The U.S. faces an unwelcome combination of looming recession and persistent inflation that is reviving angst about stagflation, a condition not seen since the 1970s.

Inflation is rising. Yesterday the Labor Department said consumer prices in the U.S. jumped 0.4% in January and are up 4.3% over the past 12 months, near a 16-year high. Even stripping out sharply rising food and energy costs, prices rose 0.3% in January, driven by education, medical care, clothing and hotels. They are up by 2.5% from the previous year, a 10-month high.

The same day brought a reminder of possible recession. The Federal Reserve disclosed that its policy makers lowered their forecast for economic growth this year to between 1.3% and 2%, half a percentage point below the level of their previous forecast, in October. They blamed a further slowdown on the slump in housing prices, tighter lending standards and higher oil prices. They warned the economy's performance could fall short of even that lowered outlook.

Stocks fell on the Labor Department's morning inflation report. But shares rallied after the afternoon release of the minutes of the Jan. 29-30 meeting of Fed policy makers and their latest forecast for the economy. That's because investors took the Fed's darker outlook on growth to mean that it intended to cut its short-term interest rate next month at its next scheduled meeting.

A simultaneous rise in unemployment and inflation poses a dilemma for Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke. When the Fed wants to fight unemployment, it lowers interest rates. When it wants to damp inflation, it raises them. It's impossible to do both at the same time.

Stagflation, a term coined in the United Kingdom in 1965, defined the years from 1970 to 1981 in the U.S. Inflation rose to almost 15%. The economy went through three recessions. Unemployment reached 9%. Fed Chairman Paul Volcker finally conquered inflation, but only by dramatically boosting interest rates, causing a severe recession in 1981-82.

Today's circumstances are far from that. Inflation is lower. Unemployment has risen, but only to 4.9%. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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Yet there are similarities. As in the 1970s, surging commodity prices are leading the way. Crude oil rose to $100.74 a barrel yesterday, a new nominal high and close to its 1980 inflation-adjusted high. Wheat prices have hit a record. And, as in the 1970s, the rate at which the U.S. economy can grow without generating inflation has fallen, because of slower growth in both the labor force and in productivity, or output per hour of work.

The biggest difference is that in the 1970s, the Fed was unwilling, or thought itself unable, to bring inflation down. The Fed today sees achieving low inflation as its primary mission.

"The reason we're so unlikely to see a repeat is we're not adding irresponsible policy," says Christina Romer, an economist at the University of California at Berkeley and a historian of Fed policy. That means if the Fed is wrong in thinking inflation's recent rise is temporary, it will tolerate economic weakness in order to get inflation down again. "They'd have to let us suffer for a while."
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Indeed, in minutes to officials' Jan. 29-30 meeting, released yesterday with the customary three-week lag, some officials noted it was important not to lose sight of controlling inflation. They argued that "when prospects for growth had improved, a reversal of [some rate cuts], possibly even a rapid reversal, might be appropriate."

But that does not seem imminent. Officials said keeping interest rates low "appeared appropriate for a time," implying Fed officials felt little urgency to reverse recent cuts. Even after the January meeting's half-point rate cut, to 3%, "downside risks" to the economy remain, they said.

The inflation picture makes steep rate cuts a riskier way to rescue the economy than when former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan delivered them in 2001. Stephen Cecchetti, an economist at Brandeis University, said the Fed is now torn between its dual responsibilities of keeping unemployment down and prices stable. "The primary objective has to be to shore up the financial markets" to protect the economy, he said. "Then, once you're finished, come back and start worrying about inflation."

Members of the Federal Open Market Committee, the Fed's policy committee, raised their forecasts for both the overall inflation rate and the "core" rate, which excludes food and energy, by 0.3 percentage points from October, their latest forecast revealed. Yet they dialed back their rhetorical concern. The officials pronounced risks on inflation to be "balanced" -- in other words, they felt inflation, should it differ from their forecast, was as likely to be lower as it was higher. In October, by contrast, they suggested that, if inflation was to differ from their forecast, they expected it to be higher. That's principally because they see unemployment remaining higher for longer than they did in October, and expect that to help contain price increases.

Higher inflation is still a possibility. Food and energy costs could keep rising, instead of flattening out as futures markets currently anticipate. Companies could succeed in passing those costs onto consumers.

Sara Lee Corp. this week told analysts it expects to recoup rising raw-material costs in part by raising prices, especially on bread. Company spokesman John Harris said Sara Lee's significant competitors had matched the increases, with consumers showing no sign of trading down to lower-cost brands. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/"With commodities reaching unprecedented levels," Mr. Harris said, "it is quite likely we will take pricing up again."

Goodyear Tire & Rubber raised the price of replacement tires 7% on Feb. 1, on top of two increases totaling 11% last year. Chief Financial Officer Mark Schmitz told analysts last week that the hike was the result of rising prices of key raw materials, according to a transcript by Thomson Financial. Mohawk Industries Inc. raised carpet prices in December and again in January because of rising material costs, even though sales have been hurt by the slumping housing market.

The declining dollar, while boosting U.S. exports, is adding to inflation pressure, as goods priced in foreign currencies become relatively more expensive. Prices for imports from China jumped 0.8% in January, the largest monthly increase since the Labor Department began reporting the data in 2003.

British Parliamentarian Iain Macleod is credited with first using the word stagflation in 1965. "We now have the worst of both worlds -- not just inflation on the one side or stagnation on the other, but both of them together. We have a sort of 'stagflation' situation."

In the U.S., stagflation scares are more common than actual stagflation. Core inflation rose after the start of recessions in both 1990-91 and 2001, but then trended down as unemployment kept rising.

The only generally agreed period of stagflation in the U.S. came in the 1970s. Its seeds were planted in the late 1960s, when President Johnson revved up growth with spending on the Vietnam War and his Great Society programs. Fed Chairman William McChesney Martin, meanwhile, failed to tighten monetary policy sufficiently to rein in that growth.

In the early 1970s, President Nixon, with the acquiescence of Fed Chairman Arthur Burns, tried to get inflation down by imposing controls on wage and price increases. The job became harder after the Arab oil embargo dramatically drove up energy prices, and overall inflation, in 1973. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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Mr. Burns persistently underestimated inflation pressure: In part, he did not realize the economy's potential growth rate had fallen, and that an influx of young, inexperienced baby boomers into the work force had made it harder to get unemployment down to early-1960s levels.

As a result, even when he raised rates, pushing the economy into a severe recession in 1974-75, inflation and unemployment didn't fall back to the levels of the previous decade. Mr. Burns and his colleagues wrongly concluded inflation no longer responded to the condition of the economy, said Ms. Romer, the Berkeley economist. "They didn't know how the world worked," she said.

In a speech in 1979, a year after he stepped down, Mr. Burns blamed his failure on a political environment that wouldn't tolerate the high interest rates necessary to rein in inflation. As the Federal Reserve tested how far it could raise rates, he said, "it repeatedly evoked violent criticism" from the White House and Congress.

Such political risks are smaller but not entirely absent for Mr. Bernanke in this election year. On Sunday, the likely Republican presidential candidate, Sen. John McCain, told ABC's "This Week": "I would have liked to have seen faster rate cuts and earlier than they were done by him." Asked if he would reappoint Mr. Bernanke when his term expires in 2010, Sen. McCain said, "I would have to consider that at the time."

Still, Mr. Bernanke has reiterated the importance of not repeating the 1970s. He and his colleagues believe a persistent escalation of inflation is likely only if workers and firms come to expect the elevated inflation rate to persist, and set their wages and prices accordingly.

"Any tendency of inflation expectations to become unmoored -- or for the Fed's inflation-fighting credibility to be eroded -- could greatly...reduce the central bank's policy flexibility" to support growth with lower interest rates, he told Congress last week.

That credibility could be endangered by the Fed's recent track record. Yesterday's forecasts show that FOMC members define price stability as inflation of 1.5% to 2%, measured by an index that differs slightly from the commonly cited consumer-price index. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/ By that measure, inflation has averaged 2.8% since mid-2004, when oil began a multiyear surge. Core inflation, which excludes food and energy, has averaged 2.2%.

Thus far, Fed officials have taken comfort that surveys and bond-market behavior suggest the public expects the inflation rate to fall. But expected inflation, as measured by trading of inflation-protected Treasury bonds, has jumped since the Fed declared in early January that supporting growth would be a more important focus than holding down inflation. (Fed officials believe technical details in the way the bonds trade may explain some of the jump.) And professional forecasters surveyed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia recently nudged up their expected inflation rate for the next 10 years to 2.5% from 2.4%, where it had stood all last year.

