None whatsoever, the gravitational balance between the Earth and the Moon is not that finely balanced. It could take a lot more abuse than we'll ever be capable of.
You can practically smell the plea for more research money can't you?
I think the full case goes:
'Our new virus could help society meet its energy needs, clean up pollution, bring about World peace, reunite the cast of 'Friends', immunise the World's population against the threat of Jennifer Lopez movies and produce a Starbucks espresso that tastes faintly of coffee.'
I thought you said Hydrogen was hard to come by on the moon? Either its scarce or it makes up a large percentage of the "atmosphere" (along with helium). It can't be both.
According to NASA, the total mass of the lunar atmosphere is around 25 000 kilograms - less mass than a railroad car. Therefore hydrogen is scarce.
How does this affect the theories about the moon being formed after Earth collided with some ancient planetoid? Or am I way behind on the current theories about the moon?
It doesn't. Any ice on the Moon would be the result of a cometary impact in the recent (geologically speaking) past.
That's one theory. Another theory states that the moon is a leftover chunk of a 10th planet that used to exist between Mars and Jupiter. That planet was destroyed in some major event, and its remains became the asteroid belt as well as several moons.
Sorry disproved long ago, the tidal influences of Mars and Jupiter prevent a large body forming in the asteroid belt. There was never a large body in that area of space. Besides, an explosion would not produce the relatively neat distribution of the modern asteroid field.
The impact theory explains the anomalous composition of the Moon (high amounts of refractory minerals, low amounts of volatiles - indicating high temperature formation, low amounts of heavy metals and isotopic composition very similar to Earth). No known asteroidal meteoric material resembles lunar rock.
Back on topic, any settlement on the moon would do best to take various materials containing hydrogen and oxygen, and crack them. Once cracked, the raw hydrogen and oxygen particles could be combined to make water.
That would be water then?
Hydrogen is pretty easy to come by.
Not on the Moon - there is a little adsorbed on to the lunar surface, but otherwise zip.
A ram scoop mounted on some form of runabout may be able to collect quite a bit.
I think you're talking about a Bussard ramjet which is a: well beyond our current technological level, because b: it needs to move at a substantial fraction of the speed of light to become effective.
I'm not sure what materials hold oxygen, but I do know that rocks tend to absorb it,
Rocks contain oxygen in the form of silicates and oxides. The Moon is not short of oxygen. But why would you want to 'crack' them if you've just brought water which contains plenty of oxygen?
that the moon does have an atmosphere a few feet thick
The Moon has an atmosphere only in the sense that it temporarily retains a cloud of vapour, the Moon's escape velocity is too low to permanently retain gases. The lunar atmosphere does not resemble that of Earth - for a start its pressure is about 1 millionth that on the surface of Earth. Instead it is made of hydrogen and helium from the Solar Wind, it also contains sodium, potassium and argon - presumably either blasted off of the lunar surface or produced by outgassing from within the Moon itself.
If they could find a heavy element with a realistic life-span of about 3 years (the average life of a computer), then we'd have a winner on our hands.
I assume you're thinking about the same technology used by NASA to power deep space craft using Radioisotope Thermal Generators (RTGs)? They work by having pelletised plutonium 238 dioxide. Plutonium generates a LOT of heat as it decays (a piece of plutonium is noticeably warm). The heat is used to drive thermocouples (one side hot, one cold = electricity).
But thermocouples are extremely inefficient (say 2%) and there is an enormous amount of heat wasted. An isotope with a half-life such as that you suggest would generate even more heat per gram than plutonium.
Partly true (lunar soil contains NO water - there MAY be some at the lunar South Pole but nowhere else)
But that wasn't the question. All of those businesses act to reduce the cost of space exploration rather than contribute new wealth.
And even then I'm somewhat dubious about their effect - keeping people alive on the Moon is going to be expensive even if you can supply their day to day needs from indigenous materials.
Hey, isn't Baldrick (or rather the actor) actually into politics in britain?
Yes he is.
Tony Robinson is a member of the Labour Party and a Blair loyalist on the National Executive Council of the Party. (The NEC provides guidance to Labour ministers on areas of policy and the election manifesto).
So, I'm not a scientist, but what are the chances that the moon habours a great deal of precious metals or minerals? I'm certain there's going to be a lot of abundant metals like iron etc but what about the stuff that could add incentive to the high cost of going to the moon and bringing the stuff back? If there was enough of it you could get some commerical interest from LUNAR PROSPECTORS.
Essentially zip. Even if there were huge deposits of anything interesting (there are some higher levels of rare earth elements in the lunar soil), the costs of getting there and back far exceed the costs of mining reserves back on Earth.
