Oldest Known Ocean Crust Found on Greenland

Scientists have discovered a 3.8-billion-year-old rock formation in Greenland that they say is the earliest example of oceanic crust ever to be discovered. The find suggests that some processes of plate tectonics—the slow but steady drifting and collision of giant pieces of Earth's outer shell—may have begun much earlier than previously suspected.

Hidden in plain sight among an oft-studied cluster of ancient rocks, the Greenland formation contains a telltale structure known as a sheeted dike complex.Because such a complex can form only during continuous crustal spreading, it identifies the Greenland rocks as ophiolites, or pieces of ocean crust that were later stranded on land. During a process called seafloor spreading, new crust is constantly created by molten rock rising to fill ever widening cracks in the ocean floor. Ophiolites can be formed when this oceanic crust is caught up in a collision of continents, forcing some of the material onto the surface. "The smoking gun here is the sheeted dike complex and hence the most important component for recognizing these rocks as an ophiolite," said study leader Harald Furnes, a professor of earth science at the University of Bergen in Norway. "The rock sequence we describe from southwest Greenland we recognized as representing the oldest ophiolite on Earth, and hence the oldest oceanic crust formed by seafloor spreading," he added. The finding, which appears in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science, may have enormous consequences for understanding the early history of the planet—and its most primitive life. Many experts suspect the first organisms originated at or near the hydrothermal vents responsible for seafloor spreading, because they may have provided the energy for chemical reactions and helped concentrate vital nutrients.Earth-Shaking Controversy According to the theory of plate tectonics, Earth's upper surface is a jigsaw puzzle of rigid plates that slowly drift over a layer of hot fluidlike rock. At many places these plates collide violently, causing volcanic activity and triggering massive earthquakes as one plate is subducted, or pushed beneath the other.

Stone Age Massacre Revealed in British Tombs

Gruesome evidence found in ancient burial chambers reveals a period of violence and instability in Stone Age Britain, according to archaeologists.

Signs of bloody massacres and fractured societies are emerging from research that used new dating techniques to age prehistoric skeletons and burial sites in southern England. The sites include Wayland's Smithy in Oxfordshire, where the remains of 14 people show evidence of an ancient massacre, according to a team led by the U.K. government body English Heritage. Eleven of the skeletons were of adult males, at least three of whom were likely killed by arrows, the team reported. One man still had the tip of a flint arrowhead embedded in his pelvic bone. Two of the bodies appeared to have been scavenged and partially dismembered by wolves or dogs before burial. Analysis using radiocarbon dating and other archaeological clues placed the age of all the bones at around 3570 B.C., some 800 years before Stonehenge was built in the same region. The burials were previously thought to have spanned several centuries. "We can now say they were put in the tomb at pretty much the same time," said Alex Bayliss, an archaeologist with English Heritage."Three of them were almost certainly killed by arrowheads found with the remains in the tomb," Bayliss said. "It's quite possible that there was some act of collective violence. "It's as if there was a cattle raid or something," she added.

news taken from national geographic(nationalgeographic.com)

In the latest bid to rocket tourists into orbit, the secretive Blue Origin unveils a flying pod.

A mere three years after Burt Rutan’s SpaceShipOne skimmed the edge of space to capture the $10-million Ansari X Prize, more than half a dozen companies are furiously building and testing spacecraft designed to take paying passengers on suborbital journeys and beyond. Five states, including California, Oklahoma, Florida, Virginia and Alaska, now hold government licenses for commercial spaceports—and the Federal Aviation Administration is already working to create new protocols so air-traffic controllers will know how to route old-fashioned commercial flights clear of busy spaceport traffic. “The giggle factor is gone,” says Taber MacCallum, CEO of Tucson, Arizona-based Paragon Space Development Corp., one of a number of firms angling to supply future spaceliners with everything from spacesuits to rocket parts. In January, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos grabbed headlines when he revealed that his secretive seven-year-old rocket-science side venture, Blue Origin, had successfully tested a vehicle dubbed Goddard. The craft, which launches and lands vertically, is a significant step toward the billionaire’s plans for flying sightseers to low Earth orbit and beyond. A video posted on the company’s Web site reveals a gumdrop-shaped capsule whooshing 285 feet above the West Texas scrub and, cushioned by the thrust of nine rocket nozzles, gently descending onto stubby legs. Bezos wouldn’t comment publicly, but a recent 223-page Federal Aviation Administration filing by his rocket scientists reveals more clues: This year, engineers will attempt to push Goddard, which uses concentrated hydrogen peroxide as a propellant, to an altitude of 2,000 feet.
By 2010, Blue Origin hopes to launch weekly suborbital passenger flights in a ship called New Shepard (as in Alan Shepard, the first American in space). The 50-foot-tall vehicle will ferry at least three passengers to 62 miles for a few moments of zero gravity at the edge of space, and land using retrorockets and a parachute.
Meanwhile Richard Branson’s company Virgin Galactic aims to beat Blue Origin to the launchpad and will test a craft dubbed the VSS Enterprise (yes, Spock, that one) next year, with commercial flights as soon as 2009. Designed by Rutan and modeled on SpaceShipOne, the 60-foot-long spaceliner will carry six passengers and two pilots. Another favored contender in the suborbital space race is Rocketplane Kistler in Oklahoma City. Its craft, the Rocketplane XP, is based on a heavily modified Learjet 25 fuselage, with rocket engines delivering 36,000 pounds of thrust. The 44-foot-long vehicle is designed for three passengers and one pilot. Test flights could get under way as early as next year, with commercial flights in 2009, says Bob Seto, the company’s vice president. None of these rides will come cheap. Virgin Galactic is asking $200,000 a ticket, and although Blue Origin has yet to set a fare, you can bet it will cost more than Amazon’s two-day shipping upgrade. But even if stratospheric ticket prices don’t seem to be deterring eager space tourists—200 people have already booked flights with Virgin Galactic—most companies are well aware that a deadly crash could hurt the flow of wealthy passengers. So with that in mind, the industry is proceeding in the spirit of Blue Origin’s lofty Latin corporate motto, Gradatim ferociter.Roughly: “Step by step, ferociously.”