On the other hand, surveys of consumer predictions about inflation show no corresponding jump. And most important, wage gains have not accelerated. Since labor is the largest component of business costs, a wage-price spiral would likely be a prerequisite for stagflation.

"We're a very, very long way from the 1970s," former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said in an interview yesterday. A hit to overall spending, as has resulted from the current tightening of lending conditions, first affects production and employment, and only later inflation, he said. "But obviously, inflation figures need to be monitored very closely."

Six nights a week, Guo Bairong takes the stage at the Xanadu Lounge at the Sands Macau casino. As players place their bets at nearby tables, he opens with a popular love song in Mandarin, closing his eyes as he sways with the music. Slipping effortlessly into Cantonese, he launches into another number.

Crowds gather not only to hear his singing, which is mellifluous, but also to gape: Guo Bairong is also known as Barry Cox, a Caucasian, former waiter and supermarket cashier from Liverpool, England, whose only formal study of Cantonese was at a British community center.

Mr. Cox's quirky act -- sandwiched between cabaret dance performances like the scantily clad Glamour Girls in glittery outfits and red elbow-length gloves and authentic Chinese crooners such as Hua D, is among the spectacles on Macau's emerging entertainment scene.

Macau's clutch of new casinos has quickly outpaced the Las Vegas strip in gambling revenue, raking in some $10 billion last year. But the former Portuguese colony has to up its game to compete with its American counterpart as an all-around tourism destination. Key to that growth is the territory's entertainment scene, which pales in comparison to the A-list performers in Las Vegas, such as Bette Midler and Cher, who have regular gigs.

A few years ago, Macau was a sleepy coastal town. Visitors came for the fresh fish and Vinho Verde, the cobblestone streets and musty antique shops -- and for the gambling. The city became a special administrative zone when it was returned to China in 1999, making it the only place in China where casinos are legal.

It all began to change after 2002, when the Beijing-backed Macau government ended local tycoon Stanley Ho's monopoly on the territory's gambling by issuing licenses to other companies, including the Vegas casino Wynn Resorts. MGM Mirage, Crown Ltd. from Australia and others soon piled in.

Around the same time, China began to ease its restrictions on individual travel to Hong Kong and Macau. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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A flood of tourists poured in from the mainland to try their luck. About 10.5 million visited Macau in 2005; that figure is expected to jump to nearly 15 million next year, according to the Pacific Asia Travel Association, a trade group.

But how to entertain this growing crowd? When the new casinos began opening in 2004, the prevailing logic among casino executives was that the Chinese visitors mostly come to gamble. Some operators are still unsure what entertainment to offer, especially performances that guests would have to pay for as opposed to the complimentary shows available on the gambling floors.

"This is a very new market," says a Wynn Macau spokeswoman, adding that "we're not sure how the market would respond" to big global acts that visitors would have to shell out for.

Wynn casino's current entertainment options are limited to a five-minute water and light show set to music, and an attraction known as the Tree of Prosperity. The 11-meter tall golden tree, which Wynn Macau says is an auspicious symbol, sits in the casino's atrium.

At the Crown Macau, "we're focusing on offering a six-star experience," says Charles Ngai, a Crown spokesman. Apparently that doesn't include entertainment; the hotel-casino has a spa, eight restaurants and two bars, but no performances on offer.

It's a different story at Mr. Ho's Grand Lisboa, where there are two shows: a free, daily "Crazy Paris" performance -- a can-can-style dance act performed by Western women, and "Tokyo Nights," performed by a troupe of Japanese dancers, which costs $31.

"No one really knows what people are looking for here," says Jennifer Welker, the Macau-based author of "The New Macau." "They're still in that testing phase of trying to suss out what people really like." Many of the guests at the Sands, for instance, she says, seem most interested in gambling and aren't willing to pay for a show. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/"The Venetian might need to host more Chinese acts to appeal to the mainland tourists," she adds.

Macau's entertainment limitations aside, the territory already is giving neighboring Hong Kong a run for its money. Many big-name acts have chosen to play in Macau rather than Hong Kong recently. Last October, for instance, the U.S. National Basketball Association's Orlando Magic, the Cleveland Cavaliers and the China Men's National Team played at the Venetian Arena, the 15,000-seat stadium at the Venetian resort and casino. The same month, hip-hop stars the Black Eyed Peas brought a crowd of more than 10,000 to its feet there. The Police performed in Macau in early February, and Celine Dion arrives next month for a one-night-only show as part of her world tour.

Hong Kong has the facilities to compete: In addition to the cavernous convention center hall in the Wanchai area that big-name acts traditionally use, the territory has the newer AsiaWorld-Arena, a 13,500-seat concert venue next to the airport. But economics may play a role in the migration of big acts to Macau. Min Yoo, a Shanghai- and Hong Kong-based concert promoter, says it is cheaper to put on a large event in Macau than in Hong Kong.

In any case, Macau still has a few wrinkles to iron out. For starters, it isn't always easy to know what events are on.

Strict rules against advertising by casinos in mainland China make it impossible to promote events there. Even in Hong Kong, says Mark Brown, president of the Sands Macau and Venetian Macau, advertising for events has to be planned carefully, considering the potential sensitivity around the idea of gambling.

What's more, Macau's transportation infrastructure is lacking. A taxi shortage means fans arriving on the ferry from Hong Kong often have to wait in long lines for a shuttle bus to the Venetian Arena.

For now, the Venetian and its sister property, the Sands, are where the serious entertainment action is. This summer, the Venetian plans to bring Cirque du Soleil, the acrobatic show that's a fixture in Las Vegas, to Macau as a permanent show with 10 performances a week. Cirque will perform in a 1,800-seat theater that is still under construction. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/That's only the beginning. "Every top U.S. name you can think of, we have an offer out there," says Mr. Brown. "Every top Asian artist, we have an offer out there. Every type of sport you can think of...we have an offer out there."

Meantime, acts like Mr. Cox's are filling the gap.

As a high-school student, Mr. Cox watched Jackie Chan movies and fell in love with the Canto-pop soundtracks. He took a few Cantonese lessons and discovered he had a flair for Asian languages -- he's never studied Mandarin formally, though he considers himself fluent in both.

So he quit his job as a salesman in a Liverpool electrical store and started waiting tables in a Chinese restaurant to hone his language skills. Eventually, he began performing at Chinese gatherings in Liverpool. His renditions of popular Canto-pop classics such "Kiss Under the Moon" and "Love Once More" won over the immigrant crowds there, turning him into a local celebrity.

But all along, his dream was to make it big in Asia. And so in 2002, he moved to Hong Kong, where he sang at corporate events and Christmas parties. He even traveled in mainland China doing a few performances in discos in places like Shenzhen and Guangzhou.

Then, six months ago, Mr. Cox, whose Chinese name was given to him by his Chinese-language headmaster, left Hong Kong for the lights of Macau. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/"It's good for what I'm doing," he says, in his Liverpudlian accent. I'm "partly living the dream," he adds.

On a chilly Saturday night, as the Black Eyed Peas warmed up at the Venetian Arena, Mr. Cox, dressed entirely in black down to his pointy-toed shoes, was warming up his audience. Gamblers at nearby slot machines had fallen still, their jaws slack at the spectacle of a foreigner singing Canto-pop. A woman was dancing in her chair.

"This one's for you," he said in Mandarin to a Chinese couple in the crowd, as he launched into a number by Deng Lijun, a Taiwanese singer popular in the 1970s and '80s. The lounge, filled with mainland and Taiwanese tourists, exploded into applause.

Dates of the Old Kingdom of Ancient Egypt: The Old Kingdom ran from about 2686-2160 B.C. It started with the 3rd Dynasty and ended with the 8th (some say the 6th).

* 3rd: 2686-2613 B.C.
* 4th: 2613-2494 B.C.
* 5th 2494-2345 B.C.
* 6th: 2345-2181 B.C.
* 7th and 8th: 2181-2160 B.C.

Before the Old Kingdom was the Early Dynastic Period, which ran from about 3000-2686 B.C.

Before the Early Dynastic Period was the Predynastic which began in the 6th millennium B.C.

Earlier than the Predynastic Period were the Neolithic (c.8800-4700 B.C.) and Paleolithic Periods (c.700,000-7000 B.C.).