Some people have postulated that since the Moon has no atmosphere, the very fine regolith has been soaking up the solar wind for billenia. Part of the solar wind is helium 3 (light(er) helium) which is essentially absent from Earth. He3 *might* be useful in the future if we ever get fusion working and commercially viable.
The difference being that this is not college, so why reinvent the wheel?
Because there aren't any more 'wheels' left - NASA left them to rust in Texas and Florida. If the Chinese want to go to the Moon, they have to reinvent the technology first.
Getting to the moon is hardly difficult with modern technology: their spacecraft is basically an updated Soyuz, and the Commies flew an unmanned Soyuz around the moon in the 60s in preparation for their lunar landing plans. If I remember correctly, that's why Apollo 8 flew round the moon and Apollo 9 tested the LEM in Earth orbit: NASA wanted to make sure they beat the Commies with the first manned flight.
It's a little more complex, the Soviet Union had two manned missions running simultaneously. There was the enormously complex N1 project which was very similar to Apollo. That was running late because the complicated N1 rocket was a nightmare to build and debug. In the event it was launched four times and failed four times.
Realising that the Soviet Union was going to lose the race to Apollo, the Soviets started a programme called (IIRC) 7KL1 which would use a Soyuz-like craft to loop around the Moon and return to Earth. It was planned that it would carry one or two cosmonauts, but the test launches (confusingly given the name 'Zond') revealed a series of problems with the craft.
A manned mission was planned for 1968 but the Proton booster was proving to be too temperamental to risk a manned flight.
Meanwhile the US had been scared by the sheer number of Soviet launches clearly aimed at the Moon. It also announced the accelerated Apollo 8 schedule only days after the Politburo had given its approval for a manned Soviet lunar orbiter - so it looks like the US had good intelligence of the Soviet space programme.
The Americans became even more scared when Jodrell Bank intercepted human voices coming from the Zond 5 craft which was launched in the summer of 1968. Eventually it was found that the Soviets were simply checking that they could receive intelligible speech from such a distance - they had put a tape recorder into the spacecraft.
Fortunately for them they hadn't put a man onboard; Zond 5 pulled 20G during re-entry and landed in the Indian Ocean rather than Kazakhstan. The animals on-board were recovered safely and Zond 5 became the first craft to be recovered after a lunar mission.
can somebody tell me how this is incremental? here were the steps listed in order: 1)orbiting the Moon 2)docking spacecraft with one another in lunar orbit 3)and returning moon rock samples to Earth. they just got into space and they already want to tackle the moon? and they have more than one spacecraft to dock in lunar orbit? IMO, that's like me saying i'm going to create an operating system, gain 80% of the market, and run gates out of the OS business... but it's all going to happen in increments...
These are unmanned spacecraft. The Chinese have a long history of unmanned spacecraft and are now partners with ESA in a number of scientific missions.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that the Chinese have paid for Russian expertise with the Luna missions of the 1960s and 70s. With the exception of lunar docking each of these was accomplished by the Soviet Union. Luna 10 (first lunar orbiter April 1966) and Luna 16 (first automated sample return September 1970). Luna 15 raced Apollo 11 to the Moon in an attempt to return the first surface samples. It crashed on to the Moon 21st July 1969.
And don't forget that the Soviet Union sent a number of Zond capsules around the Moon before Apollo 8 as a prelude to a manned orbiter mission. They were canned after the Proton booster developed problems on the launch pad. Doubtless that expertise is heading towards China.
So I always assume that London is going to continue to be the leader in the transition to a world devoid of privacy. (And the USA may be right behind, the way things are going. Or maybe Australia.)
Nope, we're ahead again. The government has just decided that all Britons are going to have to have biometric ID cards linked to a centralised government database. All in a country that has no written constitution, essentially no freedom of information, detention without trial, the acceptance of evidence gained under torture in criminal trials, where the police have repeatedly been found to be institutionally racist and with a government who thinks that George Bush is the best thing to come out of Texas since crude oil.
Apparently we need Big Brother surveillance because: (and I quote) 'In this country we have a proud tradition of being a free and open society. Freedoms are not only embedded in our democracy, but in the very way we live our lives.'
So do we have the freedom to vote against this proposal? - errr no.
But to be fair to Blunkett and friends, the government did hold a consultation exercise. Okay they tried not to tell anyone about it, but they did have one. 66% of the people who responded voted against ID cards - which was a bit of a problem for a government hell-bent on introducing them (despite not having made up its mind) So the Home Office excluded all those people who had sent in responses via groups such as Liberty. Et voila! 66% against becomes 60% in favour!
Honestly, I don't know why the US is bothering with electronic voting, a few British statisticians will get you the results you want.
You can read the whole Orwellian document here (PDF document).
It's a good start, but for real security we need a global system of archives.
