747 Radio-Ate

A 'Beautiful' Night (washingtonpost.com)

By Sharon Waxman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 25, 2002
HOLLYWOOD, March 24
A film about a math genius suffering from mental illness and an epic fantasy adventure set in an imaginary Middle Earth took top honors tonight at the 74th Academy Awards.
"A Beautiful Mind," about Nobel laureate John Nash's struggle with mental illness, won Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actress and Adapted Screenplay, while "The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring," a fantasy based on the books by J.R.R. Tolkien, won four Oscars, mainly for technical achievement.

2020hindsight.org
Gorgeous, gorgeous
Males n Females
X Ys n XXs
Fight-or-flight n Tend-and-befriend Over the weekend, Dave W commented on differences between men n women. 'Tis interesting in light of an article I was sent by email (and my Google followup): All those ol' studies on coping with stress that emphasized the human tendency toward fight-or-flight were done on males. When a coupla researchers conducted a stress study on females, lo, they uncovered a different set of behaviors: tend-and-befriend.

National Space Biomedical
Research Institute
News Release
"Star Wars" like technology closer than galaxies far away A portable, ultrasound device is being developed that could one day be used to find and treat ailments using non-invasive surgical treatments.
HOUSTON - Technology introduced by members of a galaxy far away, a long time ago, is now one step closer to reality.
And, it's with funding from a space medicine research institute that this breakthrough device will one day kill tumors and stop internal bleeding without knives, scalpels or stitches - basically without surgery as we know it.

CNN.com
Twin probes set for mission to map Earth gravity
March 15, 2002
Twin probes will use a microwave beam, depicted by red lines, to track each other.
By Kate Tobin
CNN Sci-Tech
(CNN) -- Barring any last-minute snags, NASA and the German Space Agency will launch two satellites into orbit Saturday on a five-year mission to study Earth's gravity field.
The Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment, or GRACE, aims to map variations in the Earth's gravity field as it changes over time in response to shifts in sea levels, the ebb and flow of glaciers, the seasonal melting and freezing of ice sheets, and other such fluctuations.
Further Information
GRACE-short for the Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment
CNN NASA satellite pair to tackle weighty task

BBC News - AFRICA
Zimbabwe enacts media curbs
Journalists will need government accreditation
A new law curbing the activities of independent and foreign news media in Zimbabwe has been enacted by the government.
Local journalists will have to be accredited by a government-appointed panel, and foreign correspondents will be officially barred from working full-time inside Zimbabwe.

FOXNews.com
Florida Man Fights to Keep 'ATHEIST' Licence Plate
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — State officials want to take back a license plate reading "ATHEIST" more than 16 years after issuing it to the vice president of Atheists of Florida.
Steven Miles tools around Gainesville with the vanity license plate and says it is a form of self-expression.

FOXNews.com
Much of U.S. in Grip of Dangerous Drought
NEW YORK — Gripped by drought, states from the Atlantic Ocean nearly to the Pacific have become a veritable tinderbox ready for the spark and there's no relief in sight, weather forecasters said Thursday.
The nationwide drought is more than a simple dry spell. The entire state of Wyoming has been declared a drought disaster area, and vast stretches of the Southeast and the West are ripe for wildfires.
Further Information
CNN.Com — Drought 'sleeping giant' in U.S.
U.S. Drought monitor maps, updated each Thursday at 8:30 a.m. Eastern Time.

BBC News
ENGLAND
Dolphins face extinction, MPs told
Hundreds of dolphins have been washed ashore
The common dolphin could vanish from waters between England and France, MPs have been warned.
Torbay MP Adrian Sanders said during a Westminster Hall debate on Wednesday, record numbers of dolphins and porpoises had been found washed up on beaches in England and France since January.