* Predynastic Egypt http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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* Pharaohs of the Predynastic Period, Old Kingdom and Middle Kingdom

Old Kingdom Capital: During the Early Dynastic Period and Old Kingdom Egypt, the residence of the pharaoh was at White Wall (Ineb-hedj) on the west bank of the Nile south of Cairo. This capital city was later named Memphis.

After the 8th Dynasty, the pharaohs left Memphis.
Turin Canon: The Turin Canon, a papyrus discovered by Bernardino Drovetti in the necropolis at Thebes, Egypt, in 1822, is so-called because it resides in the northern Italian city of Turin at the Museo Egizio. The Turin Canon provides a list of names of the kings of Egypt from the beginning of time to the time of Ramses II and is important, therefore, for providing the names of the Old Kingdom pharaohs.

For more on the problems of ancient Egyptian chronology and the Turin Canon, see Problems Dating Hatshepsut.
Step Pyramid of Djoser: The Old Kingdom is the age of pyramid building beginning with Third Dynasty Pharaoh Djoser's Step Pyramid at Saqqara, the first finished large stone building in the world. Its ground area is 140 X 118 m., its height 60 m., its outside enclosure 545 X 277 m. Djoser's corpse was buried there but below ground level. There were other buildings and shrines in the area. The architect credited with Djoser's 6-step pyramid was Imhotep (Imouthes), a high priest of Heliopolis.

* Imhotep
* Step Pyramid - Archaeology Guide
* Step Pyramid Tomb Robbers

Old Kingdom True Pyramids: Dynasty divisions follow major changes. The Fourth Dynasty begins with the ruler who changed the architectural style of the pyramids.

Under Pharaoh Sneferu (2613-2589) the pyramid complex emerged, with the axis re-oriented east to west. A temple was built against the eastern side of the pyramid. There was a road running to a temple in the valley that served as entrance to the complex. Sneferu's name is connected with a bent pyramid whose slope changed two-thirds of the way up. He had a second (Red) pyramid in which he was buried. Sneferu's son Khufu (Cheops) built the Great Pyramid at Giza.
About the Old Kingdom Period: The Old Kingdom was a long, politically stable, prosperous period for ancient Egypt. Government was centralized. The king was credited with supernatural powers, his authority virtually absolute. Even after death the pharaoh was expected to mediate between gods and humans, therefore preparation for his afterlife, the building of elaborate burial sites, was vitally important.

Over time, the royal authority weakened while the power of viziers and local administrators grew. The office of overseer of Upper Egypt was created and Nubia became important because of contact, immigration, and resources for Egypt to exploit. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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Although Egypt had been self-sufficient with its bountiful annual Nile inundation allowing farmers to grow emmer wheat and barley, building projects like the pyramids and temples led the Egyptians beyond its borders for minerals and manpower.

The sun god Ra grew more important through the Old Kingdom Period with obelisks built on pedestals as part of their temples. A full written language of hieroglyphs was used on the sacred monuments, while hieratic was used on papyrus documents.

Although their lifetimes span billions of years, galaxies age, just like people. As rambunctious young’uns, they undergo bursts of star formation that create hot blue orbs out of the simple elements hydrogen and helium. As galaxies grow older, they settle down. Not only do their stars cool and become redder, but they eventually burn out and die, releasing into the galaxy heavier elements that formed in the stellar furnaces.

So astronomers have been repeatedly baffled by a peculiar, developmentally challenged galaxy called I Zwicky 18. When they first sighted it about 40 years ago, they thought it was a not-quite-billion-year-old toddler brimming with hot young stars, full of hydrogen and helium and possessing very few heavy elements, called metals. Finding such a young galaxy near others that are at least 7 billion years old thrilled—and perplexed—the scientists. But new observations from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have revealed ancient stars mingled with the young ones, proving the galaxy as a whole is in fact as old as its neighbors.
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Astronomers don’t know why this galaxy is so low on metals, or why it’s forming so many new stars so late in the game. It’s possible that this relatively light galaxy has too little mass—or gravitational pull—to retain the metals, and that a rush of gas called a galactic wind swept them away. Or maybe the galaxy’s relatively isolated position caused it to develop slowly: There are few other galaxies around to help seed star formation.

They also don’t know why it’s not happening in all dwarf galaxies. “It’s possible that there are more out there like this,” says Francesca Annibali, http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who worked on the project. “If they are more common, then that means that some process is inhibiting star formation in small, low-metal environments.” Whatever the cause of I Zwicky 18’s strange history, its close resemblance to primordial galaxies offers a unique opportunity to study how stars acted in the early universe, something that normally cannot be observed at such close range.

For astronauts toiling in the close quarters of the International Space Station or on a shuttle to Mars, an ordinary germ would be risky enough. But a recent experiment published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has shown that a microbe can turn even more dangerous in space than on Earth. In that study, a bacte–rium particularly nasty for humans—salmonella—was shown to become more virulent after just 83 hours of growing in space.

The experiment on the space shuttle Atlantis was designed to explore how a lack of gravity affects disease-causing microbes in space. Astronauts aboard the space shuttle grew the salmonella, and back on Earth researchers used it to infect a group of mice. For comparison, bacteria grown in a laboratory on Earth in normal gravity infected another group of mice. The mice infected with the space-grown germs had a mortality rate almost three times higher than that of mice given germs grown in normal gravity.

Researchers noticed that while on board the space shuttle, the salmonella encased themselves in a biofilm, a protective coating that is notoriously resistant to anti–biotics. Several follow-up experiments on space http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/shuttle flights over the next few years will look to see whether other bacteria undergo similar changes in virulence in microgravity.



By now you’ve probably heard about the lunar eclipse tomorrow night. Lunar eclipses are great; they last a long time, so there’s no hurry, you don’t need crystal clear skies (the clearer the better, of course), and you don’t need a telescope! Just your eyes will do, though having binoculars is better. I actually prefer them over using a telescope.

The event will be visible pretty much everywhere in the US, Canada, South America, and western Africa and Europe. Orbiting Frog has a ton of info, including a nice animation of what to expect. Sky and Telescope has info as well (including a diagram with times listed for the west coast of the US, if that helps). But here’s the rundown:
The show starts for real around 01:43 Universal Time (CAREFUL HERE! That’s 1:43 a.m. on Thursday morning in England, but that’s Wednesday night for the United States. Check to see what your local offset is from Universal Time; for example, in Boulder we are UT - 7, so the eclipse starts here at 1:43 a.m. UT - 7 hours = 6:43 p.m. local time Wednesday night. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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But don’t trust me– do this math for yourself!).
You may read that the eclipse starts an hour or so before that, but if you look you probably won’t see anything. Earth casts a dark shadow surrounded by a much lighter one, called the umbra and penumbra, respectively. When the Moon enters the penumbra you’ll hardly notice, but when it enters the umbra at 01:43 it’ll look like a bite is taken out of it.
1 hour 20 minutes later (03:00 UT) the Moon will be totally engulfed in the Earth’s shadow. It may take on a brown or reddish appearance, depending on various factors like pollution in our atmosphere. Sometimes the Moon turns blood red, and it’s really amazing. I have found that the Moon appears to really be a globe when this happens; I assume it’s an illusion of some kind but the effect can be overwhelming.
The totality phase of the eclipse will last for about 51 minutes, and then it will start to leave the umbra, and you’ll see a bright crescent begin to form. By 05:10 UT it’ll all be over, and the Moon will look normal again.
I plan on being at The Little Astronomer’s school, since they’re hosting a party in the parking lot to see it. There are no doubt viewings all over the place, so call your local astronomy club, museum, or even news station to see what’s going on in your area.
This is the last total lunar eclipse for the US until very late in 2010, so I hope you get a chance to see it!

The Code of Hammurabi is one of the earliest known law codes and was probably compiled at the start of the reign of the Babylonian king Hammurabi (1792–1750 B.C.). The Code of Hammurabi is famous for demanding punishment to fit the crime (the lex talionis, or an eye for an eye) with different treatment for each social class. The Code is thought to be Sumerian in spirit but with a Babylonian inspired harshness. Its laws cover land tenure, rent, the position of women, marriage, divorce, inheritance, contracts, control of public order, administration of justice, wages, and labor conditions. (See LOC article on Iraq.) The prologue of the Code give a glimpse of the relationship between the Babylonian gods and kings.

A 2.3 m high diorite or basalt stele of the Code of Hammurabi was found at Susa, Iran, in 1901. At the top is a bas relief image. The text of laws is written in cuneiform. This stele of the Code of Hammurabi is at the Louvre.

