By running current through the LED for hours,
they annealed it enough to get the job done.
Guy Webster 818-354-6278
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
December 17, 2002
News Release: 2002-231
Galileo Millennium Mission Status
NASA's Galileo spacecraft has begun transmitting high-priority
scientific information that was collected and stored on its tape
recorder during the orbiter's early-November dash by Jupiter, which
brought it closer to the planet than ever before.
Damage from naturally strong radiation near Jupiter had left the tape
recorder inoperable for weeks. Galileo's flight team traced the
problem to a light-emitting diode in the electronics controlling the
motor drive, and then gradually and carefully completed a successful
long-distance repair job.
"We're delighted playback has begun. There was no guarantee we could
get to this point," said Dr. Eilene Theilig, Galileo project manager
at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "It's a real
tribute to the dedication and creativity of the team, and it continues
the tradition set by the larger Galileo teams earlier in the mission
who overcame challenging setbacks to keep the mission a success."
Playback and transmission began late last week, after tape movements
earlier in the week positioned the tape to start the download with the
data of greatest scientific interest. That information is from a
period starting on Nov. 4, when Galileo was beginning to get closer to
Jupiter than the moon Io's orbit. It ends when the spacecraft shut
down its instruments on Nov. 5 as part of a precautionary standby
reaction to other radiation-induced problems with the spacecraft's
computer shortly after passing the inner moon Amalthea.
"We hope this will be the best data set that's ever been collected
about the inner region of Jupiter's magnetic environment," said JPL's
Dr. Torrence Johnson, Galileo project scientist. The tape playback
may also provide recorded information about dust particles that form
Jupiter's faint "gossamer" ring, which Galileo flew through on Nov. 5.
The recovery was achieved by running a current through the damaged
diode to anneal, or repair, radiation-caused damage. The first
annealing attempt of six hours produced barely discernible
improvement. Three additional treatments, for a total of 83 more hours
of annealing treatment, produced progressive improvements, to the
point that the tape recorder can run for about an hour at a time. A
fifth treatment produced no additional gain. However, normal playback
runs the tape recorder for only a few minutes at a time, so the
improvement appears sufficient, said JPL engineer Greg Levanas, who
helped plot the recovery strategy.
The flight team plans to continue playback until mid-January, the
scheduled end of Galileo's mission operations.
Galileo's tape recorder became critical to the mission's strategy for
handling science data after the spacecraft's main antenna failed to
open fully during the journey from launch in 1989 to arrival at
Jupiter in 1995. Most information from onboard science instruments has
been recorded onto tape during the busy days when the spacecraft has
flown near one of Jupiter's moons. There have been over 30 such
flybys since 1995. The recorded data has been played back slowly for
transmission to Earth via Galileo's smaller secondary antenna during
the weeks and months before each subsequent flyby.
Galileo has operated five years longer than its original prime mission
and has received more than four times the cumulative dose of harmful
radiation it was designed to withstand. Last month's encounter took
the orbiter nearly twice as close to Jupiter as it had ever been
before, and exposed it to the strongest radiation it has yet
experienced. In particular, the spacecraft entered the most intense
region of a trapped proton belt and was exposed to 40 times the proton
radiation of any single previous passage close to Jupiter, probably
more than the rest of the mission combined.
The diode that radiation apparently damaged in the tape recorder is a
gallium-arsenide semiconductor component that emits light. The
motor-drive control has three of them. Light from them shines through
windows in a rotating wheel onto detectors on the other side of the
wheel. That setup senses the turning of the wheel and feeds digital
logic that controls drive signals for the motor.
The damage apparently came from high-energy protons from Jupiter's
radiation belt displacing atoms in the semiconductor's crystalline
molecular lattice. Passing a current through the diode for hours
serves as a way for electron flow to cause some of the displaced atoms
to shift back to their original lattice positions.
Galileo has nearly depleted its supply of the propellant needed for
pointing its antenna toward Earth and controlling its flight path.
While still controllable, it has been put on a course for impact into
Jupiter next September. The maneuver prevents the risk of Galileo
drifting to an unwanted impact with the moon Europa, where it has
discovered evidence of a subsurface ocean that is of interest as a
possible habitat for extraterrestrial life.
Additional information about Galileo and the discoveries is available
at
http://galileo.jpl.nasa.gov
The article says it took 30,000 processor hours
to compute. The computer has 3,000 processors
in it, so did it take 10 hours of actual time?
