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Helping Terrorists Byte The Dust
Can biological or chemical terrorists be thwarted by microscopic
dust? Michael J. Sailor thinks so. He's the chemical and biochemical
expert at the University of California at San Diego who's been
working on silicon-technology solutions to terrorism. His team has
devised a "smart dust" that may one day be used to
detect chemical or biological agents. The special dust could be
sprayed
on walls or sprinkled into drinking water samples to hunt for such
lethal agents as sarin, smallpox, or anthrax.
His team begins with a wafer of silicon that's treated with
thin layers of film that can react to specific chemicals, bacteria,
or viruses. The wafers are then pulverized, using ultrasound, into
microscopic particles of dust. Each particle acts like a supermarket
bar code that, when hit by a special laser beam, can detect if it
has interacted with a toxic agent. "The idea is that you can
have something that's as small as a piece of dust with some
intelligence built into it so that it could be inconspicuously stuck
to paint on a wall or to the side of a truck or dispersed into a
cloud of gas to detect toxic chemicals or biological materials," Sailor
says. Each wafer, hence each particle, is treated to detect a specific
agent or class of agents. "To scan for thousands of agents
at once you would need 1,000 different particles," he explains.
Anthrax detection is made a bit harder because the nasty stuff is
encased in a spore coating. "It's like a little Christmas
package. You don't know what you have until you open it up." So
more sophisticated gear is needed that can crack open the spore,
extract its DNA, then amplify and analyze it.
In the lab, Sailor's team has been able to detect dust interactions
from 20 meters away; he's confident the technique will eventually
work .6 miles away. The particles remain intact in the open air for
a few weeks before they degrade to sand and a reapplication becomes
necessary. Thankfully, unlike the smart particles featured in the
bestselling thriller, Prey (see page 13), Sailor says his won't
have the ability to self-replicate.

LONDON—The "digital divide" is the gap that keeps
high technology beyond the reach of the world's poorest residents,
especially those in Third World countries. Now a British business
group is working to help bridge that virtual chasm by funneling thousands
of discarded corporate computers to schools in disadvantaged parts
of the globe. Within the next five years, more than 600 million PCs
will be junked by U.K. companies. Because companies have to upgrade
their technical equipment so often, most of these redundant machines
are in perfect working order. Yet many are broken up and buried in
landfills. So the Prince of Wales's International Business
Leaders Forum created an initiative called the Digital Partnership
to put some of those computers into the hands of children and teachers
in the developing world. "The digital divide is real," the
Partnership says. "Access to the Internet and computers does
not in itself solve poverty, but it provides an essential and transforming
means . . . to improve education, build vital skills, and contribute
to health, social, and enterprise development." Companies
ultimately benefit by helping to develop better-trained future
employees and
customers.
The first 4,000 computers have already been sent to schools in
South Africa, and by later this year, it's hoped that 170,000
computers will reach about 4,000 schools there. Workshops are being
established to help train locals to refurbish the machines, and teachers
are being shown how best to utilize the computers in classrooms.
The machines will run the Windows XP and Office XP suite of programs,
and Microsoft is waiving software fees for the schools. Locals will
be offered fee-based lessons, and it's hoped those fees will
help pay for maintaining the computers. The Digital Partnership wants
to initiate further pilot programs in Brazil, India, and possibly
Russia and Poland. It's a good effort that should help make
the digital divide a bit narrower.
Robots That Keep Going And Going
The potential for mobile robots is huge. They can help scope out
disaster areas too dangerous for humans to tread. They can be built
for domestic applications, like butlers. They can be useful in
manufacturing processes. But that potential won't be realized until robots
have a better power supply—one that lasts. Today's
state-of-the-art robots, powered by a combination of a lithium
battery and a DC electric
motor, poop out after only 15 to 25 minutes. Not a lot of commercial
appeal there.
But two researchers at Vanderbilt University are developing a rocket-powered
actuator for mobile robots. The device not only weighs much less
than batteries, but can repeatedly lift a 51 pound load five times
longer than the most efficient batteries or motors. It runs on
about 1 gallon of liquid hydrogen peroxide mixed with iridium, a precious
metal that acts as a catalyst. This is nearly pure hydrogen peroxide,
not the 3 percent stuff the drug store sells, notes Michael Goldfarb,
who is overseeing the project with Eric J. Barth. The pair are
co-directors
of Vanderbilt's Center for Intelligent Mechatronics. Eventually,
using that same amount of fuel, a human-size robot could be powered
for up to 8 hours, Barth says, which is more like a human work schedule,
minus the coffee and lunch breaks. Barth admits there's some
risk to having hydrogen peroxide in a pressurized tank, but no more
than having gasoline in a car tank. "That's something
that society has managed to deal with fairly safely," he says.