Source: James A. Armstrong "Mesopotamia" The Oxford Companion to Archaeology. Brian M. Fagan, ed., Oxford University Press 1996. Oxford Reference Online.

Go to Other Ancient / Classical History Glossary pages beginning with the letterSilbury Hill, a 4,400-year-old, 130-foot-high mound of chalk and dirt about 80 miles west of London, has finally yielded its ancient secrets. It is not the tomb of the long-forgotten King Sil nor the resting place of a golden knight. And it is not, despite the folklore, a dumping ground for the devil’s dirt, forced to drop there by the magic of priests. The story behind the mysterious hill is much less colorful. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/Silbury Hill is a shrine filled with rocks that, for Stone Age Britons, probably represented the spirits of ancient ancestors.

The physical excavation (video) of Silbury Hill, along with studies using ground-penetrating radar and seismic sonar equipment, has shown that there is not a single human bone in the mound. Instead, dozens of sarsen stones, a type of sandstone that is also used for Neolithic stone circles like Stonehenge, are buried there.

Local geologists think that during the Stone Age, the landscape around Silbury Hill contained hundreds of thousands of sarsen stones. Because the area is made mainly of chalk, prehistoric people would have seen no apparent natural origin for the stones. Archaeologists think the locals endowed these rocks with a spiritual importance that Silbury Hill still embodies. The area itself is considered sacred by modern pagans, who still make offerings at a nearby spring. Due to conservation laws, the prehistoric holy hill is out-of-bounds to pagans and tourists alike.



Kosovo won the recognition of the United States and its biggest Western European allies Monday, while earning rebukes and rejections from Serbia, Russia and a disparate mix of states the world over who face their own separatist movements at home.

One day after the tiny Balkan province declared its independence, the world had its chance to choose sides. While some countries had made their decisions months in advance, that did not diminish the drama of whether a newly birthed nation would be welcomed into the fold or rejected.

Major European powers, including France, Germany and Britain, along with the United States, officially recognized Kosovo, even as officials took pains to point out that it should not serve as an invitation or precedent for other groups hoping to declare independence. That is because one of the biggest unknowns remains whether Kosovo’s declaration could rekindle conflicts elsewhere, including in ethnically divided Bosnia.

As a result, the reverberations were felt from Russian-backed enclaves in Georgia to the Taiwan Strait. Spain, a member of the European Union and one of the countries with soldiers in the NATO force in Kosovo, refused its recognition. Yet Turkey, despite its history of conflict with Kurdish separatists, chose to support Kosovo’s independence.

In a letter to Kosovo’s president, Fatmir Sejdiu, President Bush wrote: “On behalf of the American people, I hereby recognize Kosovo as an independent and sovereign state. I congratulate you and Kosovo’s citizens for having taken this important step in your democratic and national development.”

In an apparent conciliatory gesture, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in her own statement, “The United States takes this opportunity to reaffirm our friendship with Serbia, an ally during two world wars.”

But Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica of Serbia, which has regarded Kosovo as its heartland since medieval times, vowed that Serbia would never recognize the “false state.” http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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Mr. Kostunica recalled Serbia’s ambassador to Washington, wire services reported. The State Department had no comment on those reports on Monday evening.

At the United Nations, Boris Tadic, Serbia’s president, told the Security Council that the declaration of independence “annuls international law, tramples upon justice and enthrones injustice.” He asked that Secretary General Ban Ki-moon direct the United Nations mission chief in Kosovo to declare the action “null and void” and to dissolve the Kosovo Assembly, which adopted the declaration on Sunday.

Addressing the Council before Mr. Tadic spoke, Mr. Ban said the United http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/Nations administration, approved by the Council in 1999, would continue to run Kosovo until a formal transition could be arranged.

European foreign ministers meeting in Brussels appeared to reach a minimal common position, acknowledging that Kosovo had declared independence and allowing those nations that wanted to recognize it formally to do so.

Bernard Kouchner, France’s foreign minister, said the declaration was “a victory for common sense,” and pointed to what he hoped would be future reconciliation between Serbia and Kosovo. “I don’t know at what date, in which year, but Kosovo and Serbia will be together in the European Union,” he said.

However, the foreign minister of Spain, Miguel Ángel Moratinos, told reporters that the declaration did not respect international law and that Spain would not recognize Kosovo. “The government of Spain will not recognize the unilateral act proclaimed yesterday by the Assembly of Kosovo,” Reuters quoted him as saying.

Among European Union members, Cyprus, Romania and Slovakia have also been reluctant to recognize Kosovo.

Diplomatic recognition is more than just a popularity contest for Kosovo, a desperately poor, predominantly Muslim landlocked territory of two million. It needs the help and support of international institutions if it expects to improve its dire economic condition. A United Nations protectorate since 1999, it is policed by 16,000 NATO troops and has an unemployment rate of around 60 percent and an average monthly wage of $250.

“We will be working with the government to try to help it politically as well as economically,” said R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs, in a conference call with reporters on Monday, pointing out that the United States gave $77 million in aid to Kosovo in 2007 and would raise that amount to roughly $335 million in 2008.

Mr. Burns, who said he had consulted by phone with European counterparts after the meeting of European Union foreign ministers, said there would be a donor conference in Europe in the coming months to encourage additional aid, and hoped there could be debt relief for Kosovo as well as strong regional trade opportunities.

Russia, which opposes Kosovo’s independence, demanded an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council on Sunday to proclaim the declaration “null and void,” but the meeting produced no http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/ resolution. The Security Council agreed to a request by Russia and Serbia to hold the open meeting on Monday that Mr. Tadic addressed.

Mr. Burns said he did not foresee trouble with Russia. “I do not expect any kind of crisis with Russia over this,” he said. “I expect Russia to be supportive of stability in this region.”

But in Moscow, the upper and lower houses of Parliament on Monday released a joint statement signaling an intention to recognize at least two Russian-backed separatist areas in the former Soviet Union — Abkhazia and South Ossetia, both in Georgia.

Abkhazia and South Ossetia have announced their intention to seek recognition as independent states. Russia has already granted citizenship to most residents of both enclaves and had hinted that it might recognize their independence if Western countries recognized Kosovo.

“The right of nations to self-determination cannot justify recognition of Kosovo’s independence along with the simultaneous refusal to discuss similar acts by other self-proclaimed states, which have obtained de facto independence exclusively by themselves,” the Russian Parliament’s statement read.

Georgia disputes the claim that the regions have obtained independence by themselves. The areas broke from Georgia after brief wars in the 1990s, and have survived with Russian support.

Eduard Kokoity, the Ossetian president, said Monday that the two breakaway regions would submit a request for recognition to Russia’s Parliament by the end of the month, the Interfax news agency reported.

But experts and officials said they did not expect simmering conflicts to break out into significant violence as a result of Kosovo’s declaration. “These are emotional reactions that I think are transitory and can be contained,” said Peter Semneby, the European Union’s special representative for the South Caucasus, in a telephone interview from Georgia. “It’s very much in the interest of major actors to try to contain them.”

On the other side of the world, China, Indonesia and Sri Lanka also criticized Kosovo’s http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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The Beijing government, which has threatened military action if Taiwan declares formal independence, voiced “grave concern” over Kosovo’s action.

“China is deeply worried about its severe and negative impact on peace and stability of the Balkan region and the goal of establishing a multiethnic society in Kosovo,” said Liu Jianchao, a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman.

The province of Kosovo declared independence from Serbia on Sunday, sending tens of thousands of ethnic Albanians streaming through the streets to celebrate what they hoped was the end of a long and bloody struggle for national self-determination.

Kosovo’s bid to be recognized as Europe’s newest country — after a civil war that killed 10,000 people a decade ago and then years of limbo under United Nations rule — was the latest episode in the dismemberment of the former Yugoslavia, 17 years after its dissolution began.

It brings to a climax a showdown between the West, which argues that Serbia’s brutal subjugation of Kosovo’s ethnic Albanian majority cost it any right to rule the territory, and the Serbian government and its allies in the Kremlin. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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They counter that Kosovo’s independence is a reckless breach of international law that will spur other secessionist movements across the world.

As Albanians danced in the streets and fired guns in the air in the capital, Pristina, international reaction was sharply divided, suggesting that the clash between the principles of sovereignty and self-determination was far from resolved.