They say that they were able to include 10 times
the detail of previous simulations because of the
power of the machine.
Perhaps the Seti@home folks could lend some cycles
to similar endeavors that are clearly related to
their goals. It seems to me they could do it in
less than 10 hours...
Looking at the photomicrograph, you would never
think "perfect lens". There are a bunch of bumps
in a pretty random orientation. They can't be all
focussing on the same spots.
While orienting the calcite crystals with the
birefringent axis parallel to the optical axis
so you don't get double images is a nice trick,
Bell Labs is not going to be making their lenses
from burefringent materials, so that trick won't
be much use to them.
The other trick, using the "double-lens shape that closely resembles the shapes proposed in the 17th century by Descartes and Huygens to minimize spherical aberrations" is also nice, it would
seem we have known how to do that for some time.
(Aren't those two guys getting kind of old?)
I would speculate that the critter builds the lenses,
and then the nerve cells and photosensitive
pigments migrate to where the lens focuses the
light. It might also modify the lenses as they
grow, using feedback from the nerve cells.
Perhaps Bell Labs can use similar feedback to get
their optics the way they want them.
Aside from light gathering, it looks to me like
this trick can work backwards also. You can
economize on pigment containing cells by placing
them only at the focus of the lenses. Now you
can camouflage yourself by changing only those
small spots to match your environment.
Clearly the reason we study things like this is because we fear them.
We want to prevent another outbreak. We want to
study why it was so lethal, so we can cure it
and similar epidemics.
We also fear that someone else will resurrect this
bug and spread it around.
But those who fear that the U.S. is studying it
in order to make biological weapons will also
figure out that a biological weapon like this
will not be useful without the ability to innocculate
your own population against it.
When large democracies study diseases, even with
the worst motives, it scares me less than if we
found that suicidal cults or fanatics were studying them. Even if the government is studying
it for all the wrong reasons, we end up better able to defend against it.
There will be more pandemics. They may be man-made,
but more likely they will be natural.
And the only way we will be prepared for them is
to study them.
I occasionally use binoculars and microscopes.
My eyesight has not been damaged by them.
The eyestrain we have been discussing is caused
by the muscles of the eye trying to adjust to an
out of focus view. Strong glasses simply focus
closer to your face. Bring the object closer,
and you won't be straining.
One of the complaints listed was that shifting
from reading glasses to no glasses caused strain.
This only happens if you have to change your focus.
You can shift easily if you look at something farther
away once you remove the glasses. But of course
you removed the glasses because you wanted to look at something
farther away anyway. If you are straining to look
at that, it is not the fault of the glasses.
You probably need trifocals.
You are talking about eyestrain.
The thread was talking about eye damage,
which is an entirely different thing.
People who need reading glasses are mostly those
of use whose natural lens is no longer flexible
enough to refocus well, due to age. Without
any reading glasses, we would be under eyestrain
conditions all the time, since we would be trying
to focus the natural lens by muscle power, and
it can't flex enough.
With reading glasses, I can focus on something
close up, and I can take them off to see far
away. People with bifocals do this by lifting
their head, and yet I don't see people arguing
that bifocals cause eye damage.
Reading glasses don't cause eyestrain.
They prevent it.
Your point about glasses that are too strong is
right on the mark, and argues my case that people
should be able to adjust their lenses without a
doctor visit. If you bought the wrong reading
glasses at the drug store, return them for the
right ones.
Of course regular visits for checkups can help
find all kinds of problems.
But we don't force you to get an engine checkup
every time you fill the tank. We don't require
a doctor visit for a bandaid. We don't even
require an optometrist visit to buy the reading
glasses at the drug store. Why would we keep
poor people from improving their eyesight by
forcing them to travel miles to an expensive
optometrist to get something they can adjust by
themselves?
Give the poor people the same choices you have.
Let them decide whether the money goes into
checking for glaucoma or into feeding the baby.
We started by saying that the initial design only
hid you from one direction. Both designs have
the flaw you point out.
But if I were trying to hide a spy
plane over Iraq, I might be able to assume that
I am hiding from people on the ground, since we
have already prevented Iraqi presence to my sides.
Why not a simpler method?
on
Optical Camouflage
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Since this scheme is only good for hiding from
one watcher at a time, and only from a one-eyed
watcher when close, it seems that a simpler
method will work.