Mars Pole Holds Enough Ice to Flood Planet

Mars's southern polar ice cap contains enough water to cover the entire planet approximately 36 feet (11 meters) deep if melted, according to a new radar study. It's the most precise calculation yet for the thickness of the red planet's ice, according to the international team of researchers responsible for the discovery.

Using an ice-penetrating radar to map the south pole's underlying terrain, the scientists calculated that the ice is up to 2.2 miles (3,500 meters) thick in places, said the study's leader, Jeffrey Plaut of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. The radar, from the Mars Express orbiter, also revealed the surprising purity of the ice, Plaut added. On average, the ice cap contained less than 10 percent dust, he said. The study will appear in tomorrow's issue of the journal Science. The polar ice cap may also contain some frozen carbon dioxide, or dry ice, Plaut said. But there can't be much of it, because such a thick layer of dry ice would start to ooze sideways under its own weight. "Only water ice could support itself that way," Plaut said. The research team also found a series of depressions buried beneath the ice only 180 miles (300 kilometers) from the pole. These are probably impact craters, Plaut said, though they might also be features caused by erosion, similar to ones found elsewhere on Mars. "We don't completely understand them, because we have only a vague image of them," Plaut said. But, significantly, the team didn't find a large depression under the ice.

Boeing/NASA Blended-Wing Experiment Ready To Launch

Boeing's X-48B blended-wing-body (BWB) experimental aircraft is just about ready for its first test flight, Business 2.0 reported on Tuesday. The scale model, with a wingspan of 21 feet, should take to the air by the end of this month at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The aircraft has long been under development in a joint program involving NASA, the U.S. Air Force and Boeing's Phantom Works. The blended-wing design creates an aerodynamic shape that doesn't require a conventional tail, reducing drag and dramatically improving fuel efficiency. A military version of the aircraft could be on the market by 2022, with a passenger version flying by 2030.

U.S. Developing Jets That Fly Five Times the Speed of Sound

The U.S. Air Force is preparing to test a new vehicle that could make missiles—and someday, jets—travel ten times faster than those flown today, military officials say. The research vehicle, known as the X-51A, will be able reach hypersonic speeds when it is tested in 2009.

Hypersonic speeds are above Mach 5—faster than five times the speed of sound. "This could significantly change an operation's tempo," said Bob Mercier, deputy for technology in the aerospace propulsion division at the Air Force Research Laboratory in Ohio. A cruise missile today takes about 90 minutes to reach a target located 600 nautical miles (1,100 kilometers) away. A hypersonic cruise missile using the X-51A would reach its target in 10 minutes. "The military obviously has a need for speed," said Paul Reukauf, a hypersonic technology expert at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, California. Flight engineers define three categories of speed: subsonic, supersonic, and hypersonic. The way air flows around the aircraft distinguishes the categories, Reukauf explained. At subsonic speed, which is below the speed of sound, shock waves are absent. At supersonic speed, shock waves form on the aircraft as it flies through the air. As the air pressure rises through these waves, a sonic boom is generated. At hypersonic speeds, the shock waves form very close to the aircraft, and engineers are developing ways to harness the power of these waves. "The lift and drag and performance of the airplane can essentially be explained … by the resulting forces of the molecules of the air hitting the airplane," Reukauf said.