Britain, France and Germany were expected to be the first to recognize the new nation as early as Monday, while other nations, fearing separatist movements within their own borders, have said they will refuse. Russia demanded an emergency meeting of the United Nations Security Council to proclaim the declaration “null and void,” but the meeting produced no resolution.

The United States and additional European Union member states were expected to recognize Kosovo’s independence in the coming days.

President Bush, speaking in Tanzania, said the United States would continue to work to prevent violence in Kosovo, while reaching out to Serbia. He said that resolving the conflict in Kosovo was essential to stability in the Balkans and that “the Serbian people can know that they have a friend in America.”

In declaring independence, Kosovo’s prime minister, Hashim Thaci, a former leader of the guerrilla force that just over 10 years ago began an armed rebellion against Serbian domination, struck a note of reconciliation. Addressing Parliament in both Albanian and Serbian, he pledged to protect the rights of Kosovo’s Serbian minority. “I feel the heartbeat of our ancestors,” he said. “We, the leaders of our people, democratically elected, through this declaration proclaim Kosovo an independent and sovereign state.”

Kosovo, a desperately poor, predominantly Muslim landlocked territory of two million, has been a United Nations protectorate since 1999, policed http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/by 16,000 NATO troops. Its unemployment rate is about 60 percent and average monthly wage is $250.

Electricity is so undependable that lights go out in the capital several times a day. Corruption is rife and human trafficking threatens to entrench a lawless state on Europe’s doorstep.

Ethnic Albanians from as far away as the United States poured into Pristina over the weekend, braving freezing temperatures and heavy snow to dance in frenzied jubilation. Beating drums, waving Albanian flags and throwing firecrackers, they chanted: “Independence! Independence! We are free at last!”

A 100-foot-long birthday cake was installed on Pristina’s main boulevard.

In an outpouring of adulation for the United States, the architect of NATO’s 1999 bombing campaign against Serbian forces under President Slobodan Milosevic, revelers unfurled giant American flags, carried posters of former President Bill Clinton and chanted, “Thank you, U.S.A.” and “God bless America.”

Hundreds of people, many waving Albanian flags, celebrated in Times Square. Revelers in cars drove in circles around the area, leading chants whenever they passed the crowds gathered on the sidewalks.

That spirit of exaltation contrasted sharply with the despair, anger and disbelief that gripped Serbia and the Serbian enclaves of northern Kosovo. In Belgrade, http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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Serbia’s capital, as many as 2,000 angry Serbs converged on the United States Embassy, hurling stones and smashing windows.

In the Kosovo Serb stronghold of Mitrovica, a grenade was thrown at a United Nations building, the police said. No one was injured.

Vojislav Kostunica, the prime minister of Serbia, which has regarded Kosovo as its heartland since medieval times, vowed that Serbia would never recognize the “false state.”

In an address on national television on Sunday, he said Kosovo was propped up unlawfully by the United States and called the declaration a “humiliation” for the European Union. The Serbian government has ruled out using military force in response, but was expected to downgrade diplomatic ties with any government that recognized Kosovo.

Demonstrations were planned for Monday in Serbian enclaves across Kosovo. Serbs said they were under orders from Belgrade to ignore the independence declaration and remain in Kosovo to keep the northern part of the territory under de facto Serbian control, raising questions about Serbia’s long-term aims.

At the Security Council, Russia argued that the proclamation violated the 1999 resolution that established the United Nations mission in Kosovo. “Our position is that the declaration should be disregarded by the international community and declared null and void,” said Vitaly I. Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations.

But Alejandro D. Wolff, the deputy American ambassador, said, “In our view, this declaration is logical and consistent and completely in line with” the 1999 measure.

Secretary General Ban Ki-moon pleaded with all parties “to refrain from any actions or statements that could endanger peace, incite violence or jeopardize security in Kosovo or the region.”

The Security Council agreed to a request by Russia and Serbia to hold an open meeting on Monday that will be addressed by the Serbian president, Boris Tadic.

Kosovo’s declaration followed nearly two years of United Nations-sponsored negotiations between it and Serbia. Those talks failed, as did a Security Council effort in December to resolve Kosovo’s future.

The European Commission, the European Union’s executive branch, appealed for calm, while NATO’s secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, said the alliance would respond “swiftly and firmly against anyone who might resort to violence.”

Kosovo’s sovereignty remains severely circumscribed, making it reliant on the international community. NATO still provides international security, while the European Union has agreed to send an 1,800-strong http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/ police and judicial mission to help run the territory after the United Nations leaves.

Ulrich Wilhelm, the spokesman for the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said Germany would decide what to do on Monday.

Kosovo played a central role in the collapse of the Yugoslav federation built by the Communist strongman Josip Broz Tito, who died in 1980. Albanian nationalism erupted in Kosovo in 1981, leading to bloody clashes.

In the 1980s, Mr. Milosevic used Serbs’ enormous sense of grievance that their ancestral heartland was now dominated by Muslim Albanians to come to power in Serbia. By 1989, he had abolished Kosovo’s autonomy, fired tens of thousands of Albanians from their jobs, suppressed Albanian language education and controlled the territory with a heavy police presence.

Ten years ago, Mr. Milosevic’s forces moved against the rebel Kosovo Liberation Army, killing a guerrilla leader and his family at their compound. As violence escalated, NATO intervened in a 1999 bombing campaign, causing hundreds of thousands of Albanians and Serbs to flee.

An estimated 10,000 civilians were killed in the 1998-99 conflict, many of them Albanians, while 1,500 Serbs died in revenge killings that followed.

For the ethnic Albanians who make up 95 percent of Kosovo’s population, independence marks a new beginning.

“Independence is a catharsis,” said Antoneta Kastrati, 26, an Albanian from Peja, who said her mother and older sister were killed by their Serbian neighbors in 1999. “Things won’t change overnight and we cannot forget the past, but maybe I will feel safe now and my nightmares will finally go away.”

In Mitrovica, a 70-year-old Serbian engineer who would give only his first name, Svetozar, said: “I will stay here forever. This will always be Serbia.”

Kosovo’s declaration created immediate ripples in the former Soviet Union, where small, Russian-backed separatist areas — one in Moldova and two in the republic of Georgia — have existed since the early 1990s. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/Two of them — Abkhazia and South Ossetia in Georgia — announced their intention to seek recognition as independent states.

Conversely, several of the European Union’s 27 member states — including Spain, Greece, Cyprus, Slovakia and Romania — oppose recognizing Kosovo because they fear encouraging secessionist movements within their own borders.

In Brussels, officials were drafting a statement for a foreign ministers’ meeting on Monday. Senior European Union officials said they expected it to acknowledge Kosovo’s independence declaration without http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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The declaration of independence raises the prospects of a new constitution and emblems of nationhood, including a new flag bearing a map of Kosovo topped by six stars.

But in a sign of how hard it will be to forge the kind of multiethnic, secular identity that foreign powers have urged, the distinctive two-headed eagle of the red and black Albanian flag, reviled by Serbs, was everywhere Sunday, held by revelers, draped on horses, flapping out of car windows and hanging outside homes and storefronts across the territory.

Warren Hoge contributed reporting from the United Nations, C. J. Chivers from Moscow and Nicholas Kulish from Berlin.

It’s a rare political race where particle physics might come up, but IL-14, Denny Hastert’s former seat, is just such a delightful intersection. And Bill Foster is that Heinlein-esque synthesis; a businessman who started the firm that revolutionized theatre lighting and invented the Source 4 ellipsoidal reflector spotlight, turned award winning physicist, and now candidate.

To appreciate what kind of congressman Foster might become, it’s worth considering what kind of primary campaign he ran: he provides the option of healthcare insurance to all his paid staff; he ran a clean, non negative primary campaign stressing his positions on issues; Foster opposes the war in Iraq, champions legitimate, unfettered science and research, and supports stem cell research, just to name a few. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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To appreciate the scientific side of Dr Bill Foster, follow me below to examine one of the most fascinating, spectacular light-shows our universe can serve up.

Stars that blow themselves to smithereens often produce magnificent sights before, during, and especially after an official supernova explosion. The enigmatic Eta Carinae, below left, is thought to contain a highly unstable star on the precipice of a hypernova. The lacy remains of a supernova observed in 1054 AD is now the Crab Nebula, a tiny, rapidly rotating neutron star lurks noisily inside.



