Monthly Archives: August 2007

Energy beam weapon could be used in Iraq

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MSNBC: Since 2003 US military leaders repeatedly and urgently requested — and were denied — an energy beam weapon called the Active Denial System. The device, which is perched on a Humvee or a flatbed truck, has a range of 500 yards and uses directed-energy beams that can penetrate a few millimeters under the skin causing pain. As the soldiers train it on a crowd, the pain makes them disperse.
“I am convinced that the tragedy at Fallujah would not have occurred if an Active Denial System had been there,” Air Force science advisor Gene McCall told Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to an e-mail obtained by Associated Press. The system should become “an immediate priority,” McCall said.
However, the international red cross and other non-profit organizations, and other governments have a number of concerns related to the deployment of energy-based weapons, including whether such devices break the Geneva Convention on torture and the convention on conventional weapons. See also an earlier Physics Today news pick on laser blinding weapons being deployed to Iraq.
Laser blinding weapons in Iraq
Federation of American Scientists web site on the Convention on Conventional Weapons
convention on conventional weapons web site
Active Denial System wikipedia entry

Tenn. neutron accelerator sets record

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Houston Chronicle: The $1.4 billion Spallation Neutron Source facility, though still powering up, has established a new mark as the world’s most powerful accelerator-based source of neutrons for scientific research.
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory announced Thursday that the SNS’s neutron beam reached 183 kilowatts on Aug. 11, surpassing the 163-kilowatt record held by the ISIS facility at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory near Oxford, England.
Although the capacity of the ISIS facility is being doubled, Oak Ridge officials said their accelerator is designed to produce up to 10 times more neutrons than now.

MacCready, scientist and inventor dead at 81

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LA Times: Paul B. MacCready, an accomplished meteorologist, a world-class glider pilot and a respected aeronautical engineer, has died. He was 81. The Caltech-trained scientist and inventor created the Gossamer Condor — the first successful human-powered airplane–as well as other innovative aircraft.
MacCready died in his sleep at his Pasadena home Tuesday, according to an announcement from AeroVironment Inc., the Monrovia-based company he founded. The statement said he had been recently diagnosed with a serious ailment but the cause of death was not listed.

Mapping the Earth’s Engine

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Science: Particle physicists and geophysicists rarely meet to compare notes, but earlier this year researchers from these two disciplines gathered to discuss antineutrinos (the antiparticle of the neutrino). These fundamental particles are a by-product of reactions occurring in nuclear reactors and pass easily through Earth, but they are also generated deep inside Earth by the natural radioactive decay of uranium, thorium, and potassium (in which case they are called geoneutrinos). Particle physicists have recently shown that it is possible to detect geoneutrinos and thus establish limits on the amount of radioactive energy produced in the interior of our planet.

Scientists Seeking New Homes for Orbiting Climate Sensors

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Science: Free the NPOESS Five. That’s the message from U.S. climate scientists hoping to find a way into space for five sensors stripped last year from plans for a multibillion-dollar satellite system (Science, 16 June 2006, p. 1580). An upcoming report lays out their preferences for salvaging the sensors, which are innocent victims of massive cost overruns in the $11 billion National Polar-Orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS). But those choices–essentially, sticking the sensors back onto NPOESS or flying them on separate missions–are running up against tight budgets and a government decision to emphasize short-term monitoring for military and civilian weather forecasts over long-term measurements of global climate.

Asian Powers Shoot for the Moon With Orbiting Research Missions

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Science: If the moon shines more brightly on Asia in the next few years, it may be because three Asian powers are using a trio of spacecraft to shed some scientific light on the lunar surface. Barring last-minute glitches, Japan will launch its Selene mission on 13 September. China’s Chang’e 1 is expected to go up within a few weeks of that launch, and India aims to follow in April with Chandrayaan-I.
Lunar scientists are cheering the science-driven missions, which promise the most detailed look at the moon since NASA’s Apollo program. The results could help resolve outstanding questions about the moon’s hazy origins and evolution and prepare for possible crewed landings. And although most data will be shared with European and U.S. colleagues, Asian scientists will be spearheading the analyses. “It’s a good chance for Asian scientists” to make a mark in lunar studies, says Hitoshi Mizutani, a planetary scientist who led Selene’s development until retiring 2 years ago from the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science (ISAS) in Sagamihara, Japan.

Air force had early warning of pulsars

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Nature: It was one of the most important astronomical discoveries of the twentieth century, and it became one of the more controversial when only one of the discoverers received a Nobel prize. Now, 81-year-old Charles Schisler, who forty years ago was a US Air Force staff sergeant at a remote Alaskan radar outpost, has come forward to explain how he had used a military radar to identify around a dozen radio sources, some of which were pulsars, months before the science community officially discovered the astronomical objects.
Astronomers who have seen Schisler’s meticulous logs believe that he spotted a bright pulsar in the nearby Crab Nebula months before the first scientific observation of a pulsar was published in Nature (A. Hewish et al. Nature 217, 709–713; 1968). Although Schisler never knew exactly what he was seeing, the story should be counted as an early pulsar spotting, says Jocelyn Bell Burnell, an astronomer at the University of Oxford, UK, and one of the authors on the original paper. “He happened to be a very observant person,” Bell Burnell says.

Scientists sue NASA, Caltech over deep new background checks

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International Herald Tribune: Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientists and engineers sued NASA and the California Institute of Technology on Thursday, challenging extensive new background checks that the space exploration center and other federal agencies began requiring in the wake of the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles by 28 plaintiffs. Many have worked on such projects as the Mars rovers, the Galileo probe to Jupiter and the Cassini mission to Saturn, but none are involved in classified work, according to the suit. It seeks class-action status to represent similar JPL employees.
Caltech was sued because it manages JPL for NASA and employs its staff. The suit also named the U.S. Department of Commerce, which is involved in promulgating federal identification standards.

Victories Come Slowly in Cleanup Of Soviet Bloc Nuclear Materials

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Washington Post: David Hoffman reports on the efforts to contain the flow of nuclear material into the wrong hands, by following Sen. Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) and former senator Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) on a visit to Podolsk, Russia.
Last Wednesday, five green reinforced containers holding a total of 21 pounds of uranium, about a third of it highly enriched, which had been quietly removed from a research reactor in Otwock, Poland, were opened up in Podolsk and blended down for use in nuclear power plants.
Lugar, ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said, “People around the world would be reassured if they saw what we saw today.” Nunn and Lugar who sponsored legislation at the end of the cold war to remove thousands of tons of weapons-grade radioactive material from loosely guarded sites remain worried at the slow pace of the decommissioning program.