At the moment, (AFAIK) Google's cache is still held only in the US. If a US administration wanted google closed down - it could do it, and with it would go the archive.
Distribute the archive and that becomes much harder - although I'd rule out the UK, our government is even more protective of Bush's reputation than the GOP.
Apollo 18 through 20 had been approved - the boosters were built, but in 1970 Congress cut NASA's budget for 1971 and they couldn't afford to fly them. The Vietnam war was destroying the American budget, the dollar was in trouble and inflation was rising. The US government needed to balance the books - taking an axe to the space programme was an easy choice. It was at this time that the original space station and the Mars manned missions were also canned.
Apollo 18 would have explored Schroter's Valley in February 1972, Apollo 19 would have gone to Hyginus Rille in July 1972 and Apollo 20 to Copernicus Crater in December 1972.
The three remaining Saturn Vs ended up as follows:
1 flew Skylab into orbit.
2 ended up at Kennedy Space Center, Florida.
3 is now at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
There is a fourth Saturn V at Marshall Space Center in Huntsville, Alabama, but this was for testing and was not intended to have flown.
After the cancellation of the missions, NASA was forced by budgetary constraints to use the Shuttle as its sole man-rated launch vehicle. Of course no one actually said what the Shuttle was going to do up there - but NASA grabbed the money and was thankful.
Since the Space Shuttle can barely crawl into low Earth orbit there was simply no way of going to the Moon.
And there wasn't even a prospect of using the Soviet N1 rocket which was cancelled in 1976.
Could all this activity be caused by a colission of some object into the sun? I'm just wondering if the sun got pounded by some asteroids a few weeks ago and they screwed up the balance of the surface, causing geyser-like effects.
Highly unlikely. The heat from the Sun would vaporise anything long before impact.
Flares (including this one) tend to be linked with sunspots which are relatively cool (emphasis on the relatively there) areas of the Sun. The Sun is made of plasma - super-hot electrically-charged particles. The plasma convects, transferring energy to the surface of the Sun. As the plasma moves it creates enormous magnetic fields. Normally these are confined within the body of the Sun, but occasionally, the magnetic flux extends beyond the surface of the Sun as an enormous loop. At each point where the line emerges and re-enters the Sun are a group of sunspots.
Hot plasma streams along the line of flux, it usually confined to the magnetic flux, but occasionally it will break away as a so-called prominence.
Flares are relatively common, but their cause is not yet understood (if any solar activity experts are hanging around - please feel free to step in right about now:)). From memory, the most well-regarded theory is that ever-increasing amounts of energy is stored in the magnetic fields of the sun spot. As the field becomes twisted and tangled, the energy continues to build until a point when the magnetic field snaps back into a less-tangled state. At that point an enormous amount of energy and plasma are blasted into space in a very short period of time.
Plot summary: two kid brothers starve to death in post-nuke Japan.
Missed that one. But if you want to watch movies that make you cry and you like anime you should see Jin Roh (Japanese language only).
Very depressing - by the same studio as Ghost in the Shell. Quite, quite astonishingly beautifully drawn and acted. But make sure you listen to the Japanese soundtrack with subtitles - the lead actress is fantastic.
The vast number of pre-election polls and exit-polls published in connection with almost any election now provides some sort of idea of how the election will go even before all the votes are counted. Imagine, if you will, a situation in which pre-election polls and exit polls have indicated virtually a dead heat: getting rid of oodles of ballots would be self-defeating. It would simply be too blatant.
Exit polls have been notoriously unreliable in the past. The most famous example in Britain was the 1992 General Election. It was widely expected that the Conservatives would loose power to Labour or that we would end up with the greatest rarity of all - a hung Parliament. The exit polls published as soon as the polls closed at 22:00 said the same thing. An exciting night was in store and there was a prospect of the Liberal Democrats holding the balance of power, with the reforming John Smith at the head of Labour things looked grim for John Major...
In the event, the actual results showed that the Conservatives took 41.93% of the vote (and 336 seats), Labour got 34.39% of the vote (and 271 seats). A staggering 7% difference between the opinion polls and the actual result (most polls had been +/- 2%).
The pollsters eventually came to the conclusion that people were too ashamed to admit they voted Conservative, but liked the promised of tax cuts which were part of their 1992 manifesto. So we ended up with a squalid government that limped on for 5 years, buggered the economy, screwed the railways and handed the country to Tony Blair on a platter. All in all, not a good result.
Oh I agree, a virus that kills all of its host is an evolutionary dead end - but since evolution is blind, that doesn't preclude it happening.