Hold a rear-projection screen in front of you as a shield. It will have a pole coming toward you,
that is long enough so the end of it is behind
you when you hold the shield. On this end is a camera
looking at the scene behind you.
Now it works without half-silvered mirrors, it is
portable (you carry it around), and it works even if the
background is moving.
Just what mechanism are you proposing for this
damage?
If what you say were true, then bifocal lenses
would also damage your eyesight. Or simply
taking off your glasses would damage your eyesight.
Don't be silly. There is no harm in the drugstore
reading glasses, any more than there is in using
a magnifying glass to read. All they do is make
the image you see appear as if the object were closer to you.
If that can damage your eyesight, then don't ever look
at things too closely.
As for shatter-proof reading glasses, while they
might be a good idea, I generally don't engage in
the kind of activity that would shatter my glasses
while I am reading.
First, I love the idea of giving glasses to
people who can't afford them. Often the reason
they can't afford them is that without good
eyesight they can't make a better living.
I also love the idea of adjustable eyesight.
This is what the eye is designed to do naturally.
The lens in your eye is adjustable until you
reach my age. Just not adjustable enough.
I love the idea of letting people fix problems
themselves without expensive professionals.
The idiot in the article who complained that
the people need to see an optometrist in case
there is something worse wrong with the guy is
being atrociously patronizing. When I cut my
finger I don't go to a doctor in case I might
also have cancer.
Being in charge of the adjustment means that if I
get it wrong, I can fix it right away. How many
of us have had to go back to the optometrist to
get new glasses because they got the prescription wrong the first time? Or how many of us just put
up with bad correction and only discovered the
problem when the next pair of glasses fixed it?
But I also love the idea because of the other things
we can do with these glasses once they become
widely available. Get two pair, and have adjustable binoculars (just separate the two by
a few inches). Or have cheap adjustable focus
for small telescopes or microscopes. Or lightweight autofocus cameras.
Suppose the adjustment was really fast and easy.
Now your regular glasses can be reading glasses
with a touch to your temple.
Normally thyroid cancer patients are told to stay
some distance from family members when they return
home. After a few days the levels are lower and
such precautions aren't necessary.
I don't know if the levels are lower for Grave's
disease, or if this person should not have been
on crowded subways. But to detect the levels in
a shielded device, you would probably want the
sensors to be pretty sensitive. Sensitivity also
helps to allow fewer detectors to be used.
Should a strip-search be necessary? I doubt it.
Just hold the detector close to the thyroid to
verify the guy's story. Maybe hospitals could
give out cards, and the security folks could phone
the hospital for confirmation.
In reading the article, it looks like the "tilt"
thay are talking about is not the "tilt" of light,
but of the orbit of the planet relative to the
line of sight to earth.
They knew the orbital period from the radial velocity measurements done earlier. Now that
they know the orbit is nearly edge-on to earth,
they can determine the mass of the planet.
I was looking for something a little less lame,
something that didn't talk about the "tilt" of
the light. Are they measuring polarization?
Refraction? Diffraction?
Does anyone have a pointer to the article that
UPI has so badly dumbed-down?
They want to make sure the ad works.
An ad works if it sells the product.
So, you have to correlate running the ad with
your revenues while the ad was running.
If you can find an fMRI signal that correlates
with successful ads, then you can skip the
statistics, and just run the ads that have a
good chance of generating sales.
All they are doing is saving the expense of running ads that don't work.
While the main benefits of the virtual observatory
will be to researchers, the $10 million is only
the start, and more money will be needed, and the
way to get more money is to make it popular with
voters.
There are two examples of indexing large databases
for the masses that come to mind. One is Google,
and the other is Amazon.
Google ranks items by how popular they are, based
in large part by how many links there are to the
web page. Amazon gives you a list of books other
customers bought when they bought the book you
found in your search.
For astronomical data and images, something like
those approaches could be quite entertaining. I
could go to a popularity list to see which images
and data everyone else was looking at (a million
flies can't be wrong...). But then, like the
Internet Movie Database, it would be fun to see
other images and data that was most often found
in the same papers or web pages as this item.
Somewhat like the Science Citation Index (or the
Kevin Bacon game).
Users could also rate the images and data. Then
we could have lists such as "people who liked
this nebula also liked these HST photos". Images
could be grouped by popular use -- "Images most
often used as wallpaper", "Images most often used
by science magazines", "Data most often used by
newspapers", etc.