Moreover, he adds, batteries aren't exactly risk-free, either. "The
contents of the lead-acid battery in your car are pretty nasty,
but packaged correctly, they are not a major safety concern."
The Department of Defense funds the actuator research and eventually
wants to develop robotic exoskeletons to boost soldiers' strength.
Exoskeletons could help a soldier carry, say, a 160-pound load because
it would only feel like 10 or 20 pounds. So, in theory, tomorrow's
infantry soldier may be jet-propelled.

TOKYO—Most of the Japanese islands are under snow in winter,
and with the exception of ski resort owners, coping with and clearing
the white stuff has always been considered a costly nuisance. But
in recent years corporations and local governments have invested
in a blizzard of ways to harvest and exploit this bounty of winter
precipitation. Among the most aggressive in snow-harvest technology
is the village of Numata, population 4,000, on the northernmost island
of Hokkaido. Averaging almost 400 inches of snowfall a year, Numata
tops the list of Japan's snowiest localities. Six years ago
it began research into storing snow for use in refrigerated rice
warehouses during the summer months, when air temperatures reach
around 86 degrees. A producer of cut flowers such as larkspur, the
village has also tapped snow as a coolant for cultivating heat-sensitive
flowers during summer. Last year, exploring non-agricultural uses
for their winter resource, the village began using snow to air-condition
the library. "Usually snow is simply tossed on the sides of
the road," says Numazu village researcher Hiroki Itoh, who
has received inquiries about the system from as far away as Germany
and Scandinavia. "We're at the forefront of efforts to
harness it." A neighboring city, Bibai, has built an apartment
house cooled by snow.
Itoh acknowledges the start-up construction costs of snow-coolant
systems are high but mitigated by the innovation's two great
virtues: By storing snow nearby, the costs of melting and removal
are reduced. Just as important, this natural coolant, unlike "dirty" conventional
air conditioning systems, is environment-friendly.
Looking For Light In San Francisco
Fog is to San Francisco what snow is to Buffalo—a given. So
the city doesn't necessarily spring to mind as a leader in
solar power. But within five years, the Bay City wants to add 10
megawatts of solar power to its electricity grid—enough to
power, on average, 10,000 homes. Eventually, it wants solar power
to generate 5 percent of its peak power needs, about 40 megawatts.
The city issued $100 million in revenue bonds to pay for installation
of renewable energy sources—part of the fallout from 2001's
energy crisis that hit residents with brownouts, rolling blackouts,
and skyrocketing energy bills. So to determine where best to position
solar panels around Fog Town, local officials com-missioned the engineering
firm Augustyn + Company of Berkeley to erect 11 monitors around the
city that register and measure solar energy. The idea is to create
a fog map. Correction, says Jim Augustyn, "it's a solar
map."
The monitors should make the capturing of solar energy more efficient.
Mere observation gave engineers a pretty good notion where the
sunniest spots are, mainly around Bay Side, an area sheltered from
serious
fog. "The question is," according to Augustyn, "how
much better are the good spots?" He thinks San Francisco's
solar-power goals are reachable. "There's quite a bit
of potential in the city." The main surprise so far, he adds,
is that the foggiest parts of town still capture a fair amount of
solar power, far more than he would have reckoned. "The difference
between the best and worse areas is not as bad as I though it would
be," he admits. That's got to be encouraging news for
the city's energy-beleaguered and fogbound denizens.
A Fishy Way To Build Submarines
The idea behind submarines is stealth. Underwater warships and missiles
are harder for the enemy to detect. But because they're propeller-driven,
subs create a wake that can be spotted, especially by satellites.
So the Navy is keen to develop unmanned subs that create little or
no wake, and are also more maneuverable—propeller-driven watercraft
cannot exactly turn on a sand dollar. The best way to do that is
to mimic fish, which wiggle through the water and create nary a surface
ripple. Toward that goal, two professors of aerospace engineering
at Texas A&M University—Othon Rediniotis and Dimitris Lagoudas—are
leading a team that's devised a prototype sub that shimmies
through the water as smoothly as a hunting shark. To accomplish that
feat, they use Shape Memory Alloy wires made from nickel and titanium
that are filled with ethylene glycol (antifreeze). The wires are
then alternately heated and cooled, causing them to expand and shrink,
respectively. As the wires move, they move the sub's metal
skeleton, causing it to flex like a fish. The sub's skin is
a series of overlapping aluminum plates. The initial three-foot-long
prototype used battery power to heat the wires, but batteries take
up too much space. So the team is now working on using a fuel engine—probably
running on propane—to supply the heat. Rediniotis says full-production
subs could be as big as 20 feet in length. Possible military applications
include underwater de-mining, intelligence gathering, and ocean mapping.