Yahoo! News
Russian Co. Presents 'Space Plane'
By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV Associated Press Writer
ZHUKOVSKY, Russia (AP) - Eager to open up a space tourism market, a Russian aerospace company presented a mock-up Thursday of a "space plane" that would give an adventurer willing to pay nearly $100,000 the chance to experience three minutes in zero gravity on the edge of space.
Further Information
BBC News - Russia unveils tourists' spaceship

The American Experience
Race for the Superbomb
Nuclear Blast Mapper
Map a Blast
Would you survive a nuclear blast? Nuclear Blast Mapper will show you how terribly destructive thermonuclear weapons are. Step 1: Choose a Weapon...
1 Megaton Surface Blast: Pressure Damage Map The fission bomb detonated over Hiroshima had the explosive blast equivalent to 12,500 tons of TNT. Blast Mapper's hydrogen bomb, hypothetically detonated on the earth's surface at any location you choose, has about 80 times the blast power of that 1945 explosion.
Further Information
DOE Nevada Photo Library - Atmospheric Nuclear testing images

CNN.com
Future looks bright for new comet
Comet Ikeya-Zhang might have last passed this way 341 years ago.
Richard Stenger
(CNN) -- An unexpected visitor to the inner solar system is brightening rapidly and could put on quite a celestial show as it approaches our planet, astronomers said.
Discovered in early February, Comet Ikeya-Zhang has brightened more quickly than expected and is now visible to the naked eye, according to comet experts.

BBC News
SCI/TECH
Russia unveils tourists's spaceship
By Caroline Wyatt
BBC Moscow correspondent
A Russian company has unveiled the prototype of the world's first reusable spaceship, aimed at space tourists.
C21 is fully automatic, and the idea is that even with very little training, one of the passengers could sit at the controls.

ABCNEWS.com
Wildlife Official Battled Hijackers
Hero of Flight 93
Wildlife Official Took On Terrorists
The Associated Press
P O R T L A N D, Ore., March 14 — A former Oregon wildlife manager's law enforcement credentials, found near the wreckage of the cockpit of United Airlines Flight 93, suggest he was involved in the fight to retake the plane from terrorists on Sept. 11.

BBC Online News
Blue jet streaks high
The lights move into the upper atmosphere at a rapid rate
By Dr David Whitehouse
BBC News Online science editor
Lightning-like flashes called blue jets may link the electrical energy of thunderstorms and the charged layer of the upper atmosphere.
Writing in the journal Nature Victor Pasko at Pennsylvania State University, US, and colleagues used high-speed low-light cameras to capture an image of a fleeting blue jet that extended from the top of a thunderstorm 70 kilometres up into the ionosphere.

BBC News
SCI/TECH
Locking out the hackers
Broadband users worried that their PC is vulnerable will soon be able to buy a "black box" that watches over their net link to stop viruses and hack attacks.
At the CeBIT technology fair in Hanover, anti-virus firm Trend Micro has unveiled its Gatelock device, which it hopes will prove popular with worried surfers.

Yahoo! News
Thriving Peru Coca Hampers Drug War
By MONTE HAYES
Associated Press Writer
TINGO MARIA, Peru (AP) - The jungle-draped mountains that loom over this town in the Huallaga valley conceal a truth that anti-narcotics officials have been loath to admit.
After years of declining prices and production, coca crops are on the rise again in Peru. Even more worrisome to U.S. counternarcotics officials, Colombian drug traffickers are promoting poppy plants, the raw material of heroin.

ABCNEWS.com—Researchers
Chewing Gum May Make People Smarter:
By Jeremy Laurence
LONDON (Reuters) - The often-maligned act of chewing gum could in fact make us smarter, according to British research.
A joint study carried out by the University of Northumbria and the Cognitive Research Unit, Reading, has found that chewing gum has a positive effect on cognitive tasks such as thinking and memory.

CNN.com
Smart Mars rovers to think, work as team
March 13, 2002
Two autonomous rovers approached, gripped and carried this beam more than 164 feet (50 m) in a recent test.
From Allard Beutel
NASA is working on a new breed of rovers whose sole purpose is to work together on Mars. They are robots that basically act like synchronized swimmers for construction work.
The space agency envisions a martian building crew consisting of multiple rovers. Prototypes can now lift and move an eight-foot metal beam.

New Scientist
Satellites spot city subsidence
NewScientist.com
Subsidence near two London tunnels constructed in the last decade is revealed in new images produced from satellite data. The ground movement appears near London Underground's Jubilee line extension and a London Electricity tunnel.