Saturn's Icy Moon May Have Been Hot Enough for Life

One of the places in the solar system most likely to have extraterrestrial life may have gotten off to a hot, highly radioactive start, scientists reported yesterday at a meeting in Houston, Texas. Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, stunned scientists two years ago when NASA's Cassini orbiter discovered geyser-like jets of water vapor shooting into space from its south pole.

Now a new study of Enceladus's plume finds that it's rich in nitrogen gas. "This is interesting, because nitrogen is hard to produce in a body as small as Enceladus without significant heat," said John Spencer, a planetary scientist with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Spencer who was not part of the study. The find suggests that the moon's core once reached temperatures around 1,070 degrees Fahrenheit (577 degrees Celsius)—hot enough to convert Enceladus's internal stores of ammonia into nitrogen. This may also be hot enough to produce the possible precursors for life, said the study's lead author, Dennis Matson of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. "We've got an organic brew, a heat source, and liquid water—all key ingredients for life," Matson said in a press statement. "And while no one is claiming that we have found life, by any means, we probably have evidence for a place that might be hospitable to life." Cassini scientist Carolyn Porco of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, said Enceladus should be a leading candidate site for future probes in search of extraterrestrial life.

Skull Is First Fossil Proof of Human Migration Theory

A 36,000-year-old skull from South Africa provides the first fossil evidence that modern humans left Africa 70,000 to 50,000 years ago to colonize Eurasia, new research suggests.

"Up until a few years ago, this was largely just a theory based on some genetics," said Ted Goebel, an anthropologist at Texas A&M University who was not involved in the study. "We're beginning to accumulate evidence from archaeology, from genetics, from physical anthropology that support this model or theory that modern humans spread out of Africa … 60,000 or 70,000 years ago," he said. Scientists today can only theorize about how anatomically modern humans, who appeared in East Africa by 195,000 years ago, spread across the continent to the Middle East, Asia, Australia, and Europe. The mystery endures in large part due to the scarcity of human fossils in sub-Saharan Africa dating to 70,000 to 15,000 years ago, Goebel says. The "out of Africa" theory holds that modern humans left East Africa only relatively recently, pushing into southern Africa, the Middle East, Eurasia, and Australia sometime between 70,000 to 50,000 years ago. This theory is bolstered not only by this latest discovery but also by a separate find in Russia, in which human teeth and artifacts have been dated to around the same age as the South Africa skull. The results of both discoveries appear in the current issue of the journal Science. Skull Analysis The skull study was led by Frederick E. Grine, an anthropologist and anatomist at Stony Brook University on Long Island, New York. The fossil was originally unearthed from a riverbed near Hofmeyr, South Africa, in 1952 but was never accurately dated.

Terrorist Use of Google Earth Raises Security Fears

Detailed Google Earth images of British military bases were found in the homes of Iraqi insurgents, a London newspaper reported in January.

A British army official told the Daily Telegraph that the confiscated images showed Land Rovers, buildings, tents, and bathroom facilities inside the military compound in Basra, Iraq. British officials reportedly complained to California-based Google, and the software firm replaced the images with pre-war data on its downloadable globe. While the extent of insurgents' use of Google Earth is unknown, the news underscored what some experts see as a growing conflict between national security needs and the software's high-resolution, satellite view of the planet. Ram Jakhu, a law professor at McGill University in Canada, called the move a "justified reaction, given that the issue of national security is of paramount importance." Governments should have laws supporting freedom of information, including the right to snap and disseminate photos, he said. But there are limits. "Google shouldn't spy for terrorists," Jakhu said. Neither Google nor British military officials responded to interview requests. Fine Resolution Google Earth is made up of declassified satellite and aerial images that are stitched together to give users a 3-D view of the planet. For many locations the images have a resolution as fine as 49 feet (15 meters) per pixel—enough to see individual streets, distinguish buildings, and even make out the color of automobiles.

Salamander Tongue Is World's Most Explosive Muscle

The greatest burst of power from any animal muscle comes from the tongue of a tropical salamander, scientists have announced.
The giant palm salamander of Central America (Bolitoglossa dofleini) captures fast-moving bugs with an explosive tongue thrust that releases over 18,000 watts of power per kilogram of muscle.That shatters the previous record of 9,600 watts per kilogram, held by the Colorado River toad.
Stephen Deban of the University of South Florida in Tampa said the secret to the tiny salamander's strength lies in its "ballistic" tongue-firing mechanism. His team used high-speed video and implanted electrodes to study the prey-catching behavior of several related salamander species. Much like an arrow shot from a bow, Deban said, the giant palm salamander's bony tongue is launched with an initial burst of energy and flies forward under its own momentum. The "bow" is provided by elastic fibers in the salamander's mouth that stretch to store muscular energy and then release it all at once.
"You can pull the string back as slowly as you like, but when you let it go, the arrow achieves a much higher rate of energy release," Deban said.
The team's findings appeared in the February 15 issue of the Journal of Experimental Biology.
Built for Speed The salamander's ballistic firing permits the tongue's sticky-padded tip to reach prey in just a few thousandths of a second, Deban's team said. Such speed is critical for overcoming the countermeasures evolved by some insects.