The technology could potentially make smart torpedoes. There are
no plans at present to make manned versions. The big problem would
be "human comfort," Rediniotis says. Riding inside the
belly of a fish could give the passenger a unique sea sickness. Even
if the Navy doesn't want to use this technology, it may have
a future as an amusement park ride.

AUSTRALIA—The science and engineering disciplines in this
island nation have the highest profiles on campus—and get
the most grants. But now educators in the arts, social sciences,
and
humanities are demanding a larger share of the pie. Forty-five
deans from Australian and New Zealand universities met recently
to map
out a strategy.
" We're not asking specifically for more public and
private-sector funding—though that inevitably would flow from
what we are demanding, which is: more recognition of our importance
in broad-based universities," says Janet Greeley, executive
dean of arts, education, and social sciences at James Cook University
in North Queensland. "We don't question the importance
of science and engineering—but there's room for much
more collaboration with the arts. For instance, major scientific
and engineering breakthroughs often raise questions of social importance—ethics,
impact on society, cultural shifts, and the like. We have a role
to play."
In Europe and Canada, she says, there's been a focus on science—such
as biotechnology—but with a strong arts component. In Australia
and New Zealand, the arts tend to be overlooked in the rush to embrace
science and engineering. "We are trying to correct this," she
says.
The hugely successful export industry in selling education to students
from mostly Asian nations to Australia's north plays a large
part in the problem. "Many of these students demand science,
engineering, IT, and business. So, social sciences, the arts, and
philosophy increasingly have been overlooked," Greeley says.
However, she has observed that as countries become more prosperous—as
with, say, Singapore—"there's a shift again toward
the social sciences. There's growing interest there in political
science," she adds.
The deans plan to lobby the government in a more collective way. "Arts
faculties are doing exemplary research that may surprise people," says
Adam Shoemaker, dean of arts at Australian National University
in Canberra. Through lobbying and media campaigns, the deans will
highlight
the importance of the arts and social sciences in well-rounded
academic institutions.
Nanotechnology Conquers The World
Eleven years ago, two eminent scientists–Doyne Farmer and
Alletta Belin—warned that humans will eventually design and
create a new class of organisms that will be able to reproduce and
evolve. For all intents and purposes, these organisms "will
be ‘alive' under any reasonable definition of the word." They
cautioned that the impact of these critters on society and our planet
could be "larger than the industrial revolution, nuclear weapons,
or environmental pollution." Famed sci-fi writer Michael Crichton—the
physician-turned-author who's penned such blockbusters as Jurassic
Park and The Andromeda Strain—takes that concept and runs with
it, as usual, all the way to the bank. His latest megaseller, Prey,
is based on the chilling notion that when nanotechnology, biotechnology,
and computer science merge, the result could be technology run amok.
It's a cautionary tale of what could happen if cutting-edge
science is tainted by corporate greed and human hubris. His menace
in Prey are clouds—swarms actually—of microparticles
that are the odious offspring of the marriage of the three aforementioned
disciplines. And it's also a real page-turner that still
manages to be a basic primer on those technologies.
Nanotechnology is the craft of manufacturing machines at the nanoscale,
machines that are 1,000 times tinier than the diameter of a human
hair. And Prey's basic premise is this: Xymos Technology, a
Silicon Valley company with a fabrication plant in the no-man's-land
of the Nevada desert, is working on a Pentagon project to create
a swarm of nanoparticles that can be an eye in the sky. Each of the
particles is a teeny-weeny camera, but as they swarm together, they
network and form one larger flying camera that can't be shot
down by enemy firepower. The nanocameras communicate with one another
using agent-based algorithms, or distributed processing. As Crichton
points out, when birds flock or ants forage, it's the combined
intelligence of dozens or hundreds or thousands of small brains that
allow them to function, and to function without any leadership. This
so-called "emergent behavior" occurs even though it's
not programmed into any member of the group. Agent-based programming
is a hot field these days because the mimicking of successful biological
populations—like ants or termites—can have real-world
applications, like controlling big communications networks.