The same governments that try to stop hemp
growers and meth labs are the ones you think would
be showing up at your door if you built a
homebrew RSA cracker.
If there were open source RSA crackers floating
around, I suspect they would have no easier time
arresting all of the users of those than they
have had arresting all pot smokers.
When I built my first computer back in the very
early 1970's, the computer I used while pursuing
a PhD in biochemistry was a mainframe. It cost
me six or seven thousand dollars to build my tiny
computer, and a lot of soldering and research.
It is now a "generation" later. We have tools to
let novices write programs that would have astounded
teams of programmers back then. We have script kiddies
attacking government and industry computers.
Things move quickly, and ever more so.
One of the reasons that a small lab costs $50,000
(small change to a drug dealer) is that the goals
are different. An amateur would not be as
interested in careful controls, and could simply
buy viruses that insert transposons and freely
mix two genomes, and test any viable result for
the expression of the cocaine gene. Perhaps a
radish was the wrong thing to pick -- a yeast is
easier to culture and grow (ask an amateur beer
maker).
But some labs are cheaper than others. A suicide
terrorist could take blood samples containing
several deadly human diseases, and inoculate a
pig with those and a virulent flu virus, and hope
for a deadly contagious recombination to occur,
perhaps aided by some drugs or viruses that
make recombinations more likely. He doesn't care
about isolation procedures -- he is hoping it will
kill him.
But I am expecting science fair projects that
insert new genes into yeast to be in high schools
in my lifetime. The same high schools that produce
kids that build bombs and shoot automatic weapons
in cafeterias.
I am in the business of teaching kids how to do
science on a shoestring. I get mail from frightened
parents who think my
Plastic Hydrogen Bomb project
is really teaching kids how to make thermonuclear weapons (it is really just a high-tech squirt gun).
I also get a lot of mail from people interested
in scaling up my
Gauss Rifle to lethal energies.
I am very careful how I answer these people.
I like to think that by channelling their energy
into building toys, I am refocussing their aims
to less destructive pursuits. But as much as I
would love to help the next Einstein or Edison,
I am careful not to help create the next Bin Laden.
"Before the amateur use of genetic engineering becomes widespread, numerous political and legal obstacles will have to be overcome."
I think it is naive to believe that politics
and legality will have much effect on curbing
the amateur genetic engineers. It is no more
difficult than building your own computer, or
building a decent telescope, and it gets easier
every day, as used equipment from all the gene
companies here in Silicon Valley is making its
way into the local surplus market.
Politics and lawyers don't stop people from
growing hemp or building methamphetamine labs.
Someone is going to figure out that splicing the
gene for cocaine into radishes is a way to avoid
cartel prices.
And who wants to bet that politics and lawyers
could stop an "open source" gene splicing movement
once it got started?
I wonder which caffeine extraction method was used?
Liquid C02 under pressure is often used to extract
the caffeine. But there are other methods.
It might be interesting to see if the same results
come from decaffeinated coffees made by different
methods. It might also be interesting to see if
the study controlled for the effects of smell and
taste. People who don't drink coffee might find
their heart races when forced to drink something
that is definitely an acquired taste.
It might also be that removing caffeine and two
other alkyloids (theophylline and theobromine,
although I am unsure how prevalent those are in
coffee) which are diuretics and vasodilators
might allow other ingredients to have the opposite
effect (previously mitigated).
Actually, stochastic resonance is real, and you probably use it every day.
Consider a salt shaker.
If you slowly tip it over, the salt will only move
in jumps, as it cannot react to a small tilt, but
eventually the force of a larger tilt overcomes
the static friction.
But if you tap the shaker slightly as you tip,
the little bit of added noise overcomes the
friction, and the salt moves more like water
would.
This is stochastic resonance. Adding a little
bit of random noise to make a signal detectable.
If the nerves in the foot need some quantum of
disturbance in order to fire, adding a little
random noise can make those quanta smaller.
The end effect is to make the nerves a little
more sensitive, overcoming the insensitivity
caused by age.
Slashdot Mirror
High energy protons had damaged an LED.
By running current through the LED for hours, they annealed it enough to get the job done.
The article says it took 30,000 processor hours to compute. The computer has 3,000 processors in it, so did it take 10 hours of actual time?
They say that they were able to include 10 times the detail of previous simulations because of the power of the machine.
