Spacewalk thruster incident alarms NASA -- Coordination breakdown could have led to toxic exposure

By James Oberg
NBC News space analyst
Special to MSNBC
Updated: 4:01 p.m. ET Jan. 31, 2005

HOUSTON - "The two men aboard the international space station could have been exposed to an unexpectedly hazardous situation during their otherwise highly successful spacewalk last week, MSNBC.com has learned.



Behind closed doors, the origin of what one source called a “major close-call incident” and NASA’s reaction to it are the subject of high-level dispute within the space agency and between the space station's U.S. and Russian partners.

U.S. astronaut Leroy Chiao and Russian cosmonaut Salizhan Sharipov spent five and a half hours working outside the space station last Thursday, performing a series of assembly and inspection tasks. It was the first spacewalk of the mission for the pair, who are halfway through their six-month stay on the station.

During the spacewalk, the station turned slightly and needed to be readjusted periodically by firing rocket thrusters located on the Russian half of the station. On at least one occasion, and contrary to agreed upon mission rules, these thrusters were activated when the two crew members were working dangerously close to them.

This put them at risk of both thermal damage from the thrusters themselves and, more likely, to chemical contamination from the fuel used by the thrusters. Even in small amounts, any fuel splashed on the space suits could render the air toxic in the station when the men returned from their spacewalk.

That neither of those events actually happened isn't reassuring to those at NASA who want to know why safety measures weren't more closely followed. Engineers at NASA who have spoken privately with MSNBC.com say they are studying the incident all the more intently because the next scheduled spacewalk, in March, could expose the crew to even more hazards of this kind.

Russian mission control in charge
At a press conference prior to the spacewalk, NASA flight director Derek Hassman commented on the difficulties that reduction to a two-person crew since the Columbia disaster had created.

“One of the challenges of the two-person spacewalk is we don’t have the third crew member inside to respond to unforeseen situations or circumstances that, although unlikely, may arise,” he said. Events on the spacewalk would confirm his prescience.

Because this spacewalk used Russian suits, was from the Russian airlock, and involved work on the outside of the Russian module, the Moscow mission control center was in charge of all activities. The NASA center in Houston was staffed on an advisory level but had no operational authority.

Chiao used the “Orlan” suit with serial number 26, used four times by the previous American on ISS, Michael Fincke. Sharipov had suit number 27, which had never been used before. Although the Russians usually use suits with different colored stripes –- red or blue lines on the legs and arms -– for some reason no blue-lined suit was available, so aside from some small patches on their arms, the men looked identical.

Another unusual factor appeared just prior to the spacewalk. Because of the station’s orientation to the sun, the gearbox of the pointable dish antenna used for hi-speed communications had gotten too cold to safely operate. So although voice and telemetry signals could still be transmitted via smaller antennas, no television images were expected.

The spacewalk was authorized to proceed without television coverage.

“TV is highly desirable, but is not a hard requirement,” a NASA commentator explained. In Moscow, a Russian spokesman voiced the same sentiments to a Novosti reporter: “This trouble will not affect the fulfillment of the planned extravehicular activity,” he said.

Once the spacewalk began, however, television scenes were received intermittently, as the antenna temperature fluctuated near the critical limit and as the line-of-sight to relay satellites suffered frequent blockages from station structures. In Houston, controllers closely watched the images whenever they became available, but in Moscow, in would turn out, they did not.

Enter the thrusters
The spacewalk ended successfully after 5 hours and 38 minutes. The planned equipment had been deployed, and in an important discovery, the crewmen had noted some strange "goo" around the dump ports from Russian life support equipment that had been mysteriously malfunctioning in recent months.

But those who followed the spacewalk live on NASA TV, or later watched the tape, noticed some other strange events. Less than an hour into the spacewalk, the gyroscopes that keep the space station oriented had become overloaded and needed assistance.

“The Russian thrusters are now back in control of the space station,” the NASA commentator announced. “The crew is taking a pause to allow the thrusters to reestablish control” against what he called “a slight deviance” that was “nothing significant.”