Daylight Saving Change: Energy Boon or Waste of Time?

At 2 a.m. on March 11 the United States will spring forward three weeks earlier than usual, as the country implements the first change to its time standards since 1986.

In 2005 Congress passed a mammoth new energy bill that includes a controversial monthlong extension of daylight saving time. Instead of starting on the first Sunday in April, daylight saving will now begin on the second Sunday in March. Daylight saving time will end on the first Sunday in November—one week later than it used to.But the move's energy-saving potential is uncertain and is already being called into question. A study released last year by the U.S. Department of Energy estimates that the change will save less than 1 percent of the country's annual energy consumption. Bob Aldrich of the California Energy Commission told National Public Radio that energy needs in the U.S. have changed a lot since the 1970s, when the data supporting the current bill was collected. "We've become much more electronically configured, if you will," he told NPR. In addition to lights, people plug in more computers, televisions, satellite dishes, and other power-hungry electronics than they did 30 years ago. Meanwhile, advocates such as Massachusetts Democrat Ed Markey, who co-sponsored the bill in the House of Representatives, said the plan is about more than just saving energy. "In addition to the benefits of energy saving, less crime, fewer traffic fatalities, more recreation time and increased economic activity, daylight saving just brings a smile to everybody's faces," Congressman Markey said in a press statement. Some of the bill's boosters cited U.S. Department of Transportation studies from the 1970s while arguing for the change. The studies evaluated the 1974 and 1975 extensions of daylight saving time, which were designed to address the energy crisis spurred by an oil embargo.

The Robots Of Future

Human experience is marked by a refusal to obey our limitations. We’ve escaped the ground, we’ve escaped the planet, and now, after thousands of years of effort, our quest to build machines that emulate our own appearance, movement and intelligence is leading us to the point where we will escape the two most fundamental confines of all: our bodies and our minds. Once this point comes—once the accelerating pace of technological change allows us to build machines that not only equal but surpass human intelligence—we’ll see cyborgs (machine-enhanced humans like the Six Million Dollar Man), androids (human-robot hybrids like Data in Star Trek) and other combinations beyond what we can even imagine. Although the ancient Greeks were among the first to build machines that could emulate the intelligence and natural movements of people (developments invigorated by the Greeks’ musings that human intelligence might also be governed by natural laws), these efforts flowered in the European Renaissance, which produced the first androids with lifelike movements. These included a mandolin-playing lady, constructed in 1540 by Italian inventor Gianello Torriano. In 1772 Swiss watchmaker Pierre Jacquet-Droz built a pensive child named L’Écrivain (The Writer) that could write passages with a pen. L’Écrivain’s brain was a mechanical computer that was impressive for its complexity even by today’s standards. Such inventions led scientists and philosophers to speculate that the human brain itself was just an elaborate automaton. Wilhelm Leibniz, a contemporary of Isaac Newton, wrote around 1700: “What if these theories are really true, and we were magically shrunk and put into someone’s brain while he was thinking. We would see all the pumps, pistons, gears and levers working away, and we would be able to describe their workings completely, in mechanical terms, thereby completely describing the thought processes of the brain. But that description would nowhere contain any mention of thought! It would contain nothing but descriptions of pumps, pistons, levers!” Leibniz was on to something. There are indeed pumps, pistons and levers inside our brain—we now recognize them as neurotransmitters, ion channels and the other molecular components of the neural machinery. And although we don’t yet fully understand the details of how these little machines create thought, our ignorance won’t last much longer.

The word “robot” originated almost a century ago. Czech dramatist Karel Capek first used the term in his 1921 play R.U.R. (for “Rossum’s Universal Robots”), creating it from the Czech word “robota,” meaning obligatory work. In the play, he describes the invention of intelligent biomechanical machines intended as servants for their human creators. While lacking charm and goodwill, his robots brought together all the elements of machine intelligence: vision, touch sensitivity, pattern recognition, decision making, world knowledge, fine motor coordination and even a measure of common sense.Capek intended his intelligent machines to be evil in their perfection, their perfect rationality scornful of human frailty. These robots ultimately rise up against their masters and destroy all humankind, a dystopian notion that has been echoed in much science fiction since.The specter of machine intelligence enslaving its creators has continued to impress itself on the public consciousness. But more significantly, Capek’s robots introduced the idea of the robot as an imitation or substitute for a human being. The idea has been reinforced throughout the 20th century, as androids engaged the popular imagination in fiction and film, from Rosie to C-3PO and the Terminator. The first generation of modern robots were, however, a far cry from these anthropomorphic visions, and most robot builders have made no attempt to mimic humans. The Unimate, a popular assembly-line robot from the 1960s, was capable only of moving its one arm in several directions and opening and closing its gripper. Today there are more than two million Roomba robots scurrying around performing a task (vacuuming) that used to be done by humans, but they look more like fast turtles than maids. Most robots will continue to be utilitarian devices designed to carry out specific tasks. But when we think of the word “robot,” Capek’s century-old concept of machines made in our own image still dominates our imagination and inspires our goals.

