need it. Video shows how one overall-clad baby glanced between Warneken’s face and the dropped clothespin before quickly crawling over, grabbing the object, pushing up to his feet and eagerly handing back the pin. Warneken never asked for the help and didn’t even say “thank you,” so as not to taint the research by training youngsters to expect praise if they helped. After all, altruism means helping with no expectation of anything in return.

And — this is key — the toddlers didn’t bother to offer help when he deliberately pulled a book off the stack or threw a pin to the floor, Warneken, of Germany’s Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology, reports Thursday in the journal Science.

To be altruistic, babies must have the cognitive ability to understand other people’s goals plus possess what Warneken calls “pro-social motivation,” a desire to be part of their community. “When those two things come together — they obviously do so at 18 months of age and maybe earlier — they are able to help,” Warneken explained.

No other animal is as altruistic as humans are. We donate to charity, recycle for the environment, give up a prime subway seat to the elderly — tasks that seldom bring a tangible return beyond a sense of gratification. Other animals are skilled at cooperating, too, but most often do so for a goal, such as banding together to chase down food or protect against predators. But primate specialists offer numerous examples of apes, in particular, displaying more humanlike helpfulness, such as the gorilla who rescued a 3-year-old boy who fell into her zoo enclosure.

But observations don’t explain what motivated the animals. So Warneken put a few of our closest relatives through a similar helpfulness study. Would 3- and 4-year-old chimpanzees find and hand over objects that a familiar human “lost”? The chimps frequently did help out if all that was required was reaching for a dropped object — but not nearly as readily as the toddlers had helped, and not if the aid was more complicated, such as if it required reaching inside a box. It’s a creative study that shows chimps may display humanlike helpfulness when they can grasp the person’s goal, University of California, Los Angeles, anthropologist Joan Silk wrote in an accompanying review. Just don’t assume they help for the reasons of empathy that motivated the babies, she cautioned.

Cassini finds signs of water on Saturn’s moon
Tariq Malik, SPACE.com

Saturn’s moon Enceladus, one of the brightest objects in the Solar System, may have pockets of liquid water lurking beneath its surface feeding great jets that spew from the satellite, hinting at the possibility of a habitable environment, researchers said Thursday. Observations from the Cassini spacecraft currently studying Saturn and its myriad moons shows Enceladus to be a geologist’s dream, with an active plume spewing water and other material spaceward, as well as a hot spot of thermal activity at its south pole.

“This finding has substantially broadened the range of environments in the solar system that might support living organisms, and it doesn’t get any more significant than that,” said Carolyn Porco, Cassini imaging team leader at the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, in an e-mail interview. “I’d say we’ve just hit the ball right out of park.”

Porco led one of nine studies of Enceladus, all of which are detailed in the journal Science, based on Cassini’s observations from three flybys past the moon — each closer than the last — in February, March and July of 2005.

Enceladus’ active nature points toward subsurface water reservoirs beneath its icy exterior, much like that believed to churn just under the surface of Jupiter’s moon Europa, researchers said. But unlike Europa, which researchers believe harbors a vast ocean beneath kilometers of thick ice, Enceladus’ water may be just below the surface. “What’s different here is that pockets of liquid water may no more than tens of meters below the surface,” said Andrew Ingersoll, a Cassini imaging team member and atmospheric scientist at the California Institute of Science, in a statement.

Cassini caught hard evidence of Enceladus’ plume since last year, though scientists were unsure of what powers the jets of particles blowing into space. The moon is only the third other body in the Solar System — Earth, Jupiter’s moon Io and possibly Neptune’s moon Triton are the others — known to have active volcanic processes, researchers said. Porco’s team found evidence that the jets may erupt from buried pockets of water at temperatures above 32 degrees Fahrenheit (0 degrees Celsius) like a frigid geyser. The close proximity of water, rock and the south pole’s thermal hot spot puts Enceladus on the list of possible harbors for biological activity, some researchers said. “You’ve got liquid water, and it’s liquid water interfacing with rock... and there’s energy,” NASA Cassini scientist Candice Hansen-Koharcheck told SPACE.com. “We’ve got the very most basic ingredients here, and so that notches it up on the biological potential list.”

“If a wet domain exists at the bottom of Enceladus’ icy crust, Cassini may help to confirm it,” writes Jeffrey Kargel, a research scientist with the University of Arizona’s Department of Hydrology and Water Resources, in a related article in Science. But the spacecraft, Kargel wrote, will not be able to determine whether subsurface water pockets could offer a habitat suitable for living organisms.