“Now I can see the thruster firing,” one of the spacewalkers commented a few minutes later, as reported by an interpreter (both men were speaking Russian). Speaking to the other spacewalker, he continued: “It is very interesting to watch the thrusters firing right behind your back.”

Over the remaining hours of the spacewalk, while the men worked at various locations on the outside of the space station, the thrusters came on again and again. Television views would show the men in one area, and brief white thruster plumes appearing on another section of the module. But no audio discussion over the NASA TV channel gave any indication of any concern.

NASA’s internal status report, which is not distributed to the public, later contained a cryptic paragraph on thruster activity during the spacewalk: “Attitude control momentum again was observed to build up in the US [Control Moment Gyros] from reacting to external torques,” the report stated. This “required control authority transfer to [Russia’s Service Module] thrusters to permit gyro desaturation.” After a brief period, “control then returned to the CMGs”.

That is, the station was, as in normal, kept in position by spinning up or slowing down heavy gyroscopes on the U.S. section. But when something "torqued" (or forced to turn) the station to a degree beyond the ability of the gyroscopes to handle, rocket thrusters on the Russian side had to be turned on to relieve the load on the gyroscopes.

NASA’s official public report made no mention of the orientation control issue or of the Russian thruster firings near the spacewalkers.

NASA warning reportedly ignored
However, within hours of the apparently uneventful completion of the spacewalk, the halls at NASA’s Johnson Space Center were abuzz with rumors about a serious contingency that had come up.

“You might want to ask about turning on a Russian thruster when the crew is in the keep-out zone,” one contact e-mailed me, “and the U.S. flight director is telling [the Russian] not to because they are [too close].”

Subsequent private inquiries obtained several different -– and sometimes conflicting –- accounts of the incident. Requests for additional information from NASA officials in Houston have not been answered.

Sources explained that the Russian thrusters that control the station’s orientation are in two sets. For pitching and yawing (turning the station up-down and side-to-side), the thrusters of the docked Progress supply ship are wired into the station’s autopilot. But for rolling the station along its long axis, the Progress thrusters are too weak, so the main thrusters along the back rim of the Russian service module are used. Since rotation control involves the thruster pushing largely parallel to the station’s rim, the thruster plume sweeps out a large area near the station skin.

“Yes, a major close-call incident occurred,” one source claimed. While installing one experiment, he continued, the crew had to work close to a thruster. By prior agreement, when crewmen were in this zone, the Russian thrusters were supposed to remain disarmed. But if the thrusters were urgently needed, the crew was to be instructed to remain outside a "keep-out zone" until they could again be disarmed.

During a brief period when television views had become available, Houston controllers saw the crew move to a worksite within such a zone. They then heard Moscow announce that the thrusters would be armed to respond to another orientation deviation.

According to multiple sources, Hassman, the NASA flight director, told his Moscow counterpart that the crew was too close to the thruster. Moscow disagreed and told Hassman that the crew was safely at another worksite. But the NASA team could see on television that this wasn’t the case. It became clear that since they had assumed that no television would be available for the spacewalk, the Russians were not even looking at the NASA video feed.

Witnesses delicately described “an exchange” between the two flight directors in Houston and Moscow, but the net result was that the Russian ground controllers did not tell the spacewalkers to leave the forbidden area, nor did they disarm the thrusters for more than ten minutes, until proper orientation had been restored. During this period, say sources, the crew reported thrusters firing near them.

Although some NASA engineers insisted that the crew would have to assume they had been contaminated, and should be instructed to inspect their suits and to make sure all sides of the suits were bathed in sunlight long enough to "bake out" any contamination, NASA eventually decided to assume that there had been no contamination. No special measures were requested. The Russians, meantime, continued to insist that nothing at all had happened.

The mysterious 'phantom torque'
In Houston, NASA officials have set up a special team to investigate the incident. The group will determine what changes may be needed in U.S.-Russian control procedures before the next spacewalk in two months.

Meanwhile, neither side can agree on what is causing the so-called "phantom torque" that is pushing the station out of alignment during spacewalks to begin with.