The three schematics below courtesy of graphic artist Karen Wehrstein illustrate the basics of what is thought to happen deep inside a massive, aging star near the end of its life, during a classic kind of Supernova called a Type ll. After burning successively heavier elements, the star eventually begins producing iron at its center. It's a stellar dead end. The iron core grows, robbing the star of energy due to the idiosyncrasies (See comment) of atomic physics, and soon reaches a critical threshold; a massive ball of iron thousands of kilometers in diameter suddenly collapses dramatically, like a soap bubble, into an unimaginably dense remnant a few kilometers wide. Overlying superheated plasma, compressed so much it weighs way more than lead -- quickly falls in to fill the gaping void. When it slams in to the surface of the degenerate core it begans fusing furiously. Short version: Star Go Ka-BOOM!



This does two things: it sets up a huge rebound, sending the outer layers of the star back out, and also releases a vast number of neutrinos .. The gas from the outer layers absorbs these neutrinos, which is like lighting a match in a fireworks factory. The outer layers explode upwards, and several solar masses of doomed star tear outwards at speeds of several thousand kilometers per second.

Under normal conditions, neutrinos are ghostly little particles that overwhelmingly zip through ordinary matter, even a million miles of solid lead, like it was so much hard vacuum. They dwell in an incomprehensible universe seething with subatomic wraiths, not quite pure energy, not entirely solid matter, but a whiff of both. These are not ‘ordinary’ objects. The neutrino represented as a little dot or arrow racing around is an avatar of sorts; a symbolic construct of a hazy particulate property from the surreal world of high energy http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/physics that our large, clunky macro-minds can latch on to. They’re sleeting through you by the trillions as you read this. No need for alarm though: fortunately for us, they don’t interact with the matter in our body!

But every now and then, one in uncounted zillions will cause a sub-atomic change which can in turn produce a tiny flash of light. So, with a giant tank of a clear substance, shielded from as much radiation as possible, surrounded by sensitive photo detectors, every now and then a lone of neutrino can be confirmed. Since these little guys whip through ordinary matter effortlessly, they’re a potential window deep into high energy places we cannot directly observe, like the fusing core of a star. And since a single light ray can take up to a million years to stagger drunkenly out of a stellar core, while neutrinos simply slip through the outer layers of plasma, neutrinos also uniquely offer current information about the state of affairs in places we can’t otherwise observe in real time.

On February 23, 1987, three separate neutrino detectors recorded a spike lasting just a few seconds. This was a strong indication that somewhere in the universe, something really, really big and no doubt violent beyond imagination had happened.

The next day several astronomers, amateur and professional, reported a small but bright point in a nearby dwarf galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. Within a few hours of that report pretty much every telescope in the southern hemisphere had swung to the anomaly. The source was a star estimated to be twenty times heavier than our sun. Except now it was gone, and in its place was the blazing Supernova 1987A. Right: Several frames taken over the course of a decade by the Hubble Space Telescope, and after the initial supernova faded, show the effects of secondary spasms of invisible gas expelled at extreme velocity smacking into a ring of previously ejected material.

One of the instruments that recorded a spike was the Irving-Michigan-Brookhaven proton decay detector. The futuristic chamber of ultra pure water surrounded by two-thousand photodetectors is shown left (The source of the bubbles is a diver inspecting the equipment). Bill Foster played a significant role in the development of the IMB. When the neutrinos set off alarm bells in 1987, Foster had moved on to Fermilab. But because of his involvement with the IMB detector and the subsequent neutrino detection from SN1987A, Foster and his team shared in the 1989 Rossi Prize in high energy physics.

If anything like SN1987A happened too near our planet, the earth would evaporate faster than a snowflake in a bonfire. And yet we may owe our existence to these violent events. The shock wave from SN 1987A will travel outward, essentially forever. Along the way it will combine with other blast fronts, forming waves of compactions and rarefactions in the medium of thin interstellar gas. Simultaneously it will salt those vast clouds of buoyant hydrogen and helium with heavier substances, volatile gases, ices, and metals. The immense waves will diffract causing nodes, small pockets will condense here and there. Gravity will take hold, and the knots of gas will shrink under their own weight, they will begin to glow with dozens of individual sparks, each lighting up the infant stellar nursery from inside. In the center of each spark, pressure and temperature will grow so high that hydrogen will begin to fuse: this is the birth of stars, this is how our own solar system may have arisen five billion years ago.

Speaking purely for myself, as an interesting side note about SN1987A: That primary ring allows astronomers to calculate the distance between us and SN1987A using simple trigonometry. That distance is about 168,000 light-years, meaning the proginator star blew up about 160,000 years before young earth creationists believe the universe began. In addition, short lived isotopes can be seen decaying in the spectra from SN1987A. That is a direct, empirical observation that radio decay rates in the past were the same as predicted by atomic theory and observed in labs today.

Thus, SN1987A is like a Wrecking Ball of Reality to two basic tenets in Young Earth Creationist apologetics: The age of the universe and the validity of radiometric dating. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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Doesn't it seem fitting then, in some cosmic way, that the candidate who contributed to our elegant understanding of the universe should prevail over the other fellow, who hails from a party where antiscientific concepts like climate change denial and creationism are badges of honor?

The polling in what should be an easy GOP victory shows Foster in a dead heat with Republican opponent Jim Oberweis. Republicans are intersted in holding the seat (John McCain is reportedly going to hold an Oberweis fundraiser with a goal of 200,000 dollars). So, if that poll is close to accurate, it is a blinking red warning that this campaign needs every vote, every volunteer, and every dollar it can muster to succeed.

Given the obvious difference between these two candidates, it seems a no brainer that the residents of IL-14 would be best served by Oberwies staying in town, and focusing on improving his already scrumptious home-made ice cream. Whereas voters in IL-14 would be far better represented by a Congressman with Bill Foster’s intellect and accomplishments serving their collective interests in Washington, DC.

If Foster manages to pull this off, it will send a powerful message about what may be in store for other 'safe GOP seats' in 2008 -- a progressive message that incidentally embraces science and reason -- well beyond the confines of Illinois' fourteenth district, and into every nook and cranny in this nation. So if I didn't convince you up there, I hope I've provided you some reason to give Bill Foster's qualifications a second look down here.

Was awfully as tempting to make a pun about Oberweis being served there at the end ... I mean to say, If it’s Sunday, it’s Sunday Kos!

It's not an idio whatever of physics.

Fusion reactions release energy up to a point where the nucleus is most energetically stable - the lowest energy configuration. The Iron nucleus is that configuration.

Heavier elements than iron are built in most cases by neutron adsorption, not fusion reactions.

"It's the planet, stupid."

This was a really cool candidate endorsement, DS, and well written for a pop audience. However, the gravitational collapse of the iron core is just too amazing to brush over.

The iron core is initially supported by electron degeneracy pressure and it is surrounded by a silicon burning shell. That shell keeps dumping more and more iron into the core and eventually the core mass approaches the Chandrasekhar limit of 1.4 Mo. Then degeneracy pressure begins to fail and the core begins to collapse. Temperatures and densities soar as the collapse proceeds. The situation is worsened by the following nuclear reaction

e + p -----> n + neutrino

which is the forcing together of electrons and protons to form neutrons and neutrinos. The neutrinos represent an energy loss term since they don't interact much with other matter and can escape from the star. Hence they won't contribute much to the pressure. The high temperatures of the contracting core also produce gamma rays which smash the iron nuclei to bits, undoing in a tenth of a second all the nuclear fusion that went on before. This process, the destruction of nuclei by highly energetic gamma ray photons, is known as photodisintegration. Both of these effects cause the pressure to drop further and the core to collapse further. This is runaway core collapse and in a fraction of a second the core goes from Earth size to about 10 km in diameter. At this point the densities are equal to the density of nuclear material in the form of a ball of neutrons. Neutron degeneracy pressure suddenly takes over and the collapse stops as the core now becomes virtually incompressible. Of course the surrounding star doesn't know that and it continues to hurtle inward. When all this stuff hits the core it bounces and drives a shock wave outward. The escaping neutrinos play an important role in energizing this outward moving shock wave. Normally neutrinos don't interact very well with matter, but here the densities are so great that the neutrinos dump considerable energy into the overlaying layers. In a few hours the shock wave hits the surface of the star and we see the star explode as a Type II supernova. In a matter of days the star brightens by about a factor of 100 million, becoming for a brief time as bright as an entire galaxy. Note: massive stars that explode in this manner are known as Type II supernovae. There is also a Type I supernova that results from an explosion in a binary system. We will discuss Type I supernova later.