Astronomers offer list of top candidates for extraterrestrial life
(AFP)

US astronomers have come up with a short list of five stars in the Milky Way galaxy that are most likely to support extraterrestrial life. The stars were chosen based on a number of criteria, including size, composition, age and color, that would make them similar to the sun and enable planets resembling Earth to orbit them, said Margaret Turnbull of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. Turnbull’s list would enable astronomers to point telescopes towards the stars with the most potential of sending radio signals from extraterrestrial life.

“These are places I would want to live if God were to put our planet around another star,” Turnbull said on Saturday at a conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in St Louis, Missouri.

The list was developed to guide the use of NASA’s new powerful orbiting observatories, or the Terrestrial Planet Finder, which will search for Earth-like planets.

“There are 400 billion stars in the galaxy, and obviously we are not going to point the Terrestrial Planet Finder at every one of them,” Turnbull said.

Among the most promising sun-like stars was beta CVn, about 26 light years from Earth in the constellation Canes Venatici. (One light year is equivalent to 9.5 billion kilometers.) Another star on the short list, Pegasus 51, was made famous in 1995 when Swiss astronomers discovered the first planet outside the solar system. The giant planet resembling Jupiter orbits Pegasus 51. A star named 16 sco, a popular target for planet searches, also made the list. The star is located in the Scorpion constellation near the center of the Milky Way and is virtually a twin of the sun, according to Turnbull.

Turnbull and her colleagues initially set out to select a dozen stars that were the most promising and sufficiently close to the Earth's solar system. In 2003, after a painstaking study of close to 120,000 stars, the team of astronomers came up with a catalogue of 129 “habitable stellar systems.”

To be considered as potential homes for intelligent life to evolve, stars had to be at least three billion years old. Turnbull said the list was merely a starting point and it remained difficult to rank stars as more or less likely to shelter life. “There are inevitable uncertainties in how we understand these stars,” she said. “If I took the top 100, it would be very difficult for me to tell which is the best.”

The list will provide potential targets for the Terrestrial Planet Finder, which was originally set to be launched in 2016 but has been postponed due to federal budget constraints. Research for the list was sponsored by NASA and the privately funded Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) organization. The institute was created in 1984 by the renown astronomer Carl Sagan, who died in 1996.

US Supreme Court supports religious use of psychedelic tea
By James Vicini, Reuters

US followers of a small Brazilian-based religion can import and use hallucinogenic tea in their ceremonies, a unanimous Supreme Court ruled on February 21, 2006 in a case pitting religious rights against federal drug laws.

The court’s opinion, the first ruling on religious freedom written by new Chief Justice John Roberts, rejected the U.S. government’s effort to stop the import and use of sacramental hoasca tea by the New Mexico branch of the religion, called O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal. The justices upheld an appeals court ruling that the government must allow the use of the herbal hoasca tea as part of a spiritual practice because of the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Roberts dismissed the government’s central argument that it has a compelling interest in the uniform application of drug law and there can be no exception for using the hallucinogen to accommodate sincere religious practice.

“The government’s argument echoes the classic rejoinder of bureaucrats throughout history: If I make an exception for you, I’ll have to make one for everybody, so no exceptions,” Roberts wrote in the 19-page opinion. He said the government already has made an exception to the drug laws by allowing peyote use by Native American churches, and there is no evidence that exception has undermined the ability to enforce the ban on peyote use by others.

Members of the Brazilian-based church believe the tea helps connect them to God. The brewed tea, made from two plants that grow in the Amazon, contains dimethyltryptamine, or DMT, a controlled substance banned under federal law. Founded in Brazil in 1961, the religion blends Christian theology and indigenous South American beliefs. It has about 8,000 members in Brazil and about 130 followers in New Mexico.

In 1999, US Customs inspectors intercepted a shipment from Brazil to the American branch of three drums labeled “tea extract.” US agents then seized 30 gallons (136 litres) of the tea from the home of Jeffrey Bronfman, the head of the church’s US chapter.

Besides federal drug laws, US Justice Department attorneys also cited the 1971 UN Convention on Psychotropic Substances, a treaty signed by the United States that bars importation of the drug in the tea.