While the NASA TV commentator described the “phantom torque” as appearing “when the crew is imparting a force” to the outside of the station, a simple familiarity with Newton's Laws of Motions shows that this explanation is spurious.

There is no force without a counterbalancing force. Any push on the outside of the station that made the station turn away from its desired orientation, would require the pushing party -– the astronaut –- to go flying off into space. Just banging on the outside, as long as you are securely attached, creates no rotational forces.

What is actually happening is that something besides the spacewalkers’ motion is creating a genuine force against the side of the station. Somehow, a small amount of material is being sprayed away from the station, enough that over time the station builds up an unwanted rotation.

As reported on last year by MSNBC.com, NASA believes this force comes from water vapor sprayed out the back of the Russian-made spacesuits to keep them cool. The Russians, however, do not want to blame their suits, and insist the force comes from slight air leakage from their airlock.

“Until it is resolved,” a source e-mailed, “we’ll continue to have this problem for every [Russian] EVA.”

Almost all of the work to be conducted during the crew’s second (and final) spacewalk will take place at the far end of the Russian segment, where the disturbing torques from their spacesuits will be greatest -– and where they will be closest to the Russian rocket thrusters that will have to be activated to counter these forces.

At the very least, NASA will likely redefine its authority for spacewalker safety with its Russian partners. It also may reconsider its nonchalant attitude toward performing such spacewalks without television coverage.

And as analysts more closely examine exactly where the crew was in relation to the Russian thrusters when they fired, NASA may also need to question the real-time thinking that led controllers to assume, in the absence of proof, that there had been no contamination. This is the opposite of the proper attitude of assuming the worst until a better appraisal could be justified. Such a culture remains too frighteningly similar to the one that failed to prevent and then failed to recognize the factors that killed seven astronauts only two years ago this week. "
© 2005 MSNBC Interactive

Joy Over New Shuttle Eases Columbia Pain

"By MARCIA DUNN

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - Two years after Columbia's demise, excitement over the space shuttle fleet's return to the skies in just a few short months is finally overtaking the agony of the accident.

In the past few weeks, two special deliveries have boosted morale among shuttle workers and provided tangible evidence they are rounding the corner.

One is a special tool to inspect the next shuttle while in orbit for any damage to its thermal-protective skin. The other is a brand new fuel tank guaranteed by NASA not to shed big chunks of foam insulation that could harm the shuttle.

Those are two of the biggest technical changes resulting from a lengthy review of what destroyed Columbia and killed seven astronauts on that still painfully vivid Saturday morning, Feb. 1, 2003.

It's appropriate, workers say, that two of the most crucial items for safely going into space again are finally at Kennedy Space Center, just in time for the second anniversary of the tragedy.

'We won't ever forget that. But when we have something like this to work on, it gives us a lot of enthusiasm and pride to focus on the future,' said payload operations manager David Schubert. He was standing next to a 50-foot inspection boom, the new tool astronauts will use to make sure the shuttle has reached space unscathed.

For the first time since Columbia went down, 'we're in pretty much known territory,' said NASA's top spaceflight official, Bill Readdy, a former space shuttle commander. 'We know how to process vehicles. We know how to get to the launch pad from here.'

'You can just feel it in the air,' observed shuttle program manager Bill Parsons. Especially satisfying, he said, is knowing that this spring's flight will help the two men aboard the international space station. The shuttle Discovery will deliver much-needed groceries and replacement parts.

For virtually everyone, the next launch - possibly as early as May 12 - is deeply personal.

'We all want to do this in memory of the crew,' said Sandy Coleman, project manager over the fuel tank. 'This is for them and this is what they would have wanted us to do. We knew them. They knew the dangers of spaceflight, and if it had been reversed, they would have been doing it for us.'

The fuel tank will be mounted to a pair of booster rockets in just over a week, and Discovery will be attached to the towering threesome in March for the long-awaited trip to the launch pad.

If Discovery is not flying by early June, NASA will have to wait until mid-July because of the unwavering requirement to launch the shuttle in daylight. That's to make sure NASA gets clear photos of the launch to make sure no damage occurred.