Smallpox (from memory) kills 30% of people infected which means that it can spread and cause utter devastation - the repeated smallpox epidemics of history shows that. The 1918-19 Spanish 'flu overall killed about 4% of people, but it had widely different mortality rates - in some parts of India it killed almost 1 in 2 of those who contracted it, and there are reports from the Canadian north of entire settlements being wiped out.
But then I think we're being terribly limited just thinking about viruses - what about bacteria? Look at the panic of the anthrax mailer in the US (an investigation that went very quiet after all the evidence pointed to a US military source) or the outbreak of foot and mouth here in the UK. And we're still not entirely sure what caused the massive outbreaks of the Black Death in the Middle Ages. it was probably some horrible variant of bubonic plague, but there is an outside chance it was something that came, killed and then retreated into the shadows.
But then again, the UK may have found the perfect biological weapon with BSE (mad cow disease); we've no idea how much of the population has ingested prions and how many will die terrible deaths over the next twenty years.
All we need is a way of putting a holstein on the top of an ICBM:)
Humans can catch influenza from a range of species including pigs, chickens, ducks and ferrets. The virus can be asymptomatic in some species but devastating when it crosses to another. I'm not sure if chimps can catch 'flu, but gorillas can.
'Flu is ancient and we *think* the Greeks may have suffered from it (we obviously can't tell for sure), but there is no way of knowing what strain they suffered from.
Pay attention here comes the science bit.
'Flu is divided into 3 types, A, B and C. C need not concern us as it is not very important. Type A 'flu is the most dangerous and is sub-classified.
The surface of the flu virus is covered with proteins, the two most important are hemagglutinin and neuraminidase. Hemagglutinin comes in three forms (H1, H2 and H3), neuraminidase (N1 and N2) and 'flu viruses are classified by the combination of H and N, (so the 1918 virus is classified as H1N1, 1957 (Asian 'Flu) H2N2 and so on).
The 'flu virus is subject to mutation (viruses tend to have high mutation rates), the genes get shuffled around and the arrangement of proteins on the surface continues to alter. So a H1N1 virus will continue to change through time (but remain in the same classification) - this is called 'antigenic drift'. As the virus mutates, it will cause new outbreaks of 'flu, but these tend to be limited in scope. (But the change means that the 'flu vaccine must change each year to combat the new varieties).
The more dangerous process is 'antigenic shift' when the virus undergoes a massive mutation. This is rarer but the cause of most pandemics. It happens irregularly and is impossible to predict. The reason is very interesting, 'flu circulates in the wild in a variety of species including pigs, whales, ferrets, ducks and pigeons. It is known that all forms of 'flu can live inside birds without expressing symptoms - birds are called the reservoir for the virus.
Any creature that is simultaneously carrying two or more varieties of the virus (although it may not show any symptoms) can permit 'resortment' of the viruses. Essentially the two viruses start swapping H and N arrangements and coming up with new varieties of 'flu. A new variation immediately renders immunisation impotent.
Naturally, new viruses require new vaccines - which is why doctors offer 'flu shots each winter. The give you a cocktail of vaccines against the virus they expect to be most prevalent in the coming winter. There is a world-wide system of alerting health authorities to new forms of 'flu - allowing labs to culture the virus and prepare a vaccine before the virus can go on the rampage. Unfortunately the system is particularly weak in China where a lot of 'flu forms originate.
Why? Well current thinking is that traditionally Chinese peasants have kept pigs close to the house (pigs can harbour the virus) and keep ducks (who also hold the virus) for food. The pigs come into contact with duck droppings and pick up the virus. The virus mutates in the pig and then the virus travels through to humans. Human waste is used to fertilise fields - where the ducks live and they pick up viruses there. Not to mention exotic 'flu variants brought in by other birds nesting and feeding in the fields.
Hence the huge scare in Hong Kong in 1997 when it was found that chickens were carrying a new 'flu variant. People who had been in contact with chickens were found to have picked up the virus, some died. There has also been a recent outbreak of 'flu in Hong Kong and China - again linked to chickens.
The drugs that claim to work against 'flu are so-called neuraminidase inhibitors (the most popular is sold as Relenza in the UK). These work by binding on to the neuraminidase molecule and prevent it from latching on to human cells, which means it can't replicate. They have mixed effects, but do seem to limit the spread of the illness and reduce the duration of the illness. The downside is that they need to be taken BEFORE the 'flu starts to replicate - at a time when there are no symptoms. The
I don't know what your definition of everyone, but the only countries that have biological weapons are USA and Russia (some claim Isreal but I'm not so sure).
The current list of countries that are believed to have the capability of manufacturing biological weapons is:
Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Egypt, India, Iran, Israel, Laos, Libya, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Syria, Taiwan, Ukraine, USA.
No one accelerated their program and others didn't even undertake them. On top of being too costly, it is too dangerous.