Attorneys for the US followers argued that the church and its members only sought to practice their beliefs and use the tea in religious ceremonies, a right they said was guaranteed by the religious freedom law.

A number of religious and civil liberties groups had supported the New Mexican sect.

The case is Gonzales v. O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao Do Vegetal, 04-1084.

Asteroid mining: key to the space economy
Mark Sonter, National Space Society

The Near Earth Asteroids offer both threat and promise. They present the threat of planetary impact with regional or global disaster. And they also offer the promise of resources to support humanity's long-term prosperity on Earth, and our movement into space and the solar system.

The technologies needed to return asteroidal resources to Earth Orbit (and thus catalyze our colonization of space) will also enable the deflection of at least some of the impact-threat objects. We should develop these technologies, with all due speed!

Development and operation of future in-orbit infrastructure (for example, orbital hotels, satellite solar power stations, earth-moon transport node satellites, zero-g manufacturing facilities) will require large masses of materials for construction, shielding, and ballast; and also large quantities of propellant for station-keeping and orbit-change maneuvers, and for fuelling craft departing for lunar or interplanetary destinations.

Spectroscopic studies suggest, and ï¿½ground-truthï¿½ chemical assays of meteorites confirm, that a wide range of resources are present in asteroids and comets, including nickel-iron metal, silicate minerals, semiconductor and platinum group metals, water, bituminous hydrocarbons, and trapped or frozen gases including carbon dioxide and ammonia.

As one startling pointer to the unexpected riches in asteroids, many stony and stony-iron meteorites contain Platinum Group Metals at grades of up to 100 ppm (or 100 grams per ton). Operating open pit platinum and gold mines in South Africa and elsewhere mine ores of grade 5 to 10 ppm, so grades of 10 to 20 times higher would be regarded as spectacular if available in quantity, on Earth. Water is an obvious first, and key, potential product from asteroid mines, as it could be used for return trip propulsion via steam rocket.

About 10% of Near-Earth Asteroids are energetically more accessible (easier to get to) than the Moon (i.e. under 6 km/s from LEO), and a substantial minority of these have return-to-Earth transfer orbit injection delta-vï¿½s of only 1 to 2 km/s. Return of resources from some of these NEAs to low or high Earth orbit may therefore be competitive versus earth-sourced supplies.

Our knowledge of asteroids and comets has expanded dramatically in the last ten years, with images and spectra of asteroids and comets from flybys, rendezvous, and impacts (for example asteroids Gaspra, Ida, Mathilde, the vast image collection from Eros, Itokawa, and others; comets Halley, Borrelly, Tempel-1, and Wild-2. And radar images of asteroids Toutatis, Castalia, Geographos, Kleopatra, Golevka and other... These images show extraordinary variations in structure, strength, porosity, surface features.

The total number of identified NEAs has increased from about 300 to more than 3,000 in the period 1995 to 2005. The most accessible group of NEAs for resource recovery is a subset of the Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (PHAs). These are bodies (about 770 now discovered) which approach to within 7.5 million km of earth orbit. The smaller subset of those with orbits which are Earth-orbit-grazing give intermittently very low delta-v return opportunities (that is it is easy velocity wise to return to Earth). These are also the bodies which humanity should want to learn about in terms of surface properties and strength so as to plan deflection missions, in case we should ever find one on a collision course with us.

Professor John Lewis has pointed out (in Mining the Sky) that the resources of the solar system (the most accessible of which being those in the NEAs) can permanently support in first-world comfort some quadrillion people. In other words, the resources of the solar system are essentially infiniteï¿½ And they are there for us to use, to invest consciousness into the universe, no less. Itï¿½s time for humankind to come out of its shell, and begin to grow! So both for species protection and for the expansion of humanity into the solar system, we need to characterize these objects and learn how to mine and manage them.

Once we learn how to work on, handle, and modify the orbits of small near-earth objects, we will have achieved, as a species, both the capability to access the vast resources of the asteroids, and also the capability to protect our planet from identified collision threats.

Since the competing source of raw materials is ï¿½delivery by launch from Earth,ï¿½ which imposes a launch cost per kilogram presently above $10,000 per kg, this same figure represents the upper bound of what recovered asteroidal material would be presently worth in low earth orbit.