NASA guarantees that after two solid years of scrutiny and re-engineering, nothing bigger than a dinner roll will come off the fuel tank's foam exterior at liftoff, too small to do the kind of damage that brought down Columbia.

Compare that with the suitcase-size chunk of foam insulation that ripped away during Columbia's launch and gouged a sizable hole in the left wing. The hole was harmless in orbit, but during re-entry let in atmospheric gases hot enough to melt the wing from the inside out. The shuttle came apart over Texas, just 16 minutes from the Cape Canaveral landing strip where the astronauts' families and NASA hotshots - like Readdy - were waiting.

The bottom line, according to Readdy, is that even though a dinner roll is the maximum allowable size for flyaway foam, any pieces that do pop off will likely be more along the size of an inconsequential corn flake or two.

NASA is still trying to figure out just how small a piece of foam could cause catastrophic damage. It seems the shuttle is even more vulnerable than engineers thought. Mathematical models used to sort that out, however, tend to 'pile worst upon worst upon worst,' Readdy is quick to point out.

This time around, NASA has backup-upon-backup-upon-backup plans - just in case it's wrong about the fuel tank losing foam.

Discovery's seven astronauts will have a hole-repair kit, albeit rudimentary and not nearly as sophisticated as engineers had hoped. They also will have the option of moving into the space station to await rescue by shuttle Atlantis.

Most important, they will have the new fuel tank and the new laser-eyed inspection boom.

For Discovery's commander, Eileen Collins, it all comes down to this: 'If it wasn't safe, I wouldn't get on it.'

Unlike the Columbia astronauts, 'we've got a lot of things going in our favor,' said her co-pilot, James Kelly. 'When you're on a crew, whether it's an airplane or on the space shuttle, if you know the health of your vehicle, then you can start making intelligent decisions about what you need to do.'"

Table tennis stars auction trophies

By MISC-TSUNAMI-LAI-CHAK

HONG KONG (AP)

"Table tennis stars auction trophies: "HONG KONG (AP) - Hong Kong's table tennis stars are auctioning off recently won trophies from Europe to raise money for tsunami survivors.

Doubles partners Li Ching and Ko Lai-chak, who won silver at the Olympics Games in Athens last year, will sell their trophies from recent wins in Slovenia and Croatia, the Hong Kong Table Tennis Association said in a statement Thursday. The trophies will be auctioned before the final match of a local tournament on Sunday.

Other items used by the Hong Kong table tennis team will also be sold, it said. Proceeds will be donated to the Hong Kong Red Cross."

PENMANSHIP: Write it right even if your computer crippled you

BY MARGARIA FICHTNER

mfichtner@herald.com

"On the table before them lay a large sheet of parchment, the ''unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America.'' Yet on that August day in 1776 the delegates, black flies nibbling at their legs, squandered little time on ceremony in the stifling room. Congress president John Hancock picked up a quill and, with a quick flourish, signed his name. The simple gesture produced the most familiar bit of penmanship in U.S. history, a signature as synonym, corporate logo and, now during National Handwriting Week, gentle reminder to mind our P's and Q's

The week honors what would have been Hancock's 268th birthday, but it also calls attention to a skill that many of us -- keyboard-dependent, e-mail and instant-message graphophobes who barely can scrawl their names on a credit-card receipt -- no longer practice with much pleasure or verve. ''We're raising generations of children who won't write anything,'' etiquette expert Letitia Baldrige says from her home in Washington, the words brittle with exasperation. 'If they wrote a thank-you note on a lawnmower it would be great rather than nothing at all. What it is is going on record, . . . and that's something we haven't taught our children. We think, `Oh, a telephone call will do,' . . . but it doesn't. . . .''

Still, Baldrige, who served as Jacqueline Kennedy's White House chief of staff and has written several books on how to navigate the sometimes treacherous social currents of diplomatic, corporate and personal life, is no sanctimonious scold. She eagerly bends some rules and breaks others. Given the pressures of today's world, she says, well-mannered people may now type thank-you letters, even condolence notes on their computers, provided they print them out on good paper and take a few seconds to sprinkle some handwritten words along with a signature at the bottom.