Ultimately the source of energy that powers a supernova is gravity. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/
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The collapse of a solar mass of material down into a neutron star the size of 10 kilometers releases 10^53 ergs of energy which is an enormous amount.

A plan of invasion. Gen. Longstreet telegraphs that he has no corn, and cannot stay where he is, unless supplied by the Quartermaster-General. This, the President says, is impossible, for want of transportation. The railroads can do no more than supply grain for the horses of Lee’s army—all being brought from Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, etc. But the President says Longstreet might extricate himself from the exigency by marching into Middle Tennessee or Kentucky, or both.

Soon after this document came in, another followed from the Tennessee and Kentucky members of Congress, inclosing an elaborate plan from Col. Dibrell, of the Army of Tennessee, of taking Nashville, and getting forage, etc. in certain counties not yet devastated, in Tennessee and Kentucky. Only 10,000 additional men will be requisite. They are to set out with eight days’ rations; and if Grant leaves Chattanooga to interfere with the plan, Gen. Johnston is to follow and fall upon his rear, etc. Gen. Longstreet approves the plan—is eager for it, http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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I infer from his dispatch about corn; and the members of Congress are in favor of it. If practicable, it ought to be begun immediately; and I think it will be.

A bright windy day—snow gone.

The Federal General Sherman, with 30,000 men, was, at the last dates, still marching southeast of Jackson, Miss. It is predicted that he is rushing on his destruction. Gen. Polk is retreating before him, while our cavalry is in his rear. He cannot keep open his communications.

The Jewish revolt against the Romans, ending with the destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple in A.D. 70, marked an irreparable breach between the pagan-and later Christian-worlds and an outcast Jewish minority. Yet the first two-thirds of this absorbing historical study explores the harmony of Roman and Judaic civilizations before the revolt. Goodman, a professor of Jewish studies at Oxford, finds many similarities in a far-ranging comparative analysis of their religions, cultures, economies and governments, though he gives more space to the worldly, extravagant Romans than to the relatively austere and parochial Jews. Before the revolt, he contends, Romans considered Jews unobjectionable, despite their eccentric monotheism; Jerusalem prospered under Roman rule and Jews living in diaspora were well integrated into Roman society. Goodman argues that the cataclysm could have been avoided (the burning of the Temple was accidental, he believes) but for the politics of the imperial succession, which prompted a needlessly hard line against the revolt and then Judaism itself. Drawing on Josephus's firsthand narrative, Goodman fleshes out his lucid account with archeology, numismatics and commentary from Roman and Jewish sources. The result is a scholarly tour de force, a resonant story of a tragic conflict caused by political miscalculation and opportunism. 16 pages of photos, 8 maps.

"This is an important book, on a difficult subject: the reason why the Romans, who had so much in common with the Jews, sought to destroy the Jews and Judaism completely. Only one man could have written it. Martin Goodman is professor of Jewish studies at Oxford and has the unique distinction of having edited both the Journal of Roman Studies and the Journal of Jewish Studies. This polarity of expertise enables him to describe in a penetrating way the terrifying Jewish revolts against Rome of AD 66-70 and 132-5, as well as provide a fresh and convincing analysis of their origins and consequences. . . Goodman has written a splendid book."
—Paul Johnson, The Tablet

“Martin Goodman’s massive new treatment of two crucial centuries of Jewish history should be read by anyone seeking seriously to understand modern Middle Eastern tanges. . . It would be pleasing to feel that international http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/
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statesmen might draw lessons from Goodman’s lucid account of ancient tragedy.”
—Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Guardian

“Sombre and magisterial. . . a brilliant comparative survey. . . There can be no doubting that the issues raised by Rome and Jerusalem will have a resonance with readers far beyond the confines of university classes or theology departments. The Roman world has begun to hold a mirror up to our own anxieties in a way that would have appeared wholly implausible a bare decade ago. If it was the fall of the Bastille that shaped 19th and 20th century history, then it can sometimes seem as though the 21st century is being shaped by the fall, nearly 2000 long years ago, of Jerusalem.”
—Tom Holland, Sunday Times

“His style is brisk and clear, his learning prodigious and his scope immense. . . as Goodman’s compelling and timely book reminds us, even the most pessimistic could hardly have guessed that it would take 2000 years for [the Jews] to return to their holy city — or that even then, their battles would be far from over.”
—Dominic Sandbrook, Saturday Telegraph

“Rome and Jerusalem is, among many other things, a history of anti-Semitism — or, if that term is felt to be anachronistic for Goodman’s period. . . judaophobia. . . Martin Goodman has spent his career studying both ancient Rome and ancient Jerusalem …He is thus the ideal scholar to try to hack a way through these tangled thickets of belief, prejudice and false consciousness.”
—Paul Cartledge, Sunday Telegraph

“A monumental work of scholarship … the parallels with modern day Baghdad are all the more resonant for Goodman studiously avoiding them.”
—Rabbi David J. Goldberg, the Independent

“An impressive, scholarly book.”
—The Economist

In 1912, Robert Falcon Scott reached the South Pole only to discover that he had been beaten to the Antarctic prize five weeks earlier by the Norwegian Roald Amundsen. Scott turned around and began a perilous journey back to base camp. He never made it. He and his four teammates died after two months of heartbreaking toil. The diaries they left behind recounted their struggle in harrowing detail.

Two years later, Ernest Shackleton led an expedition to Antarctica with the aim of exploring the continent much further than before. His ship, the Endurance, became trapped by ice, and Shackleton led his crew to the relative safety of nearby Elephant Island. Despairing of rescue, he and a handful of men set sail in a lifeboat to cross 800 miles of the rough seas, making for South Georgia Island, east of the Falklands. After an epic 16-day journey, Shackleton and his men reached the island, then hiked to a whaling station and arranged to rescue their 22 stranded shipmates. Not a single life was lost.

The two expeditions, with their dramatically different outcomes, are classics of polar exploration. Yet as Stephanie Barczewski observes in "Antarctic Destinies," the meaning of the tales -- along with their moral lessons and cultural appeal -- has shifted over the course of a century. "In 1912," she writes, "many people saw Scott as a hero. Today, many people see him as a bumbling idiot whose incompetence resulted in his own death as well as the deaths of his four companions. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/
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In 1916, many people saw Shackleton as admirable on some level but not quite trustworthy. . . . Today, many people see him as one of the greatest leaders in human history." Her book attempts to show, as she puts it, "the malleability of heroism."

The Scott expedition's Terra Nova at Cape Evans in Antarctica, 1910

At first, Scott was revered in death as the embodiment of British manliness. "Had we lived," he wrote in one of his diary's final entries, "I should have had a tale to tell of the hardihood, endurance and courage of my companions which would have stirred the heart of every Englishman. These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale." Scott was adduced as an exemplar of hardihood, endurance, courage and plenty else besides. No cause seemed too hopeless to hitch its wagon to his star. Even the Alliance of Honour, an anti-masturbation group, appropriated Scott's resolve in its pamphleteering.

Shackleton, by contrast, was greeted by more creditors than fans when he returned to England in late 1914. (He had undertaken the expedition only after interesting a host of investors.) And he encountered a public http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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that, far from marveling at his ordeal, appeared to regard as unseemly the very idea of able-bodied men, on the eve of World War I, running off to polar wastes in search of adventure.

It is perhaps not surprising that Scott's reputation has undergone revision, given his team's grisly end and our inclination, in retrospect, to question the rightness of failed decisions. Shackleton's rise in recent years, however, has been puzzlingly meteoric. History long treated him with mild curiosity or indifference. The James Caird -- that plucky lifeboat that traveled so far -- gathered dust for decades at an obscure college in England and was even used as a trash receptacle. But in 1998 The Wall Street Journal noted a surging "Shackleton Mania" and, the next year, New York's American Museum of Natural History hosted an exhibition about the Endurance. An accompanying book became a best seller and publishers unleashed a flood of Shackleton titles, including business and leadership books. Movies and documentaries followed.

Why was Shackleton so suddenly ascendant? Ms. Barczewski notes that his Endurance experience matches three popular genres: man against nature, maritime adventure and polar survival. Shackleton, in short, could be recast as a prototypical action hero for the late 20th century, not least for Americans. The new Shackleton, Ms. Barczewski writes, "combined optimism and pragmatism in a stereotypically American way: he united an eternally sunny outlook and 'can-do' spirit with a hard-headed assessment of the obstacles that must be overcome."