Future large scale economic activity in orbit is unlikely to develop however until launch cost drops to something in the range $500 to $1,000 per kilogram to LEO. At that point, any demand for material in orbit which can be satisfied at equal or lower cost by resources recovered from asteroids, will confer on these asteroidal resources an equivalent value as ore in true mining engineering terms, i.e., that which can be mined, have valuable product recovered from it, to be sold for a profit. Now, $500,000 per ton product is extraordinarily valuable, and is certainly worth chasing!

Note that the asteroidal materials we are talking about are, simply, water, nickel-iron metal, hydrocarbons, and silicate rock. Purified, and made available in low earth orbit, they will be worth something like $500,000 per ton, by virtue of having avoided terrestrial gravityï¿½s ï¿½launch cost levy.ï¿½ These are values up there with optical glass, doped semiconductors, specialty isotopes for research or medicine, diamonds, some pharmaceuticals, illicit drugs. On the mining scene, the only metal which has ever been so valuable was radium, which in the 1920s reached the fabulous value of $200,000 per gram!

Platinum Group Metals (which are present in metallic and silicate asteroids, as proved by the ï¿½ground truthï¿½ of meteorite finds) have a value presently in the order of $1,000 per ounce or $30 per gram. Vastly expanded use in catalysts and for fuel cells will enhance their value, and PGM recovery from asteroid impact sites on the Moon is the basis of Dennis Wingoï¿½s book, Moonrush.

When will we see asteroid mining start? Well, it will only become viable once the human presence commercial in-orbit economy takes off. Only then will there be a market. And that can only happen after NASA ceases acting as a near-monopolist launch provider and thwarter of competition, and reverts to being a customer instead.

A developing in-space economy will build the technical capability to access NEAs, almost automatically. And regardless of the legal arguments about mineral claims in outer space, once the first resource recovery mission is successful, what's the bets on a surge in interest similar to the dotcom-boom and biotech-boom?

The first successful venturers will develop immense proprietary knowledge, and make a mint. And some as-yet unidentified (but almost certainly already discovered) NEAs will be the company-making mines of the 21st century.

Shooting for the moon once again
John Johnson Jr., Los Angeles Times

HOUSTON — Behind 18 inches of concrete in stainless steel cabinets flushed with pure nitrogen rests a material rarer than gold, more valuable than diamonds. Not even NASA curator Gary Lofgren knows both combinations to the Johnson Space Center’s vault that contains 600 pounds of lunar rocks and soil.

Of late, Lofgren has noticed something unusual — there’s been a run on moon dirt. Gram by precious gram, he’s been doling out samples to researchers around the world eager to study the desolate orb again.

Thirty-four years after the last Apollo astronaut walked on the lunar surface, a new space race is underway. It will be a long race, with humans unlikely to set foot on the moon again in the next 10 to 15 years. But countries are gearing up to take their first steps. India’s 20,000 space workers are readying a lunar orbital mission set for 2007. Japan plans to send a robotic rover to the lifeless rock by 2013, and the European Space Agency has a probe, SMART-1, orbiting the moon.

Although many countries are talking about sending people to the moon, only two, the United States and China, have set dates for manned lunar landings. NASA says its next manned mission will be as early as 2018; China says it wants to land “taikonauts” — as Chinese astronauts are called — as early as 2017.

“There is a lunar armada” on the way back to the moon, said James B. Garvin, head of NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter project, scheduled to lift off in 2008. It’s an unlikely renaissance of lunar exploration after decades of sending robots to distant planets while human explorers busied themselves building a space station in low-Earth orbit. Each country is going for its own reasons — some commercial, some strategic, some for national pride. But if the plans come to fruition, the moon could become a busy extraterrestrial outpost for scientists, engineers and possibly ordinary citizens in the coming decades. It would also serve as a vital way station for man's long-dreamed-of trip to Mars.

Leading the way is the only country that has set foot there before, the United States. Two years from now, NASA will begin launching probes to search for landing sites and potential water sources at the moon's south pole. Work is underway on new generation lunar projects, including a souped-up rover and a $38-million project to extract breathable oxygen from moon dust.

All this has gotten NASA’s workforce, which has been demoralized by the frustrations and tragedies of the ill-fated space shuttle program, fired up in ways it hasn’t been since the 1960s. But there are plenty of doubters. Why bother with the moon? The U.S. has been there. Six times. On each occasion, explorers have found the same barren world — a place of “magnificent desolation,” in the words of Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin.