Colossal Squid Caught off Antarctica!

In Antarctica's Ross Sea, a fishing boat has caught what is likely the world's biggest known colossal squid (yes, that's the species' name), New Zealand officials announced today.

Heavier than even giant squid, colossal squid (Mesonychoteuthis hamiltoni) have eyes as wide as dinner plates and sharp hooks on some of their suckers. The new specimen weighs in at an estimated 990 pounds (450 kilograms). The sea monster had become entangled while feeding on Patagonian toothfish caught on long lines of hooks. The crew then maneuvered the squid into a net and painstakingly hauled it aboard—a two-hour process. The animal was frozen and placed in a massive freezer below decks. Now in New Zealand, the carcass awaits scientific analysis. "Even basic questions such as how large does this species grow to and how long does it live for are not yet known," said New Zealand Fisheries Minister Jim Anderton in a statement. The deep-sea species was first discovered in 1925, though the only evidence was two tentacles found in a sperm whale's stomach. The new specimen is likely the first intact male ever recovered, Anderton said. Squid expert Steve O'Shea told local press, "I can assure you that this is going to draw phenomenal interest." For one thing, added the Auckland University of Technology professor, the squid would yield calamari rings the size of tractor tires.

World's Longest Underground River Discovered in Mexico

Divers exploring a maze of underwater caves on Mexico's Yucatán Peninsula have identified what may be the longest underground river in the world.

The waterway twists and turns for 95 miles (153 kilometers) through the region's limestone caverns, said British diver Stephen Bogaerts, who made the discovery with German colleague Robbie Schmittner. In a straight line, the system would span about six miles (ten kilometers) of land. Bogaerts and Schmittner spent four years exploring using underwater scooters and specially rigged gas cylinders to find a connection between the Yucatán region's second and third longest cave systems, known respectively as Sac Actun and Nohoch Nah Chich. "We expected to have done it by December 2004," Bogaerts said. "But, unfortunately, we were unable to make the connection in the area we were looking in, so we had to look somewhere else." The team scoured the passages, marking each new twist and turn with carefully labeled rope. On January 23 the pair headed toward the final connection from opposite sides and used an unopened bottle of champagne to make the final tie-off between the two systems. "It's a little bit like planting a flag on the moon or the top of Everest," Bogaerts said. The pair celebrated with a second bottle of champagne on the surface.
Explorer's Paradise
Gene Melton is chair of the Lake City, Florida-based National Speleological Society's Cave Diving Section. He said the connection caps 20 years of exploration and mapping in the Yucatán's underground labyrinth. "Bogaerts and Schmittner saw the trending of certain passages going together, and they started making a major effort to explore it," he said.

Stonehenge Settlement Found

A major prehistoric village has been unearthed near Stonehenge in southern England.

The settlement likely housed the builders of the famous monument, archaeologists say, and was an important ceremonial site in its own right, hosting great "feasts and parties" Excavations also offer new evidence that a timber circle and a vast earthwork where the village once stood were linked to Stonehege—via road, river, and ritual. Together, the sites were part of a much larger religious complex, the archaeologists suggest. "Stonehenge isn't a monument in isolation. It is actually one of a pair—one in stone, one in timber.'' said Mike Parker Pearson. The Late Stone Age village—the largest ever found in Britain—was excavated in September 2006 at Durrington Walls, the world's largest known "henge," a type of circular earthwork. A giant timber circle once stood at Durrington, which is 1.75 miles (2.8 kilometers) from the celebrated circle of standing stones on Salisbury Plain. At Durrington the archaeologists discovered foundations of houses dating back to 4,600 years ago around the time construction began on Stonehenge. Excavations revealed the remains of eight wooden buildings. Surveys of the landscape have identified up to 30 more dwellings, Parker Pearson said. "We could have many hundreds of houses here," he added. The initial stone circle at Stonehenge—the so-called sarsen stones—has been radiocarbon-dated to between 2600 and 2500 B.C. The dates for the village are "exactly the same time, in radiocarbon terms, as for the building of the sarsens," Parker Pearson said. Six of the houses so far unearthed measured about 250 square feet (23 square meters) each and had wooden walls and clay floors. Fireplaces and furniture—such as cupboards and beds—could be discerned from their outlines in the earth, Parker Pearson said.