And yes, the US and the USSR both expanded their biological weapons programmes after the British abandoned the concept. The USSR (at least) continued to develop biological weapons in contravention of international treaties.
I just upgraded the hard drive in my wife's "Grape" iMac, partially in preparation for Panther (and partially so she can continue ripping her CD collection w/o running out of space).
Have you noticed any change in performance? There's an elderly iMac here that could do with a speed boost and I've heard that Panther feels zippier than 10.2.
Yes, by developing these killer diseases ourselves, we increase the chances that we'll have a defense against the biological weapons which someone else uses against us.
And do you think other countries will not see this as legitimising such research? Every one of them can use the same excuse of researching vaccines to produce who-knows-what.
Even if the US chooses not to make this into a weapon (which will be a first, so far every biological agent developed by the US has been weaponised at one stage or another), other countries will.
I really recommend Jeremy Paxman and Robert Harris' 'A Higher Form of Killing' to anyone who thinks that research into biological and chemical weapons does not lead to new weapons. Time and time again, the big powers have claimed that they are investigating defensive measures whilst secretly working on offensive weapons.
History does not give us much hope, and the present White House - with its opposition to tighter biological and chemical weapons treaties, its refusal to sign a nuclear test treaty and its desire for new nuclear weapons, makes me even less hopeful.
This is just one tack. If North Korea, Iran, etc. just wanted to embarrass the crap out of the U.S., they could stop (or never start... whatever) their programs and retort: "We have put down our weapons. Now put down yours."
One of the few times this has happened in the past was when the British abandoned biological and chemical weapons in the 1950s. What happened? Everyone else carried on or accelerated their programmes.
And I seem to recall that the rest of the World getting together to stop nuclear testing hasn't persuaded the American government to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
Slashdot Mirror
Best wishes,
Mike.
I think the full case goes:
'Our new virus could help society meet its energy needs, clean up pollution, bring about World peace, reunite the cast of 'Friends', immunise the World's population against the threat of Jennifer Lopez movies and produce a Starbucks espresso that tastes faintly of coffee.'
Best wishes,
Mike.
According to NASA, the total mass of the lunar atmosphere is around 25 000 kilograms - less mass than a railroad car. Therefore hydrogen is scarce.
Best wishes,
Mike.
It doesn't. Any ice on the Moon would be the result of a cometary impact in the recent (geologically speaking) past.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Sorry disproved long ago, the tidal influences of Mars and Jupiter prevent a large body forming in the asteroid belt. There was never a large body in that area of space. Besides, an explosion would not produce the relatively neat distribution of the modern asteroid field.
The impact theory explains the anomalous composition of the Moon (high amounts of refractory minerals, low amounts of volatiles - indicating high temperature formation, low amounts of heavy metals and isotopic composition very similar to Earth). No known asteroidal meteoric material resembles lunar rock.
Back on topic, any settlement on the moon would do best to take various materials containing hydrogen and oxygen, and crack them. Once cracked, the raw hydrogen and oxygen particles could be combined to make water.
That would be water then?
Hydrogen is pretty easy to come by.
Not on the Moon - there is a little adsorbed on to the lunar surface, but otherwise zip.
A ram scoop mounted on some form of runabout may be able to collect quite a bit.
I think you're talking about a Bussard ramjet which is a: well beyond our current technological level, because b: it needs to move at a substantial fraction of the speed of light to become effective.
I'm not sure what materials hold oxygen, but I do know that rocks tend to absorb it,
Rocks contain oxygen in the form of silicates and oxides. The Moon is not short of oxygen. But why would you want to 'crack' them if you've just brought water which contains plenty of oxygen?
that the moon does have an atmosphere a few feet thick
The Moon has an atmosphere only in the sense that it temporarily retains a cloud of vapour, the Moon's escape velocity is too low to permanently retain gases. The lunar atmosphere does not resemble that of Earth - for a start its pressure is about 1 millionth that on the surface of Earth. Instead it is made of hydrogen and helium from the Solar Wind, it also contains sodium, potassium and argon - presumably either blasted off of the lunar surface or produced by outgassing from within the Moon itself.
Best wishes,
Mike.
I assume you're thinking about the same technology used by NASA to power deep space craft using Radioisotope Thermal Generators (RTGs)? They work by having pelletised plutonium 238 dioxide. Plutonium generates a LOT of heat as it decays (a piece of plutonium is noticeably warm). The heat is used to drive thermocouples (one side hot, one cold = electricity).
But thermocouples are extremely inefficient (say 2%) and there is an enormous amount of heat wasted. An isotope with a half-life such as that you suggest would generate even more heat per gram than plutonium.
Best wishes,
Mike.
But that wasn't the question. All of those businesses act to reduce the cost of space exploration rather than contribute new wealth.