Visionaries such as Gregg Maryniak, director of the James S. McDonnell Planetarium in St. Louis, have little patience with those who say, “been there, done that” about the moon. “That’s like saying you've seen New York when you changed planes at JFK.”

At the height of the moon race in the 1960s, the Army Corps of Engineers dug a six-acre faux lunar landscape on a patch of Texas flatland at the Johnson Space Center, complete with craters. Apollo Astronauts in spacesuits test-drove the lunar rover and clambered over large rocks to prove they could handle the harsh environs of the moon. The country was younger and bursting with energy when President Kennedy inaugurated the race to the moon in May 1961. “No single space project will be more exciting or more impressive to mankind — and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish,” Kennedy said. A month earlier, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had become the first person in space when he orbited Earth in his Vostok 1 spacecraft. It was the latest in a string of firsts notched by the Soviet space program, beginning with the 1957 launch of Sputnik, whose distinctive “beep, beep, beep” broadcast sent American politicians into a frenzy of chest-beating and teeth-gnashing.

Slowly, America began to catch up. It was a heady time, fired by patriotic zeal and steeled by tragedies. At least four Soviet and three American astronauts died in the moon race. It took seven years and $150 billion in today’s dollars to get there. At 1:17 p.m. PDT on July 20, 1969, astronaut Neil Armstrong announced: “Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.” Several hours later, the spectral image of a man appeared on television slowly descending the ladder from the Apollo 11 lunar module.

The U.S. sent five more missions. But by the end of the Apollo program in 1972, the passion for the moon had faded. American television curtailed its coverage, more enamored of Watergate and other earthly concerns. Twelve people walked on the lunar surface. Space workers dispersed to other programs, budgets shrank and the moon once again was just a silver orb in the night sky, inspiration to poets and songwriters rather than engineers. The lunar landscape in Texas was bulldozed and forgotten. Until now. NASA is rebuilding it. Kosmo is in charge.

A few hundred miles above the moon, the European Space Agency’s SMART-1 maintains a lonely vigil — the only craft now in lunar orbit. From 1959 to 1976, the United States and the Soviet Union sent 60 missions to the moon. Then came a long hiatus. Missions resumed in 1990, first with the Japanese Hiten probe to test space technologies. It was followed by NASA's Clementine in 1994 and Lunar Prospector in 1998, which mapped the rocky surface. SMART-1, the European Space Agency’s first lunar mission, arrived in 2004 to test a new solar-powered ion drive and collect scientific data.

It will soon have plenty of company. The Japanese are readying Lunar-A and SELENE for launch on missions to survey the moon’s geology and topography. Then comes India’s $100-million Chandrayaan-1 mission in September 2007. The 1,150-pound craft shaped like a 5-foot cube will orbit the moon’s polar regions for two years and make a chemical map of the surface. China is preparing to launch a probe at about the same time to study the lunar environment from orbit. By 2012, China would start work on a spacecraft capable of bringing material back from the moon. A landing by taikonauts would occur after 2017.

China, India and Japan have ambitious strategic goals to develop advanced technologies for military and commercial uses. The countries are pouring money and people into the task. India’s space budget, for example, is $600 million a year, employing 20,000 people — about as many as NASA. Suffusing the enterprises is a sense that reaching the moon — ultimately with human explorers — will become a dividing line of this century, separating great powers from lesser ones. “If you can send humans into space, you can play with the big boys,” said NASA lunar expert Wendell Mendell.

The military and commercial potential of the moon has sparked tensions reminiscent of the Cold War — with space-faring nations eyeing one another’s advancing rocket technologies. “There’s a lot of politics among countries in East Asia that we saw in the West before,” said Jerry Sanders, a NASA lunar program manager. But there is also a sense of brotherhood among the moon researchers who sense their long-held dreams could soon become reality.

Ethanol could reduce fossil fuel need: study

Maggie Fox, Reuters

Ethanol — alcohol produced from corn or other plants — is more energy-efficient than some experts had realized and it is time to start developing it as an alternative to fossil fuels, researchers say. While some critics have said the push for ethanol is based on faulty science and mostly benefits the farm lobby, several reviews and commentaries published in the January 27, 2006 issue of the journal Science argue otherwise.

“We find that ethanol can, if it is made correctly, contribute significantly to both energy and environmental goals. However, the current way of producing ethanol with corn probably only meets energy goals,” said Alexander Farrell at the University of California at Berkeley.