The Invisible Warship

It will be almost silent, nearly invisible to enemy radar—and capable of dropping six powerful missiles simultaneously on a single target up to 95 miles away. But the most important feature of the DDG1000 Zumwalt, the Navy's first new destroyer in 30 years, could be its versatility. The 600-foot-long ship will be just as comfortable in the deep ocean as in the mine-infested shallows of the Persian Gulf.
Yesterday’s big boats were designed for open-water standoffs, not hostile coastlines. They show up like giant bull’s-eyes on land-based radar installations. And the ships lack sufficient sensor systems to dodge the waterborne mines common to enemy harbors.
That’s not going to cut it for the fleet of the future. Captain Jim Syring, the DDG1000’s program manager, says the need for littoral dominance is obvious if you consider the shallow waters near potential conflict regions: “All you’ve got to do is look at the areas of interest: the Persian Gulf, the Sea of Japan, the Korean Peninsula.”
Whether it’s dropping off a SEAL team or launching missiles inland, the Zumwalt is going to have to slip in unnoticed. It will be quiet—the diesel engine’s noise will be stifled by an inch-thick rubber coating that Syring likens to elephant skin—and stealthy. The spinning dishes and antennas common to today’s ships easily register on enemy radar, so the DDG1000 will instead feature communications hardware that lies flat, embedded in the skin of the deckhouse. This sleek design, combined with a hull that slopes inward from sea level up, rather than outward like most ships, will scatter the energy from an enemy’s radar. According to Syring, on scanners the Zumwalt will look like a fishing boat.
Though hard to find, the DDG1000 will announce its presence with a bang. The Advanced Gun System will be able to fire 600 GPS-guided Long Range Land Attack Projectiles in only 30 minutes—or plant six of them in the same spot at the same time. Staggered around the ship’s perimeter, 80 launchers packed with Tomahawks and other missiles will provide additional power.
For added protection, a new dual-band radar system that searches both the sky and the sea surface will be able to locate something as small as a terrorist speeding in on a Jet Ski, and the ship’s bulbous front protrusion sports a super-sensitive sonar array for identifying underwater minefields. All that’s left now is to start cutting metal. Construction on the first of seven ships is expected to start early next year, with a planned delivery date of 2012.

DDG1000 ZumwaltPurpose: Multi-mission destroyer designed for shallow-water dominance Manufacturer: Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics Dimensions [feet]: 600 (length); 80.7 (beam); 27.6 (draft)

Weapons: Two 155-millimeter Advanced Gun System launchers; 80 Advanced Vertical Launch System cells; two 57-millimeter close-range guns

Cost: $2.3 billion

Clues to Human Origin

One of the more embarrassing mysteries of human evolution is that people are host to no fewer than three kinds of louse while most species have just one.
Even bleaker for the human reputation, the pubic louse, which gets its dates and residence-swapping opportunities when its hosts are locked in intimate embrace, does not seem to be a true native of the human body. Its closest relative is the gorilla louse. (Don’t even think about it.)
Louse specialists now seem at last to have solved the question of how people came by their superabundance of fellow travelers. And in doing so they have shed light on the two major turning points in the history of fashion: when people lost their body hair, and when they first made clothing.