And even then I'm somewhat dubious about their effect - keeping people alive on the Moon is going to be expensive even if you can supply their day to day needs from indigenous materials.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Yes he is.
Tony Robinson is a member of the Labour Party and a Blair loyalist on the National Executive Council of the Party. (The NEC provides guidance to Labour ministers on areas of policy and the election manifesto).
Best wishes,
Mike.
Essentially zip. Even if there were huge deposits of anything interesting (there are some higher levels of rare earth elements in the lunar soil), the costs of getting there and back far exceed the costs of mining reserves back on Earth.
Some people have postulated that since the Moon has no atmosphere, the very fine regolith has been soaking up the solar wind for billenia. Part of the solar wind is helium 3 (light(er) helium) which is essentially absent from Earth. He3 *might* be useful in the future if we ever get fusion working and commercially viable.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Because there aren't any more 'wheels' left - NASA left them to rust in Texas and Florida. If the Chinese want to go to the Moon, they have to reinvent the technology first.
Best wishes,
Mike.
It's a little more complex, the Soviet Union had two manned missions running simultaneously. There was the enormously complex N1 project which was very similar to Apollo. That was running late because the complicated N1 rocket was a nightmare to build and debug. In the event it was launched four times and failed four times.
Realising that the Soviet Union was going to lose the race to Apollo, the Soviets started a programme called (IIRC) 7KL1 which would use a Soyuz-like craft to loop around the Moon and return to Earth. It was planned that it would carry one or two cosmonauts, but the test launches (confusingly given the name 'Zond') revealed a series of problems with the craft.
A manned mission was planned for 1968 but the Proton booster was proving to be too temperamental to risk a manned flight.
Meanwhile the US had been scared by the sheer number of Soviet launches clearly aimed at the Moon. It also announced the accelerated Apollo 8 schedule only days after the Politburo had given its approval for a manned Soviet lunar orbiter - so it looks like the US had good intelligence of the Soviet space programme.
The Americans became even more scared when Jodrell Bank intercepted human voices coming from the Zond 5 craft which was launched in the summer of 1968. Eventually it was found that the Soviets were simply checking that they could receive intelligible speech from such a distance - they had put a tape recorder into the spacecraft.
Fortunately for them they hadn't put a man onboard; Zond 5 pulled 20G during re-entry and landed in the Indian Ocean rather than Kazakhstan. The animals on-board were recovered safely and Zond 5 became the first craft to be recovered after a lunar mission.
Best wishes,
Mike.
These are unmanned spacecraft. The Chinese have a long history of unmanned spacecraft and are now partners with ESA in a number of scientific missions.
I wouldn't be surprised to find that the Chinese have paid for Russian expertise with the Luna missions of the 1960s and 70s. With the exception of lunar docking each of these was accomplished by the Soviet Union. Luna 10 (first lunar orbiter April 1966) and Luna 16 (first automated sample return September 1970). Luna 15 raced Apollo 11 to the Moon in an attempt to return the first surface samples. It crashed on to the Moon 21st July 1969.
And don't forget that the Soviet Union sent a number of Zond capsules around the Moon before Apollo 8 as a prelude to a manned orbiter mission. They were canned after the Proton booster developed problems on the launch pad. Doubtless that expertise is heading towards China.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Nope, we're ahead again. The government has just decided that all Britons are going to have to have biometric ID cards linked to a centralised government database. All in a country that has no written constitution, essentially no freedom of information, detention without trial, the acceptance of evidence gained under torture in criminal trials, where the police have repeatedly been found to be institutionally racist and with a government who thinks that George Bush is the best thing to come out of Texas since crude oil.
Apparently we need Big Brother surveillance because: (and I quote) 'In this country we have a proud tradition of being a free and open society. Freedoms are not only embedded in our democracy, but in the very way we live our lives.'
So do we have the freedom to vote against this proposal? - errr no.
But to be fair to Blunkett and friends, the government did hold a consultation exercise. Okay they tried not to tell anyone about it, but they did have one. 66% of the people who responded voted against ID cards - which was a bit of a problem for a government hell-bent on introducing them (despite not having made up its mind) So the Home Office excluded all those people who had sent in responses via groups such as Liberty. Et voila! 66% against becomes 60% in favour!
Honestly, I don't know why the US is bothering with electronic voting, a few British statisticians will get you the results you want.
You can read the whole Orwellian document here (PDF document).
Best wishes,
Mike.
At the moment, (AFAIK) Google's cache is still held only in the US. If a US administration wanted google closed down - it could do it, and with it would go the archive.