Farrell and colleagues looked at six studies used to argue for and against the development of ethanol as an energy source.

“One of the main purposes is to explain why the studies found in the literature have such divergent results,” Farrell said in a telephone interview. “Some of the studies use what appear to be obsolete data or data whose quality cannot be verified.”

Currently, ethanol is not a significant source of fuel, but is blended into gasoline in some states. Environmentalists hope it could be developed as a cleaner source of fuel than oil or gas.

“The 3.4 billion gallons (15.5 billion liters) of ethanol blended into gasoline in 2004 amounted to about 2 percent of all gasoline sold by volume and 1.3 percent of its energy content,” the researchers wrote.

Farrell said it was possible to put ethanol in a car and run it, but making ethanol using current technology is expensive and contributes to pollution and greenhouse gases.

“(The environmental cost) comes entirely from making fertilizer, running the tractors over the farm and operating the biorefinery,” Farrell said.

Better methods now being investigated would use the woody parts of plants, using what is known as cellulosic technology to break down the tough fibers.

“Ethanol can be, if it’s made the right way with cellulosic technology, a really good fuel for the United States,” said Farrell, an assistant professor of energy and resources. “At the moment, cellulosic technology is just too expensive. If that changes — and the technology is developing rapidly — then we might see cellulosic technology enter the commercial market within five years.”

Writing in the same journal, scientists from Imperial College London, Georgia Tech and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee said they had teamed up to find ways to make a facility to do that. Their facility would make a range of fuels, foods, chemicals, animal feeds, materials, heat and power using what is known as biomass — a collection of renewable plant matter and biological material such as trees, grasses and agricultural crops.

“We”re looking at a future for biomass where we use the entire plant and produce a range of different materials from it,” Charlotte Williams of Imperial’s Department of Chemistry said in a statement.

"Before we freeze in the dark, we must prepare to make the transition from nonrenewable carbon resources to renewable bioresources," her team wrote.

An oil industry expert said it was possible. “Credible studies show that with plausible technology developments, biofuels could supply some 30 percent of global demand in an environmentally responsible manner without affecting food production,” Steven Koonin, chief scientist for BP in London, wrote in a commentary. “To realize that goal, so-called advanced biofuels must be developed from dedicated energy crops, separately and distinctly from food.”

New Mexico to build the world’s first “spaceport”
Laura Meckler, Wall Street Journal

New Mexico, long rumored to be a favored landing spot for UFOs and aliens, now wants to use taxpayer money to build a launching pad for space tourists. The state plans to spend some $200 million to build a “spaceport” in the desert, envisioning a day when regular people board commercial spaceships and take flight. A private venture called Virgin Galactic, which hopes to offer commercial space flight as soon as 2008, plans to base its operations at the new facility.

The deal brings together two ambitious public figures: Virgin Atlantic founder Richard Branson, known for his U.K.-based airline and his publicity stunts, and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, the former diplomat and congressman often mentioned as a Democratic presidential candidate. The two plan to make the announcement next Wednesday in Santa Fe.

“We see a whole new space industry, and we are at the ground floor of that industry,” said Rick Homans, chairman of the recently formed New Mexico Spaceport Authority and the secretary for economic development.

The spaceport will be built just west of the White Sands Missile Range, 45 miles northeast of Las Cruces. The area now has two ranch families, several roads and “a lot of open space,” said Mr. Homans.

Entrepreneurs and space buffs have pitched the notion of commercial space travel for many years. But last year’s successful flight of SpaceShipOne — the first privately built vehicle to reach space and the brainchild of aerospace engineer Burt Rutan — showed that the technology had advanced far enough to begin planning for the possibility of actual travel. SpaceShipOne proved that a space vehicle could take off like a plane, use rockets to penetrate the upper reaches of the atmosphere and then return and land on a conventional runway.

Still, a variety of regulatory and other hurdles remain before space travel can become a reality. It is unclear, for example, how operators would buy insurance to guard against accidents. And before taking passengers aloft, the Federal Aviation Administration must certify that the spacecraft is safe enough for passengers, crew and others on the ground.

Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic, said in an interview that his company hopes to begin testing in 2007 and hopes the first commercial flight will launch in late 2008 or early 2009. The company envisions two to three suborbital flights per day by 2011, taking passengers as high as 65 miles above Earth. The company is asking $200,000 per flight per person. Flights will last two hours and include five minutes of full weightlessness, with passengers tethered to their seats, he said. Approved passengers would need less than a week of training, he said.