Three kinds of louse call Homo sapiens their home, but each occupies a different niche on the human body. The head louse, Pediculus humanus, lives in the forest of fine hairs on the scalp. Its cousin, the body louse, lives not on the skin but in clothes. And the exclusive territory of the pubic louse, Phthirus pubis, is the coarser hairs of the crotch.
Lice are intimately adapted to their hosts and cannot long survive away from the body’s blood and warmth. If their host evolves into two species, the lice will do likewise. So biologists have long been puzzled over the fact that the human head louse is a sister species to the chimpanzee louse, but the pubic louse is closely related to the gorilla louse.
By comparing louse DNA, a team led by David L. Reed of the University of Florida has now reconstructed how this strange situation probably came about. Dr. Reed’s team collected pubic lice from a public health clinic in Salt Lake City. Samples of gorilla lice were obtained by members of the Mountain Gorilla Veterinary Project, which provides free health care to gorillas in the wild.
The number of DNA differences between the gorilla louse and the pubic louse indicates that they diverged some 3.3 million years ago, Dr. Reed and colleagues report in today’s issue of the journal Biomed Central Biology. Among people, the pubic louse is usually spread by sexual contact, but the gorilla louse could have been contracted in some other way.
“We’ll never know if it was sex or something more tame,” Dr. Reed said. What can be said about the transfer, he believes, is that it signals human ancestors had already lost their body hair by 3.3 million years ago, confining the human louse to the head and leaving the groin open to invasion by the gorilla louse.
Archaeologists contend that human ancestors lost their standard ape body hair when they left the shade of the forests for the hot, open savanna and needed bare skin for efficient sweating. Adaptation to the savanna was well in place by 1.7 million years ago. But loss of body hair could have begun earlier, and Dr. Reed’s result suggests a time for when people first became naked.
If people first became nudists 3.3 million years ago, when did they start to wear clothes? Surprisingly, lice once again furnish the answer. Though humans may long have worn loose garments like animal skin cloaks, the first tailored clothing would have been close-fitting enough to tempt the head louse to expand its territory. It evolved a new variety, the body louse, with claws adapted for clinging to fabric, not hairs.
In 2003, Mark Stoneking, a geneticist at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, estimated from DNA differences that the body louse evolved from the head louse about 107,000 years ago. The first sewn clothes were presumably made shortly before this time.
Probing back even earlier in louse evolution, Dr. Reed and his colleagues report that the two species of primate lice, Pediculus and Phthirus, probably diverged from each other on an ape host 13 million years ago. The divergence may have happened after the lice started to specialize in different parts of the body.
Some seven million years ago, this ancient ape species split into gorillas and the ancestors of humans and chimps, with both lineages infected by both species of lice. But Pediculus then fell extinct in its gorilla hosts, according to Dr. Reed’s reconstruction, and Phthirus vanished from the chimp-human ancestor. Next, chimps and humans diverged, and their joint louse diverged with them into Pediculus humanus and Pediculus schaeffi.
The last event in this history of human-louse cohabitation was the transfer of the gorilla’s Phthirus louse to people.
Dr. Stoneking said Dr. Reed’s reconstruction was “pretty reasonable” and said he agreed that acquisition of the gorilla’s louse indicated people had lost their body hair by then. “The transfer doesn’t have to be sexual,” he said, “but presumably it does require reasonably close contact.”

Future Flights

All Sonic, No BoomLong hampered because the planes were too loud to fly over land, supersonic air travel is now on its way back—without the big bang By Eric Hagerman March 2007

If you’re ever lucky enough to fly a Quiet Supersonic Transport between New York and Los Angeles, you’ll have just enough time to get through a movie—a short one. Instead of the usual six hours, it will be a 1,100mph, two-hour hop. The QSST, as the proposed luxury private jet is known, could be the first civilian supersonic plane approved for overland routes, thanks to aerodynamics designed to muzzle its sonic boom. Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works has been developing the project for six years under a $25-million contract from Supersonic Aerospace International (SAI), founded by Michael Paulson, son of Gulfstream founder Allen Paulson. The 12-passenger QSST would fly at between 47,000 and 57,000 feet with a range of 4,600 miles (Chicago to Rome, for example), and it doesn’t need an extended runway. Configured with 12 club chairs, a spacious bathroom and a sweet A/V system, the QSST is aimed at diplomats or executives with plenty of money—but little time—to spare.
Designed to fly between Mach 1.6 and 1.8 (1,056 to 1,188 mph), the two-engine gull-wing aircraft would leave a sonic wake that’s only one hundredth the strength of the Mach 2–capable Concorde, the 100-seat speed demon that wound up permanently grounded following a fatal accident in 2000. (High maintenance costs for the aging fleet and a struggling airline industry also contributed to its demise.)
Eliminating bone-rattling sonic booms is a major feat of aerodynamic hocus-pocus. When an aircraft travels faster than the speed of sound, it creates pressure waves in the air that collide with one another faster than they can dissipate, resulting in a loud crack, or sonic boom. The QSST, though it shares its general shape with the Concorde is less than half the size and uses fine-tuned aerodynamics to control the pressure generated as the plane displaces air at supersonic speeds. With air disturbances along the craft evened out, the QSST generates more shockwaves of smaller magnitude rather than two explosive reports. Tom Hartmann, the program manager at Lockheed, expects the boom to be imperceptible—quieter than a kite flying overhead.
Another key to quiet flight is its broad distribution of lift-generating surfaces. The QSST’s canards—the small wings near the front of the fuselage—and swept-V tail provide substantial lift, preventing the sharp, loud-boom-generating pressure change typical of larger, wider wings. Hartmann says the QSST is so sleek that it can fly 10 percent farther on its fuel supply supersonically than it can at subsonic speeds. “We could easily design a low-sonic-boom aircraft if it didn’t have to fly anywhere,” he says—that is, if the design didn't have to take fuel efficiency into consideration. “The challenge is to fly a long way. The hard part of this was to develop a low-drag design.”
The inverted-V tail also allows the two engines to be mounted far aft— a design feature that further separates the pressure waves and keeps them from crashing into one another. Normally, this engine placement would require extra material to support the cantilevered weight, but the inherent strength of the V tail's truss shape compensates.
The Federal Aviation Administration restricted the Concorde to transoceanic flights because that craft created sonic booms strong enough to rattle dishes on the ground below. Paulson says the QSST will meet the FAA’s stringent new noise regulations, which took effect at the beginning of 2006, and he’s hopeful that the quiet design will prompt a lifting of the ban on overland supersonic flights.
SAI is evaluating engine designs from General Electric, Pratt & Whitney and Rolls-Royce for a unit that produces 33,000 pounds of thrust (on par with a midsize airliner), for 66,000 pounds of total thrust from two engines. Paulson plans to settle on a design in the next year, assemble an international consortium to manufacture the jet, and put it on the market by 2014 for about $80 million. He’d like to roll out a fleet of 300 to 400 in the next 20 years. “The Concorde was a magnificent aircraft,” Paulson says, “but basically, it was 1960s technology. This is an idea whose time is overdue.”