Distribute the archive and that becomes much harder - although I'd rule out the UK, our government is even more protective of Bush's reputation than the GOP.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Apollo 18 through 20 had been approved - the boosters were built, but in 1970 Congress cut NASA's budget for 1971 and they couldn't afford to fly them. The Vietnam war was destroying the American budget, the dollar was in trouble and inflation was rising. The US government needed to balance the books - taking an axe to the space programme was an easy choice. It was at this time that the original space station and the Mars manned missions were also canned.
Apollo 18 would have explored Schroter's Valley in February 1972, Apollo 19 would have gone to Hyginus Rille in July 1972 and Apollo 20 to Copernicus Crater in December 1972.
The three remaining Saturn Vs ended up as follows:
There is a fourth Saturn V at Marshall Space Center in Huntsville, Alabama, but this was for testing and was not intended to have flown.
After the cancellation of the missions, NASA was forced by budgetary constraints to use the Shuttle as its sole man-rated launch vehicle. Of course no one actually said what the Shuttle was going to do up there - but NASA grabbed the money and was thankful.
Since the Space Shuttle can barely crawl into low Earth orbit there was simply no way of going to the Moon.
And there wasn't even a prospect of using the Soviet N1 rocket which was cancelled in 1976.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Highly unlikely. The heat from the Sun would vaporise anything long before impact.
Flares (including this one) tend to be linked with sunspots which are relatively cool (emphasis on the relatively there) areas of the Sun. The Sun is made of plasma - super-hot electrically-charged particles. The plasma convects, transferring energy to the surface of the Sun. As the plasma moves it creates enormous magnetic fields. Normally these are confined within the body of the Sun, but occasionally, the magnetic flux extends beyond the surface of the Sun as an enormous loop. At each point where the line emerges and re-enters the Sun are a group of sunspots.
Hot plasma streams along the line of flux, it usually confined to the magnetic flux, but occasionally it will break away as a so-called prominence.
Flares are relatively common, but their cause is not yet understood (if any solar activity experts are hanging around - please feel free to step in right about now :)). From memory, the most well-regarded theory is that ever-increasing amounts of energy is stored in the magnetic fields of the sun spot. As the field becomes twisted and tangled, the energy continues to build until a point when the magnetic field snaps back into a less-tangled state. At that point an enormous amount of energy and plasma are blasted into space in a very short period of time.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Missed that one. But if you want to watch movies that make you cry and you like anime you should see Jin Roh (Japanese language only).
Very depressing - by the same studio as Ghost in the Shell. Quite, quite astonishingly beautifully drawn and acted. But make sure you listen to the Japanese soundtrack with subtitles - the lead actress is fantastic.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Exit polls have been notoriously unreliable in the past. The most famous example in Britain was the 1992 General Election. It was widely expected that the Conservatives would loose power to Labour or that we would end up with the greatest rarity of all - a hung Parliament. The exit polls published as soon as the polls closed at 22:00 said the same thing. An exciting night was in store and there was a prospect of the Liberal Democrats holding the balance of power, with the reforming John Smith at the head of Labour things looked grim for John Major...
In the event, the actual results showed that the Conservatives took 41.93% of the vote (and 336 seats), Labour got 34.39% of the vote (and 271 seats). A staggering 7% difference between the opinion polls and the actual result (most polls had been +/- 2%).
The pollsters eventually came to the conclusion that people were too ashamed to admit they voted Conservative, but liked the promised of tax cuts which were part of their 1992 manifesto. So we ended up with a squalid government that limped on for 5 years, buggered the economy, screwed the railways and handed the country to Tony Blair on a platter. All in all, not a good result.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Smallpox (from memory) kills 30% of people infected which means that it can spread and cause utter devastation - the repeated smallpox epidemics of history shows that. The 1918-19 Spanish 'flu overall killed about 4% of people, but it had widely different mortality rates - in some parts of India it killed almost 1 in 2 of those who contracted it, and there are reports from the Canadian north of entire settlements being wiped out.
But then I think we're being terribly limited just thinking about viruses - what about bacteria? Look at the panic of the anthrax mailer in the US (an investigation that went very quiet after all the evidence pointed to a US military source) or the outbreak of foot and mouth here in the UK. And we're still not entirely sure what caused the massive outbreaks of the Black Death in the Middle Ages. it was probably some horrible variant of bubonic plague, but there is an outside chance it was something that came, killed and then retreated into the shadows.
But then again, the UK may have found the perfect biological weapon with BSE (mad cow disease); we've no idea how much of the population has ingested prions and how many will die terrible deaths over the next twenty years.
All we need is a way of putting a holstein on the top of an ICBM :)
Best wishes,
Mike.
'Flu is ancient and we *think* the Greeks may have suffered from it (we obviously can't tell for sure), but there is no way of knowing what strain they suffered from.