''Especially if you have handwriting like I do,'' Baldrige says. 'My handwriting was never very good to begin with, and I had eight years of Sacred Heart nuns on my back. They insisted that no young lady was a real young lady unless she wrote beautifully. And so my handwriting was bad then, and now that I have arthritis, it's terrible. So I put everything on a computer, but I also write something personal at the bottom, and I always say, `I'm sorry. Because of arthritis I couldn't hand write this. I apologize.' ''

Baldrige, who was born in Miami Beach, might be comforted to know that South Florida public-school third-graders, like many of their parents and grandparents, still study the traditional Palmer Method of cursive handwriting. ''Everyone has to know how to sign their names,'' says Shezette Blue-Small, curriculum specialist with Broward County Schools. ``And in order to do that they have to know how to write in cursive. It's also a quicker way to write. We know that everybody's using computers, but if you have to take notes and don't have shorthand in your background, then cursive is much quicker.''

With any luck, at least some of these children, learning to trace their AaBbCc's at a time when more people than ever are scribbling poems and keeping journals, will, like Hancock, polish their loops and downstrokes all their lives.

''I'm picturing his signature as controlled and very even, and it's artistic, isn't it? And doesn't it have all kinds of visual flair?'' asks Lena Rivkin, a graphologist from Studio City, Calif., who advises Fortune 500 companies on the attributes and quirks that lie embedded in the handwriting of employees and job applicants. And while it is unlikely that a modern-day boss would hire even an ex-Founding Father solely on the basis of his elongated J, elaborately looped K and fancy underscoring -- ''Your signature doesn't say that much,'' Rivkin insists -- Hancock's John Hancock, archaically flamboyant and large enough for England's King George to read without his spectacles, still seems self-aware, decisive and grand.

The Writing Instrument Manufacturers Association reports that U.S. consumers bought $4.5 billion worth of pens, pencils and markers in 2002, the last year for which figures are available, up 3.7 percent from 2001. ''About half the pens we sell are fountain pens,'' says Steve Leveen, founder of Levenger, the Delray Beach-based supplier of instruments and accessories for writers and readers. The grandson of an itinerant penmanship instructor, Leveen is steeped, rather charmingly, in the history of the writing arts, from ''The first replacement for the natural feather came about 1825 when, in the Industrial Revolution in the United States, they started producing, God forbid, steel-nib pens. . . . '' to ``the disposable ballpoint pen that we can now find at the Holiday Inn is the answer to our prayers, but. . . . ''

No surprise, then, that even in his business dealings, Leveen often writes by hand. ''I write correspondence cards, because I find that I can write a few sentences to a customer or an associate as fast as I can do an e-mail,'' he says `` . . . I use a broad fountain pen, because people who love fountain pens recognize when you write with one, and they appreciate it. And also it's just fun.''

Close Human Relative Nearly Extinct

"A close relative to the chimpanzee that is thought to be the closest human relative may be on the verge of extinction, scientists say.



Bonobos, or pygmy chimpanzees, have been hunted so extensively that their survival is at risk, warn officials at the World Wildlife Fund.

"The world could soon lose the primate species that shares the greatest genetic connection to humans," said Richard Carroll, a primatologist and director of WWF's Central Africa program. "Bonobos are fascinating creatures and little understood. They have the only great ape society led by females, with a sophisticated social structure that encourages cooperation and peace and settles disputes through sex."

Found only in the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo in Central Africa, bonobos were believed to once number as many as 50,000. But preliminary results from the first systematic survey of a known bonobo stronghold found more evidence of poachers than bonobos, indicating that there may be as few as 10,000 left in the wild.

Bonobos, along with other species, are targeted by hunters for meat for personal consumption and for the commercial bushmeat trade.

The survey was conducted in Congo's 90,000-square-mile Salonga National Park, a protected area the size of Holland. The first data available, from about a third of the park, show evidence of very few bonobos. No bonobos were encountered, and nests and dung were seen in only a quarter of the area surveyed, at lower densities than previously measured.