Mr. Whitehorn said the project is much more than a high-priced thrill ride. “It’s very easy to see it as a toy or a plaything. It’s an investment in itself,” he said. He said 150 people have signed contracts and put down at least $20,000 toward their space trip. The company now has some $11 million in the bank, he said.

The $200 million investment will be used for the spaceport building itself as well as roads and utilities to support it, state officials said. The project depends on money from the federal government that has yet to be appropriated, and voters in counties near the site must approve a sales tax increase. If fully funded, the state envisions the facility operating much like an airport, with public money funding the structure and companies that fly out of it paying user fees.

Space passengers won’t pay taxes to New Mexico, but the state foresees profit from industries that locate near the spaceport to support the venture, and from tourists who visit as part of their space trip, Mr. Homans said. A number of other states, including California and Florida, have considered building spaceports.

Congress agreed last year that space travel shouldn’t be subject to the same rigorous safety standards applied to normal commercial aviation and directed the Federal Aviation Administration to write regulations governing the industry.

US releases proposed space tourism rules
Darlene Superville, Associated Press

Thinking of spending that next vacation on the moon or Mars or circling the Earth? Before liftoff, there’s a list of things the would-be “space flight participant” should know. More than 120 pages of proposed rules, released by the US government on Dec. 29, 2005, regulate the future of space tourism. This don’t-forget list touches on everything from passenger medical standards to preflight training for the crew.

Before taking a trip that literally is out of this world, companies would be required to inform the “space flight participant” — known in more earthly settings as simply a passenger — of the risks. Passengers also would be required to provide written consent before boarding a vehicle for takeoff.

Legislation signed a year ago by President Bush and designed to help the space industry flourish prohibits the Federal Aviation Administration from issuing safety regulations for passengers and crew for eight years, unless specific design features or operating practices cause a serious or fatal injury.

“This means that the FAA has to wait for harm to occur or almost occur before it can impose restrictions, even against foreseeable harm,” the proposal says. “Instead, Congress requires that space flight participants be informed of the risks.”

Physical exams for passengers are recommended, but will not be required, “unless a clear public safety need is identified,” the FAA says in the proposed regulations.

Passengers also would have to be trained on how to respond during emergencies, including the loss of cabin pressure, fire and smoke, as well as how to get out of the vehicle safely.

Pilots, meanwhile, must have an FAA pilot certificate and be able to show that they know how to operate the vehicle. Student or sport pilot licenses would not qualify.

Each member of the crew must have a medical certificate issued within a year of the flight, and a crew member's physical and mental state must be “sufficient to perform safety-related roles,” the rules say.

The FAA also would require each crew member to be trained to ensure that the vehicle will not harm the public, such as if it had to be abandoned during a flight emergency.

The legislation that Bush signed last year tasked the FAA with coming up with rules to regulate the commercial space flight industry, which has been slowly getting off the ground.

Laws governing private sector space endeavors, such as satellite launches, have existed for some time. But there previously has been no legal jurisdiction for regulating commercial human space flight.

In 2001, California businessman Dennis Tito became the world’s first space tourist when he rode a Russian Soyuz capsule to the international space station. Mark Shuttleworth, a South African Internet magnate, followed a year later on a similar trip, also paying $20 million for the ride.

Last year, in a feat considered a breakthrough for the future of private space flight, Burt Rutan won the $10 million Ansari X Prize by rocketing his SpaceShipOne to the edge of space twice in five days.

Two months ago, Greg Olsen, who made millions at a Princeton, N.J., technology company, became the world’s third paying space tourist, also on a jaunt to the international space station.

The 123-page proposal was published Dec. 29 in the Federal Register, the government's daily publication of rules and regulations, and will be subject to public comment for 60 days, through Feb. 27.

Final regulations are expected by June 23.

Gold rush in space?
Dr. David Whitehouse, BBC

The most detailed study of an asteroid shows that it contains precious metals worth at least 20 trillion dollars. The data were collected December 1998 by the Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous (Near) spacecraft which passed close to the asteroid Eros. It provided an unprecedented look at one of the mountains of rock that fly around the solar system. Over a thousand images of Eros were transmitted back to Earth that allowed scientists to estimate its size and mass. The results are startling.