Pay attention here comes the science bit. 'Flu is divided into 3 types, A, B and C. C need not concern us as it is not very important. Type A 'flu is the most dangerous and is sub-classified.
The surface of the flu virus is covered with proteins, the two most important are hemagglutinin and neuraminidase. Hemagglutinin comes in three forms (H1, H2 and H3), neuraminidase (N1 and N2) and 'flu viruses are classified by the combination of H and N, (so the 1918 virus is classified as H1N1, 1957 (Asian 'Flu) H2N2 and so on).
The 'flu virus is subject to mutation (viruses tend to have high mutation rates), the genes get shuffled around and the arrangement of proteins on the surface continues to alter. So a H1N1 virus will continue to change through time (but remain in the same classification) - this is called 'antigenic drift'. As the virus mutates, it will cause new outbreaks of 'flu, but these tend to be limited in scope. (But the change means that the 'flu vaccine must change each year to combat the new varieties).
The more dangerous process is 'antigenic shift' when the virus undergoes a massive mutation. This is rarer but the cause of most pandemics. It happens irregularly and is impossible to predict. The reason is very interesting, 'flu circulates in the wild in a variety of species including pigs, whales, ferrets, ducks and pigeons. It is known that all forms of 'flu can live inside birds without expressing symptoms - birds are called the reservoir for the virus.
Any creature that is simultaneously carrying two or more varieties of the virus (although it may not show any symptoms) can permit 'resortment' of the viruses. Essentially the two viruses start swapping H and N arrangements and coming up with new varieties of 'flu. A new variation immediately renders immunisation impotent.
Naturally, new viruses require new vaccines - which is why doctors offer 'flu shots each winter. The give you a cocktail of vaccines against the virus they expect to be most prevalent in the coming winter. There is a world-wide system of alerting health authorities to new forms of 'flu - allowing labs to culture the virus and prepare a vaccine before the virus can go on the rampage. Unfortunately the system is particularly weak in China where a lot of 'flu forms originate.
Why? Well current thinking is that traditionally Chinese peasants have kept pigs close to the house (pigs can harbour the virus) and keep ducks (who also hold the virus) for food. The pigs come into contact with duck droppings and pick up the virus. The virus mutates in the pig and then the virus travels through to humans. Human waste is used to fertilise fields - where the ducks live and they pick up viruses there. Not to mention exotic 'flu variants brought in by other birds nesting and feeding in the fields.
Hence the huge scare in Hong Kong in 1997 when it was found that chickens were carrying a new 'flu variant. People who had been in contact with chickens were found to have picked up the virus, some died. There has also been a recent outbreak of 'flu in Hong Kong and China - again linked to chickens.
The drugs that claim to work against 'flu are so-called neuraminidase inhibitors (the most popular is sold as Relenza in the UK). These work by binding on to the neuraminidase molecule and prevent it from latching on to human cells, which means it can't replicate. They have mixed effects, but do seem to limit the spread of the illness and reduce the duration of the illness. The downside is that they need to be taken BEFORE the 'flu starts to replicate - at a time when there are no symptoms. The
The current list of countries that are believed to have the capability of manufacturing biological weapons is:
Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Egypt, India, Iran, Israel, Laos, Libya, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Syria, Taiwan, Ukraine, USA.
No one accelerated their program and others didn't even undertake them. On top of being too costly, it is too dangerous.
And yes, the US and the USSR both expanded their biological weapons programmes after the British abandoned the concept. The USSR (at least) continued to develop biological weapons in contravention of international treaties.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Have you noticed any change in performance? There's an elderly iMac here that could do with a speed boost and I've heard that Panther feels zippier than 10.2.
Best wishes,
Mike.
And do you think other countries will not see this as legitimising such research? Every one of them can use the same excuse of researching vaccines to produce who-knows-what.
Even if the US chooses not to make this into a weapon (which will be a first, so far every biological agent developed by the US has been weaponised at one stage or another), other countries will.
I really recommend Jeremy Paxman and Robert Harris' 'A Higher Form of Killing' to anyone who thinks that research into biological and chemical weapons does not lead to new weapons. Time and time again, the big powers have claimed that they are investigating defensive measures whilst secretly working on offensive weapons.
History does not give us much hope, and the present White House - with its opposition to tighter biological and chemical weapons treaties, its refusal to sign a nuclear test treaty and its desire for new nuclear weapons, makes me even less hopeful.
Best wishes,
Mike.
One of the few times this has happened in the past was when the British abandoned biological and chemical weapons in the 1950s. What happened? Everyone else carried on or accelerated their programmes.
And I seem to recall that the rest of the World getting together to stop nuclear testing hasn't persuaded the American government to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
Best wishes,
Mike.
You've never heard of influenza then?
Best wishes,
Mike.