Perhaps the Seti@home folks could lend some cycles to similar endeavors that are clearly related to their goals. It seems to me they could do it in less than 10 hours...
Doing a Google search for "Ophiocoma wendtii optical" came up with loads of articles about this, mostly similar, but some better than others.
A good one is from Physics Today.
Looking at the photomicrograph, you would never think "perfect lens". There are a bunch of bumps in a pretty random orientation. They can't be all focussing on the same spots.
While orienting the calcite crystals with the birefringent axis parallel to the optical axis so you don't get double images is a nice trick, Bell Labs is not going to be making their lenses from burefringent materials, so that trick won't be much use to them.
The other trick, using the "double-lens shape that closely resembles the shapes proposed in the 17th century by Descartes and Huygens to minimize spherical aberrations" is also nice, it would seem we have known how to do that for some time. (Aren't those two guys getting kind of old?)
I would speculate that the critter builds the lenses, and then the nerve cells and photosensitive pigments migrate to where the lens focuses the light. It might also modify the lenses as they grow, using feedback from the nerve cells. Perhaps Bell Labs can use similar feedback to get their optics the way they want them.
Aside from light gathering, it looks to me like this trick can work backwards also. You can economize on pigment containing cells by placing them only at the focus of the lenses. Now you can camouflage yourself by changing only those small spots to match your environment.
Clearly the reason we study things like this is because we fear them.
We want to prevent another outbreak. We want to study why it was so lethal, so we can cure it and similar epidemics.
We also fear that someone else will resurrect this bug and spread it around.
But those who fear that the U.S. is studying it in order to make biological weapons will also figure out that a biological weapon like this will not be useful without the ability to innocculate your own population against it.
When large democracies study diseases, even with the worst motives, it scares me less than if we found that suicidal cults or fanatics were studying them. Even if the government is studying it for all the wrong reasons, we end up better able to defend against it.
There will be more pandemics. They may be man-made, but more likely they will be natural.
And the only way we will be prepared for them is to study them.
No, I disagree completely.
I occasionally use binoculars and microscopes.
My eyesight has not been damaged by them.
The eyestrain we have been discussing is caused by the muscles of the eye trying to adjust to an out of focus view. Strong glasses simply focus closer to your face. Bring the object closer, and you won't be straining.
One of the complaints listed was that shifting from reading glasses to no glasses caused strain. This only happens if you have to change your focus. You can shift easily if you look at something farther away once you remove the glasses. But of course you removed the glasses because you wanted to look at something farther away anyway. If you are straining to look at that, it is not the fault of the glasses. You probably need trifocals.
You are talking about eyestrain.
The thread was talking about eye damage, which is an entirely different thing.
People who need reading glasses are mostly those of use whose natural lens is no longer flexible enough to refocus well, due to age. Without any reading glasses, we would be under eyestrain conditions all the time, since we would be trying to focus the natural lens by muscle power, and it can't flex enough.
With reading glasses, I can focus on something close up, and I can take them off to see far away. People with bifocals do this by lifting their head, and yet I don't see people arguing that bifocals cause eye damage.
Reading glasses don't cause eyestrain. They prevent it.
Your point about glasses that are too strong is right on the mark, and argues my case that people should be able to adjust their lenses without a doctor visit. If you bought the wrong reading glasses at the drug store, return them for the right ones.
Or just turn the screw on the adjustable version.
You missed the point.
Of course regular visits for checkups can help find all kinds of problems.
But we don't force you to get an engine checkup every time you fill the tank. We don't require a doctor visit for a bandaid. We don't even require an optometrist visit to buy the reading glasses at the drug store. Why would we keep poor people from improving their eyesight by forcing them to travel miles to an expensive optometrist to get something they can adjust by themselves?
Give the poor people the same choices you have. Let them decide whether the money goes into checking for glaucoma or into feeding the baby.
We started by saying that the initial design only hid you from one direction. Both designs have the flaw you point out.
But if I were trying to hide a spy plane over Iraq, I might be able to assume that I am hiding from people on the ground, since we have already prevented Iraqi presence to my sides.
Since this scheme is only good for hiding from one watcher at a time, and only from a one-eyed watcher when close, it seems that a simpler method will work.
Hold a rear-projection screen in front of you as a shield. It will have a pole coming toward you, that is long enough so the end of it is behind you when you hold the shield. On this end is a camera looking at the scene behind you.