Quiet Supersonic Transport (QSST)
Purpose: High-speed private flights over land and sea
Manufacturer: Lockheed Martin and Supersonic Aerospace International
Range: 4,600 miles
Speed: Mach 1.6 to 1.8 (approx. 1,056 mph to 1,188 mph)
Dimensions: 132.1 ft. length, 63 ft. wingspan
Capacity: 12 passengers, 3 crew
Cost (projected): $2.5 billion development cost; $80 million per aircraft
First flight (projected): 2011

The Future Of Work

You Snooze, You Lose!

Want to keep pace with the competition? Forget coffee—a new class of FDA-approved stimulants will keep you working harder, better, faster and stronger


As a species, we’ve hit the bedtime barrier. You can eat at your desk, socialize in the break room, and answer text messages on a date, but sooner or later, you’re going to have to sleep. “After 18, 19 hours awake, your brain function starts to fail,” says Dallas, Texas, sleep-medicine specialist Andrew O. Jamieson. Coffee might keep you up, “but you’re not going to be focused.”
Coffee? You might as well be commuting by buggy. Old-school stimulants like caffeine, amphetamines and the drug Ritalin are about to be marginalized by eugeroics. This emerging breed of “wakefulness” pills promises to keep the workers of tomorrow not just awake, but alert, on-task and feeling fine through the night and well into the next day. Remember these names, because they’re your future: Modafinil, approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1998 for the treatment of narcolepsy and marketed in the U.S. as Provigil, is already giving a competitive edge to everyone from Air Force pilots on 40-hour missions to (less legally) college students cramming for exams. The drug’s maker, Cephalon in Frazer, Pennsylvania, is awaiting FDA approval for armodafinil, which promises even longer periods of wakefulness on a single dose, and Irvine, California–based Cortex is working on its own drug, code-named CX717 and developed with funding from the military. The drugs are targeted at sleep disorders like narcolepsy, but it’s their dramatic potential influence on the workplace that has researchers and efficiency experts buzzing.
Scientists understand how the drugs work only broadly. Unlike traditional stimulants, eugeroics don’t simply jazz up the whole body. Instead they tweak specific sleep-related mechanisms in the brain, so users don’t feel jittery or wired, just alert. And in experiments with CX717, sleep-deprived rhesus monkeys on the drug often outperformed their own well-rested but undrugged best efforts on mental-performance tests. Modafinil, too, “is definitely a cognitive enhancer,” says cognitive psychopharmacologist Barbara Sahakian of the University of Cambridge. In her studies of alert human volunteers, the drug improved planning, concentration and impulse-control skills, and even boosted some forms of memory.
Here’s the rub: The drugs don’t replace sleep, and decades of research show that sleep deprivation prompts immune dysfunction, depression and other disorders. Sleep isn’t something we should be looking to phase out of our lives.Yet the economic pressure to stay out of bed is intense. Cutting out four hours of sleep a night would free up almost 1,500 extra hours a year. That’s an additional nine months’ worth of standard 40-hour workweeks—plenty of time to earn a promotion or start your own company on the side (or, worst case, slog away in obscurity). From Napoleon to Edison to Churchill, many of history’s most notable figures got by on only a few hours of sleep a night. Give an entire workforce the energy of a Thomas Edison, and you’ve got a new Industrial Revolution.
For better or worse, when the trend takes hold, there will be no going back. Imagine sticking to double lattes while everyone else in the office—or at the start-up down the road—is juicing on the latest eugeroic, and you’ll seem as naive and obsolete as the NFL linesman who swears by protein shakes alone. Any worker could benefit, says University of Virginia bioethicist Jonathan Moreno, author of the recent book Mind Wars. “But for consultants or contractors, people who aren’t on a salary? The incentives are ridiculous.”