Eros is believed to have been formed from the wreckage of a collision with a larger body. Its composition appears to be similar to the stony meteorites that frequently fall to Earth. That means Eros is a goldmine in space, as well as a platinum mine, a zinc mine and many more minerals besides. If Eros is typical of stony meteorites, then it contains about 3% metal. With the known abundance of metals in meteorites, even a very cautious estimate suggests 20,000 million tons of aluminum, along with similar amounts of gold, platinum and other rarer metals.

In the 2,900 cubic kms of Eros, there is more aluminum, gold, silver, zinc and other base and precious metals than have ever been excavated in history or, indeed, could ever be excavated from the upper layers of the Earth’s crust. That is just in one asteroid and not a very large one at that. There are thousands of asteroids out there.

How much is Eros worth? The trading price for gold in 1999 was about $250 per ounce, or about $9m per ton. It means the value of the gold in asteroid Eros was about one trillion dollars. That is just the gold. Platinum is even more expensive, $350 per oz. Work it out yourself. Since it contains a lot of rare elements and metals that are of use in the semiconductor industry for example, at today’s prices Eros is worth more than 20 trillion dollars.

Solar powered asteroid mining

It takes about 2,000 calories to boil a gram of iron so the equivalent of between 20 to 200 thousand megatons of TNT would be needed to start liberating substantial quantities of iron from the asteroid. But this energy could be obtained from the Sun. If you wanted to mine only a section of Eros at a time then a huge solar energy collector — a sheet only a few kilometres in size — could collect enough energy from sunlight to power a smelting plant on the surface of Eros. These are all “guesstimate” figures. But they serve to demonstrate just how plentiful are the resources of the Solar System, in terms of minerals, metals and energy, once we decide to go out and get them. It shows how mining one fairly small asteroid like Eros would revolutionize the availability of many raw materials on Earth. No one knows how much a mission to mine an asteroid would cost, but I am willing to bet it would be the best return on an investment since Leonardo da Vinci bought a sketch pad or Paul McCartney a guitar.

Researchers find peyote does not harm the brain
Randy Dotinqa, Wired

In the first study of its kind, researchers have found that peyote — for now, the only legal hallucinogenic drug in the United States — doesn’t rob regular users of brain power over time. While the findings don’t directly indicate anything about the safety of psychedelic drugs like LSD and mushrooms, they do suggest that at least one hallucinogen is OK to use for months or even years.

“We really weren’t able to find any (mental) deficits,” said Dr. John Halpern, associate director of substance abuse research at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, and co-author of the study, released in the Nov. 4, 2005 issue of the journal Biological Psychiatry. Hallucinogenic drugs have long fascinated researchers, who are now studying whether they hold the potential to treat mental illnesses like depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

But little is known about the long-term effects of hallucinogenic use. Part of the problem is that many users — such as LSD aficionados — take a variety of other drugs, so it’s hard to tease out the specific effects of psychedelic drugs. Enter peyote, currently the only hallucinogenic drug legally allowed for use outside research labs (although that may change). Compared with LSD and mushrooms, peyote is a bit obscure, with its use — at least legally — limited to the sacramental rites of the Native American Church, which has as many as 300,000 members. Many peyote users don't take other drugs, making them ideal subjects for hallucinogenic research.

Peyote comes from the crowns of a cactus that grows in northern Mexico and parts of Texas. Harvesters cut off the crown, dry it and sell it in “buttons,” Halpern said. Generally, users eat the buttons whole or grind them up into a powder that can be mixed into food or brewed into a tea. When enough peyote is eaten, users enter a hallucinogenic state thanks to its active ingredient, the chemical mescaline. Halpern and colleagues recruited three groups of Navajos — 61 members of the Native American Church who regularly ate peyote, 36 alcoholics who have been dry for at least two months, and 79 people who reported little or no use of alcohol or drugs. The researchers then gave mental-health and cognitive tests to the subjects. Only the alcoholics showed signs of brain problems.

On the psychological front, Native American peyote users were actually in better shape emotionally than those who didn’t use the drug. Why? For one thing, the church provides plenty of emotional support to members, said Dennis J. McKenna, senior lecturer at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Spirituality & Healing. For another, Native American users are careful about how they use peyote. “The context of the use is a really important thing,” McKenna said. “Most people using mushrooms or LSD in a recreational way don’t really have a context for this type of use, such as an emphasis on setting, a la psychedelic guru Timothy Leary.”

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