Now it works without half-silvered mirrors, it is portable (you carry it around), and it works even if the background is moving.
Just what mechanism are you proposing for this damage?
If what you say were true, then bifocal lenses would also damage your eyesight. Or simply taking off your glasses would damage your eyesight.
Don't be silly. There is no harm in the drugstore reading glasses, any more than there is in using a magnifying glass to read. All they do is make the image you see appear as if the object were closer to you. If that can damage your eyesight, then don't ever look at things too closely.
As for shatter-proof reading glasses, while they might be a good idea, I generally don't engage in the kind of activity that would shatter my glasses while I am reading.
First, I love the idea of giving glasses to people who can't afford them. Often the reason they can't afford them is that without good eyesight they can't make a better living.
I also love the idea of adjustable eyesight. This is what the eye is designed to do naturally. The lens in your eye is adjustable until you reach my age. Just not adjustable enough.
I love the idea of letting people fix problems themselves without expensive professionals. The idiot in the article who complained that the people need to see an optometrist in case there is something worse wrong with the guy is being atrociously patronizing. When I cut my finger I don't go to a doctor in case I might also have cancer.
Being in charge of the adjustment means that if I get it wrong, I can fix it right away. How many of us have had to go back to the optometrist to get new glasses because they got the prescription wrong the first time? Or how many of us just put up with bad correction and only discovered the problem when the next pair of glasses fixed it?
But I also love the idea because of the other things we can do with these glasses once they become widely available. Get two pair, and have adjustable binoculars (just separate the two by a few inches). Or have cheap adjustable focus for small telescopes or microscopes. Or lightweight autofocus cameras.
Suppose the adjustment was really fast and easy. Now your regular glasses can be reading glasses with a touch to your temple.
I love this idea.
About as useful as the Plastic Hydrogen Bomb.
The more free science books on the web, the better!
This one looks particulary nice. It may not be that accessible to novices, but it is authoritative, and the price (my tax dollars at work) looks good.
Normally thyroid cancer patients are told to stay some distance from family members when they return home. After a few days the levels are lower and such precautions aren't necessary.
I don't know if the levels are lower for Grave's disease, or if this person should not have been on crowded subways. But to detect the levels in a shielded device, you would probably want the sensors to be pretty sensitive. Sensitivity also helps to allow fewer detectors to be used.
Should a strip-search be necessary? I doubt it.
Just hold the detector close to the thyroid to verify the guy's story. Maybe hospitals could give out cards, and the security folks could phone the hospital for confirmation.
Or just call a cab for the poor guy.
Thanks!
In reading the article, it looks like the "tilt" thay are talking about is not the "tilt" of light, but of the orbit of the planet relative to the line of sight to earth.
They knew the orbital period from the radial velocity measurements done earlier. Now that they know the orbit is nearly edge-on to earth, they can determine the mass of the planet.
Some other astrometry uses of the Fine Guidance Sensors can be found here: HST Astrometry Science Team.
I was looking for something a little less lame, something that didn't talk about the "tilt" of the light. Are they measuring polarization? Refraction? Diffraction?
Does anyone have a pointer to the article that UPI has so badly dumbed-down?
They want to make sure the ad works.
An ad works if it sells the product.
So, you have to correlate running the ad with your revenues while the ad was running.
If you can find an fMRI signal that correlates with successful ads, then you can skip the statistics, and just run the ads that have a good chance of generating sales.
All they are doing is saving the expense of running ads that don't work.
While the main benefits of the virtual observatory will be to researchers, the $10 million is only the start, and more money will be needed, and the way to get more money is to make it popular with voters.
There are two examples of indexing large databases for the masses that come to mind. One is Google, and the other is Amazon.
Google ranks items by how popular they are, based in large part by how many links there are to the web page. Amazon gives you a list of books other customers bought when they bought the book you found in your search.
For astronomical data and images, something like those approaches could be quite entertaining. I could go to a popularity list to see which images and data everyone else was looking at (a million flies can't be wrong...). But then, like the Internet Movie Database, it would be fun to see other images and data that was most often found in the same papers or web pages as this item. Somewhat like the Science Citation Index (or the Kevin Bacon game).
Users could also rate the images and data. Then we could have lists such as "people who liked this nebula also liked these HST photos". Images could be grouped by popular use -- "Images most often used as wallpaper", "Images most often used by science magazines", "Data most often used by newspapers", etc.