"These preliminary results are obviously disturbing," Carroll said. "Salonga National Park was created in 1970 specifically to safeguard bonobos and we thought it was the least disturbed and best protected habitat for the bonobo. Based on how bad it looks here, we can assume that across the Congo, bonobos are in crisis."

Photo Credit: WWF-Canon / Martin Harvey

Universal Translator Might be Needed to Understand ET

By Douglas Vakoch
SETI Institute

"Will we ever find a primer for decoding messages from extraterrestrials? Last month, anthropologists who gathered for a major conference in Atlanta, Georgia heard some news that will be sobering for SETI enthusiasts: it may be much more difficult to understand extraterrestrials than many scientists have thought before.

Among the sessions held during December’s annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association was one called "Anthropology, Archaeology, and Interstellar Communication: Science and the Knowledge of Distant Worlds." The session included papers by scholars from such diverse fields as astronomy, archaeology, anthropology, and psychology. Is there a Cosmic Rosetta Stone, they asked, drawing parallels to Earth’s own Rosetta Stone, which provided the key to decoding Egyptian hieroglyphics? Will we ever find a comparable primer for decrypting any messages we might receive some day from extraterrestrials?
Universal Translator

Thirty years ago, a message was beamed to the stars from the world’s largest radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico, written in the language of math and science. But could another civilization understand such a message? In the search for a universal language to overcome cultural differences between humans and extraterrestrials, many have emphasized knowledge that would be shared by extraterrestrial scientists. For example, the metal plaques borne on two Pioneer spacecraft, launched by NASA in the 1970s, indicate our location in the galaxy relative to prominent pulsars that slowly and systematically change frequency over time—locating the spacecrafts’ launch in both time and space. And indeed, for an extraterrestrial civilization that values technical intelligence over social intelligence, such a description might be the start of an ideal message.

But not everyone is so sanguine about using science and math as universal languages. Anthropologist Ben Finney of the University of Hawai’i challenged the standard assumptions several years ago, by drawing on lessons learned from decoding Egyptian and Mayan hieroglypics—a story recounted in Atlanta. "SETI scientists reasoned that advanced ET would de-encrypt their messages through prime numbers, pi, the Planck constant and other presumed cosmic universals so that new members of the Galactic club could immediately begin deciphering them," Finney explained. "I questioned this reasoning on the basis of terrestrial experience in deciphering ancient Egyptian and Mayan inscriptions."

On closer examination of the process of decoding these scripts, Finney concluded that when initial assumptions are wrong, the decryption can be delayed for a long time. "These tasks were long held up by Plotinus’ fallacy of treating each hieroglyph as an idea or concept in itself without reference to language, and were only accomplished with the aid of such keys as the Rosetta Stone and by studying modern forms of Egyptian and Mayan." The lesson for SETI, it seems, is to remain flexible in our initial interpretations of messages from other worlds.

"The archaeological search for peoples from another time and place offers some analogy to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence," said Paul Wason, an archaeologist at the John Templeton Foundation. "Without benefit of direct contact with living beings, without the aid of understandable written communications, … prehistoric archaeologists rely on inferences drawn mainly from material traces of past activity."
We Come in … Peace?

Astronomer Frank Drake, who conducted the first SETI experiment in 1960, emphasized the ambiguities of communicating with those who encounter reality in very different ways. He cited examples from interstellar messages that have been drafted already, as well as initial planning to communicate with future generations of humans here on Earth – through radioactive waste site markers. According to Drake, "probably the most intensive and extensive efforts to communicate with intelligent creatures quite different from contemporary humans have been the program which placed a multi-media record on two of the Voyager spacecraft, and the plan to place fail-safe hazard markers at long-lived radioactive waste repositories."

As one of the designers of these two messages, Drake is well aware of the challenges of tapping into concepts that could be interpreted without error. "In both cases, the development of message content in these projects ran into enormous problems of potential misinterpretation," he explained. "The developers recognized that the interpretation of the message contents would surely take place in a context much different from the present, and unknowable to them. Attempting to construct messages which are unambiguous in such circumstances is extremely difficult and inevitably fraught with error."