Prey explains that the problem with trying to build molecules from
scratch is time. So complex is one molecule, Crichton writes, that
it would take human manufacturers 3,000 trillion years to build
it. Not exactly feasible—even with lots of overtime. It's
expected the eventual solution will be nano-assemblers—super-miniature
machines that will build molecules. That's a solution, however,
that's probably decades away. Enter biotechnology. The book's
fictitious company solves the problem by using bacteria—in
this case, ubiquitous E. coli, which can feed on almost anything—to
build the molecules. Writes Crichton, ". . . there wasn't
much difference between creating a new bacteria to spit out, say,
insulin molecules, and creating a human-made, micromechanical assembly
to spit out new molecules."
Things go wrong for Prey's boffins when their swarm cameras
fall apart in wind. As the Pentagon loses interest, and funding begins
to dry up, Xymos executives and researchers—fearing for their
livelihood—panic and make some bad decisions. They code the
molecules to have memory, which means they can learn. They also
give them the ability to self-replicate and run on solar power.
They then
release them into the environment to let them solve the wind problem
on their own. Which they do. Trouble is, they continue to evolve.
By the hour. And they evolve into something scary and deadly.
How feasible is Crichton's nano-thriller? Well, clearly scientists
have already warned about the need to keep strict controls on these
technologies. And Crichton, in an introduction to Prey, certainly
makes clear his own concerns. Still, for the sake of having a story
to tell, Crichton has his scientists—motivated by cutthroat
corporate realpolitik—give their nanobugs a combination of
powers they don't really need. Would real scientists act so
lamely? That's anybody's guess, but as we've
seen in the last few years, corporate greed can surely seduce smart
people
into stupidity.

Engineer Leads The Columbia Probe
- By Thomas K. Grose
The videotape footage of the white contrail streaking
across the blue sky was aired repeatedly by TV stations the morning
of February 1. It confirmed the obvious: The space shuttle Columbia
had disintegrated in the upper reaches of our atmosphere and
plummeted to Earth. But what caused the accident, which killed all
seven crew
members? An independent panel has been selected to find out.
It's
headed by retired Admiral Harold W. Gehman Jr., a trained engineer
who also led the probe into the October 2000 terrorist attack
on the USS Cole in Yemen.
Gehman, 60, who was the Navy's second-highest
ranking officer when he retired a few months before the Cole attack,
received his undergraduate degree in industrial engineering from
Penn State in 1965. He also once headed the U.S. Joint Forces Command,
which develops concepts to ensure that the various branches of the
military work effectively as a team. That unit's commanders
are considered innovative thinkers, says retired Adm. Kendell Pease,
who has known Gehman since 1985. "They're real visionaries." Gehman's
duties there included evaluating new technologies, training methods,
and hardware, Pease adds. "He's very comfortable around
technology." NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe says Gehman
is "well-versed in understanding exactly how to look at the
forensics in these cases and coming up with the causal effects of
what could occur." Pease agrees, saying that Gehman knows
how to stick to relevant facts and not be swayed by emotion.
His engineering background will serve him well in
this investigation. "An engineer learns how to get his arms
around a problem; what's important and what's not," says
Graham Candler, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University
of Minnesota. The shuttle is a very complex machine, he says, but
Gehman "need only understand a piece of it to figure out what
went wrong." Eugene E. Covert, a professor emeritus of aerospace
engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was
a member of the team that investigated the explosion of the Challenger
space shuttle 17 years ago, says a well-trained engineer knows how
to "avoid jumping to conclusions…If you form a premature
hypothesis, you tend to look for evidence to support it and you might
overlook something important." Donna Shirley, a professor of
aerospace engineering at the University of Oklahoma, who worked 32
years at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says the panel will
likely face mountains of contradictory evidence, but engineers know
how "to sort out conflicting ideas."
Typically, Covert says, accident investigators list
all the things that could go wrong and trace them forward, "like
a decision tree." They will also work backward from the explosion,
looking at the things that could have caused it. Hopefully, the
processes converge on plausible explanations that can be tested.
Such inquiries
also sift through tons of data and whatever physical evidence that's
collected. Often, investigations into airplane crashes reconstruct
the demolished aircraft. "When you put it back together,
if you find a big hole, well, that tells you something," Shirley
explains. What is the most helpful is finding those pieces that
first fell from the doomed spacecraft, because they can pinpoint
where
the trouble originated.
Faulty sealers and O-rings were blamed in
the Challenger disaster, and that theory is universally accepted.
But Candler
says the O-rings were an "obvious smoking gun," and this accident
may prove harder to solve. But Gehman vows "to get it right.
The astronauts who will fly in future orbiter missions need to know
we have done everything we possibly can to come to the bottom of
this and fix it."
Thomas K. Grose is a freelance writer baed in
Washington, D.C.
He can be reached at tgrose@asee.org.
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