We have meteorites that we think came from Mars.
Presumably, there are meteorites from Earth on Mars, Venus, and maybe even Europa.
If we see no signs of earthlike DNA in those places, then I would say the likelyhood of panspermia goes way down.
I don't have a problem believing that life evolved from inorganic materials all by itself.
But then, lots of people believe in weird things.
Somehow you have completely missed the point.
The same governments that try to stop hemp growers and meth labs are the ones you think would be showing up at your door if you built a homebrew RSA cracker.
If there were open source RSA crackers floating around, I suspect they would have no easier time arresting all of the users of those than they have had arresting all pot smokers.
But don't worry -- they only catch the paranoids.
For a discussion of cheap ways to do photography and video through a microscope, try
Photography through a miscroscope
We are in complete agreement.
When I built my first computer back in the very early 1970's, the computer I used while pursuing a PhD in biochemistry was a mainframe. It cost me six or seven thousand dollars to build my tiny computer, and a lot of soldering and research.
It is now a "generation" later. We have tools to let novices write programs that would have astounded teams of programmers back then. We have script kiddies attacking government and industry computers. Things move quickly, and ever more so.
One of the reasons that a small lab costs $50,000 (small change to a drug dealer) is that the goals are different. An amateur would not be as interested in careful controls, and could simply buy viruses that insert transposons and freely mix two genomes, and test any viable result for the expression of the cocaine gene. Perhaps a radish was the wrong thing to pick -- a yeast is easier to culture and grow (ask an amateur beer maker).
But some labs are cheaper than others. A suicide terrorist could take blood samples containing several deadly human diseases, and inoculate a pig with those and a virulent flu virus, and hope for a deadly contagious recombination to occur, perhaps aided by some drugs or viruses that make recombinations more likely. He doesn't care about isolation procedures -- he is hoping it will kill him.
But I am expecting science fair projects that insert new genes into yeast to be in high schools in my lifetime. The same high schools that produce kids that build bombs and shoot automatic weapons in cafeterias.
I am in the business of teaching kids how to do science on a shoestring. I get mail from frightened parents who think my Plastic Hydrogen Bomb project is really teaching kids how to make thermonuclear weapons (it is really just a high-tech squirt gun). I also get a lot of mail from people interested in scaling up my Gauss Rifle to lethal energies.
I am very careful how I answer these people.
I like to think that by channelling their energy into building toys, I am refocussing their aims to less destructive pursuits. But as much as I would love to help the next Einstein or Edison, I am careful not to help create the next Bin Laden.
"Before the amateur use of genetic engineering becomes widespread, numerous political and legal obstacles will have to be overcome."
I think it is naive to believe that politics and legality will have much effect on curbing the amateur genetic engineers. It is no more difficult than building your own computer, or building a decent telescope, and it gets easier every day, as used equipment from all the gene companies here in Silicon Valley is making its way into the local surplus market.
Politics and lawyers don't stop people from growing hemp or building methamphetamine labs. Someone is going to figure out that splicing the gene for cocaine into radishes is a way to avoid cartel prices.
And who wants to bet that politics and lawyers could stop an "open source" gene splicing movement once it got started?
I wonder which caffeine extraction method was used?
Liquid C02 under pressure is often used to extract the caffeine. But there are other methods.
It might be interesting to see if the same results come from decaffeinated coffees made by different methods. It might also be interesting to see if the study controlled for the effects of smell and taste. People who don't drink coffee might find their heart races when forced to drink something that is definitely an acquired taste.
It might also be that removing caffeine and two other alkyloids (theophylline and theobromine, although I am unsure how prevalent those are in coffee) which are diuretics and vasodilators might allow other ingredients to have the opposite effect (previously mitigated).
Actually, stochastic resonance is real, and you probably use it every day.
Consider a salt shaker.
If you slowly tip it over, the salt will only move in jumps, as it cannot react to a small tilt, but eventually the force of a larger tilt overcomes the static friction.
But if you tap the shaker slightly as you tip, the little bit of added noise overcomes the friction, and the salt moves more like water would.
This is stochastic resonance. Adding a little bit of random noise to make a signal detectable.
If the nerves in the foot need some quantum of disturbance in order to fire, adding a little random noise can make those quanta smaller.
The end effect is to make the nerves a little more sensitive, overcoming the insensitivity caused by age.