As an example, Drake highlighted the ambiguity of the pictures of a man and woman etched onto the Pioneer plaques. "Is the depiction of a man holding an arm upraised to be taken as a friendly gesture of greeting, or as a threat of aggression?" Even supposing the recipients could discern that we are showing images of our species, how could they infer our intentions?
Intelligent Intentions

Perhaps SETI scientists can get some guidance in understanding other civilizations from social scientists. As archaeologists try to distinguish between rudimentary stone tools and rocks chipped by natural processes, their methods may provide insights that will help SETI scientists distinguish between naturally occurring cosmic static and signals from intelligent civilizations, whose purpose is to send intentional greetings.

"Archaeology regularly engages in the search for intelligence, intentionality, purpose and design broadly," Wason explained, "even as our deeper goal is recovering concrete detail concerning what, specifically, those intentions and purposes were." The resulting insights might inform the ways we structure messages, he suggested. "This is relevant for message construction from our end, reinforcing the view that we should give attention to all aspects of message form and context, not just its content. It is also relevant for identifying signs of purpose and intentionality beyond our planet."
Other Worlds

The fields of anthropology and archaeology also offer analogies to understanding "the Other," beings radically different from ourselves. In the process, they may provide insights into communicating broader notions of culture, thereby increasing the likelihood that messages will be intelligible. Simulations based on anthropological models of first contact between terrestrial cultures, for example, might help evaluate the adequacy of current protocols that guide responses to detecting a signal from extraterrestrials.

And yet, the delay of centuries or millennia between each exchange makes interstellar dialogue impossible, except as a dialogue across generations. In this scenario, initial misunderstandings could go uncorrected for a long time. "Without the Other’s dialogic input," said archaeologist Kathryn Denning of York University, "their responses to our misunderstandings, and answers to our questions, then the burden of self-correction falls to us. Perhaps then the challenge for both SETI and archaeology is that of recognizing and shedding enough of our own assumptions. Can we make ourselves unassumed, unfamiliar… indeed, alien?"

Rockers Start Writing, Writers Rock

The entire piece can be read by clicking on the title link above.

"By HILLEL ITALIE



Folk singer and songwriter Bob Dylan plays the harmonica and acoustic guitar in March 1963 at an unknown lU.S. location. A murky, rare 1960 recording of an Dylan playing guitar and singing folk songs has been donated to the Minnesota Historical Society. He was born in Minnesota in 1941 as Robert Allen Zimmerman. (AP Photo)

NEW YORK (AP) - In 2001, Martin Amis, Rick Moody and other authors and artists gathered in New York to honor a peer they regarded as a giant of the times. They compared him to Walt Whitman, Mark Twain and Arthur Rimbaud. They called him a bard, a shaman and a master of 'art as revenge.'

That man was Bob Dylan. Had he lived in England, he'd be Sir Bob Dylan, maybe even Lord. Scholarly books have compared him to Dante and Keats; admirers lobby for him to get the Nobel Prize. At a 1997 Kennedy Center ceremony, where fellow honorees included dancer Edward Villela and opera star Jessye Norman, President Clinton thanked Dylan for a 'lifetime of stirring the conscience of the nation.'

Now, Dylan has been knighted by the nation's book reviewers. His memoir, 'Chronicles, Vol. 1,' was among the finalists announced last weekend by the National Book Critics Circle, which has given awards to such writers as John Updike and Philip Roth. Dylan's competitors this year include Stephen Greenblatt, a leading Shakespearean scholar and author of the best-selling 'Will in the World'; and historian Ron Chernow, cited for 'Alexander Hamilton.'

'Bob Dylan is unfairly talented. I've written a lot of books and after reading Dylan's book, I realized I would never write a book that good,' says critic Greil Marcus, a former NBCC finalist whose Dylan book, 'Like a Rolling Stone,' comes out this spring.

'I expected a big, oversized book with lots of pictures and memorabilia. Instead, here is this modest object, with no illustrations. It's not very long. Its tone is humble. It's literate. This is a real book, written out of an immersion in literature.'

In 'Chronicles,' Dylan not only celebrates the influence of Woody Guthrie and other musicians, but states that he recorded an entire album, which he does not identify, based on some stories by Chekhov. Elsewhere he praises Voltaire, Rousseau, John Locke and others as 'visionaries, revolutionaries.'"

Dylan unlikely to attend ceremony

"Canadian Press

Wednesday, January 26, 2005

Bob Dylan.(AP Archive/Rogelio Solis)

NEW YORK (AP) -- Bob Dylan, whose memoir Chronicles, Vol. I is nominated for a National Book Critics Circle prize, will likely be too busy with his day job to attend the March 18 ceremony.



'Bob Dylan is honoured by the NBC nomination, however, he'll be on a concert tour in March,' Simon & Schuster spokeswoman Victoria Meyer said Tuesday. Meyer added that the publisher would 'work with his office to see if there's any way he can come to the NBC ceremony.'

Chronicles was nominated Saturday in the biography/autobiography category, with other finalists including Ron Chernow's Alexander Hamilton and a biography of Shakespeare, Stephen Greenblatt's Will in the World.

Virtually all literary efforts by rock stars, from the Kinks' Ray Davies to Smashing Pumpkins' Billy Corgan, are laughed off by critics, but Dylan has been praised for an unusually rich and engaging book, writing passionately about influences such as Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson and recalling his years as a young singer-songwriter in New York's Greenwich Village.

Dylan's book, published last fall, also has enjoyed commercial success. Two more volumes are planned.

The National Book Critics Circle is a not-for-profit organization of about 600 book editors and critics.

The Canadian Press 2005"

Bob Dylan nominated for major book award

"[World News]: New York, Jan 25 : Rock legend Bob Dylan has been nominated along with literary giants Philip Roth and Adrienne Rich for the National Book Critics Circle awards.

Dylan's memoir 'Chronicles, Vol. 1' which has been an instant success is among the finalists for biography/autobiography along with best sellers - Ron Chernow's biography of Alexander Hamilton and Stephen Greenblatt's biography of Shakespeare, 'Will in the World,' according to hollywoodreporter.com.

Dylan has been toasted for a brilliant effort at analysing his life and times and influences on his stunning music. The book carries the Dylan story from the time he was a young singer-songwriter in Greenwich Village to being acknowledged as the songster of an entire generation. "

Scientists Create Petrified Wood in Days

"YAKIMA, Wash. (AP) - Researchers at a national science laboratory in south-central Washington have found a way to achieve in days what takes Mother Nature millions of years - converting wood to mineral.

The ability to make petrified wood could hold promise for separating industrial chemicals, filtering pollutants and soaking up contamination, said Yongsoon Shin, research scientist at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

'Wood petrified is very hard and very porous material - it's not really a wood component,' Shin said Monday in a telephone interview. As a mineral product, petrified wood has a large, hard surface and a porous inside, making it ideal to soak up or separate substances or act as a catalyst in other processes, he said.

Natural petrified wood occurs when trees are buried without oxygen, then leach their wood components and soak up the soil's minerals. For instance, at the Ginkgo Petrified Forest, a state park on the west shore of the Columbia River in central Washington, trees were believed to have been buried without oxygen beneath molten lava millions of years ago.

To create petrified wood, the researchers bought pine and poplar boards at a lumber yard. They gave a half-inch cube of wood an acid bath, then soaked it in a silica solution for days. The wood was air-dried, cooked in an argon-filled furnace at temperatures as high as 1,400 degrees and cooled in argon to room temperature.

The colorless, odorless element argon is sometimes used as a protective atmosphere for growing certain crystals.

The result was a new silicon carbide that exactly replicates petrified wood, Shin said.

The results of the research were published in the latest edition of the journal Advanced Materials.

The researchers now are focused on trying to create narrow, ordered pores in the silicon carbide to make the material even more porous, which would make it even more useful in the industrial world, Shin said.

'If pores are too big or too small, it's not too useful,' he said.

The Richland lab is a research center operated by the U.S. Department of Energy. It works on complex problems in energy, national security, the environment and life sciences. The laboratory employees nearly 4,000 people and has a $650 million annual budget. "