The most exciting, though unoriginal, part of "Antarctic Destinies" traces the oft-told tales of the two expeditions. Longer sections detail various biographical and pop-cultural trends: Ms. Barczewski cites everything from scholarly tomes and magazine articles to Monty Python sketches and Chick Lit to show how the two men have been viewed by each new generation.

As she was finishing her book, Ms. Barczewski saw signs that popular estimations were changing again. Recent researchers have suggested that Scott encountered unusually bad weather; other writers have focused on the fate of the Ross Sea party, a usually forgotten sledging expedition poorly organized by Shackleton as part of the 1914 venture. It resulted in the deaths of three men.

Ms. Barczewski, for her part, prefers not to pick a winner. And who can blame her? Both Scott and Shackleton, she says, were "great men."

Joseph Albert "Jock" Yablonski (March 3, 1910 - December 31, 1969) was an American labor leader in the United Mine Workers in the 1950s and 1960s. He was murdered in 1969 by killers hired by a union political http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/
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opponent, Mine Workers president W. A. Boyle. His death led to significant reforms in the union.
Contents

* 1 Early life and union career
* 2 UMWA presidential candidacy
* 3 Murder
* 4 Aftermath of Yablonski's murder
* 5 Portrayal in popular culture
* 6 Notes
* 7 References
* 8 External links

Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1910, Yablonski began working in the mines as a boy. He became active in the United Mine Workers after his father was killed in a mine explosion. He was first elected to union office in 1934. In 1940, he was elected as a representative to the international executive board, and in 1958 was appointed president of UMW District 5.

He clashed with W. A. "Tony" Boyle, who became president of the UMW in 1963, over how the union should be run and his view that Boyle did not adequately represent the miners. In 1965, Boyle removed Yablonski as president of District 5 (under reforms enacted by Boyle, district presidents were appointed, not elected). In May 1969, Yablonski announced his candidacy for president of the union. As early as June, Boyle was discussing the need to kill him.

UMWA presidential candidacy

The United Mine Workers was in turmoil by 1969. Legendary UMWA president John L. Lewis had retired in 1960. His successor, Thomas Kennedy, died in 1963. From retirement, Lewis hand-picked Boyle for the UMWA presidency. A Montana miner, Boyle was as autocratic and bullying as Lewis, but not as well liked.

From the beginning of his administration, Boyle faced significant opposition from rank-and-file miners and UMWA leaders. Miners' attitudes about their union had also changed. Miners wanted greater democracy and more autonomy for their local unions. There was also a widespread belief that Boyle was more concerned with protecting mine owners' interests than those of his members. Grievances filed by the union often took months—sometimes years—to resolve, lending credence to the critics' claim. Wildcat strikes occurred as local unions, despairing of UMWA assistance, sought to resolve local disputes with walkouts.

In 1969, Yablonski challenged Boyle for the presidency of UMWA.In an election widely seen as corrupt, Boyle beat Yablonski in the election held on December 9 by a margin of nearly two-to-one (80,577 to 46,073). Yablonski conceded the election, but on December 18, 1969, asked the United States Department of Labor (DOL) to investigate the election for fraud. He also initiated five lawsuits against UMWA in federal court.

On December 31, 1969, three hitmen shot Yablonski, his wife Margaret, and his 25-year-old daughter Charlotte, as they slept in the Yablonski home in Clarksville, Pennsylvania. The bodies were discovered on January 5, 1970, by Yablonski's son, Kenneth. The killings had been ordered by Boyle, who had demanded Yablonski's death on June 23, 1969, after a meeting with Yablonski at UMWA headquarters degenerated into a screaming match. In September 1969, UMWA executive council member Albert Pass received $20,000 from Boyle (who had embezzled the money from union funds) to hire gunmen to kill Yablonski. Paul Gilly, an out-of-work house painter and son-in-law of a minor UMWA official, and two drifters, Aubran Martin and Claude Vealey, agreed to do the job. The murder was postponed until after the election, however, to avoid suspicion falling on Boyle. After three aborted attempts to murder Yablonski, the killers did their job. But they left so many fingerprints behind, it took police only three days to catch them.

A few hours after Yablonski's funeral, several of the miners who had supported http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/
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Yablonski met in the basement of the church were the memorial service was held. They met with attorney Joseph Rauh and drew up plans to establish a reform caucus within the United Mine Workers.

The day after the killing, 20,000 miners in West Virginia walked off the job in a one-day strike, convinced Boyle was responsible for the murders.

Yablonski's murder sparked action. On January 8, 1970, Yablonski's attorney waived the right to further internal review and requested an immediate investigation of the 1969 union presidential election by DOL. On January 17, 1972, the United States Supreme Court granted Mike Trbovich, a 51-year-old coal mine shuttle car operator and union member from District 5 (Yablonski's district), permission to intervene in the DOL suit as a complainant—keeping the election fraud suit alive. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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The Department of Labor had taken no action on Yablonski's complaints while he lived, as if preserving the rights of union members were not important or urgent. But after his murder, Labor Secretary George P. Shultz assigned 230 investigators to the UMWA investigation.

The Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act (LMRDA) of 1959 regulates the internal affairs of labor unions, requiring regular secret-ballot elections for local union offices and providing for federal investigation of election fraud or impropriety. DOL is authorized under the act to sue in federal court to have the election overturned. By 1970, however, only three international union elections had been overturned by the courts.

Gilly, Martin and Vealey were arrested days after the assassinations and indicted for Yablonski's death. Eventually, investigators arrested Pass and Pass' wife. All were convicted of murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Two of the three assassins were sentenced to death; Martin avoided execution by pleading guilty and turning state's evidence.

Miners for Democracy (MFD) formed in April 1970 while the DOL investigation continued. Its members included most of the miners who belonged to the West Virginia Black Lung Association and many of Yablonski's supporters and former campaign staff. MFD's support was strongest in southwestern Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, and the panhandle and northern portions of West Virginia, but MFD supporters existed in nearly all affiliates. The chief organizers of Miners for Democracy included Yablonski's sons, Joseph (known as "Chip") and Ken, Trbovich and others.

DOL filed suit in federal court in 1971 to overturn the 1969 UMWA election. After several lengthy delays, the suit moved went to trial on September 12, 1971. On May 1, 1972, Judge William Bryant threw out the results of the 1969 UMWA international union elections. Bryant scheduled a new election to be held during the first eight days of December 1972. In addition, Bryant agreed that DOL should oversee the election to ensure fairness.

On May 28, 1972, MFD nominated Arnold Miller, a miner from West Virginia who had challenged Boyle on the need for black lung legislation, as its presidential candidate.

Balloting for the next UMWA president began on December 1, 1972. Balloting ended on December 9, and Miller was declared the victor on December 15. The Labor Department certified Miller as UMWA's next president on December 22, 1972. The vote was 70,373 for Miller and 56,334 for Boyle.

Two http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/
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of the convicted murders accused Boyle of masterminding and funding the assassination plot. Boyle was indicted on three counts of murder in April 1973 and convicted in April 1974. He was sentenced to three consecutive life terms in prison. He died in prison in 1985.

The murders were portrayed in a 1986 HBO television movie, Act of Vengeance. Charles Bronson portrayed Yablonski and Wilford Brimley played Boyle.

Cuvier's beaked whale has a robust body and a small head which is about ten percent of its body length. Its forehead slopes to a poorly defined short beak, and its mouth turns upward, giving it a goose-like profile. This whale has a depression behind the blowholes which ends in a distinct neck. Its blow is small and not very noticeable and is projected slightly forward and to the left. One of its more interesting features is that in adult males two large teeth about 2 inches long (5 cm) protrude from the tip of the lower jaw. The males use these teeth in fights with each other over females. For their part the females have smaller, more pointed teeth that remain embedded in the gums. The lower jaw of the Cuvier's beaked whale extends well beyond the upper jaw. Like other beaked whales, the Cuvier's has two deep, V-shaped throat grooves.

COLOR: This whale varies greatly in color. Its back may be rusty-brown, dark gray, or fawn colored and the underside of the body may be dark brown or black. As the Cuvier's beaked whale ages, first the head and neck and then the body become more lightly colored; the heads of old males are almost completely white. The back and sides of this whale, especially the males, are often covered with double-lined scratches caused by the teeth of other males. Its sides and belly are covered with oval white patches.

Cuvier's beaked whale surface characteristics
surface characteristics http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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FINS AND FLUKE: Dorsal fins of Cuvier's beaked whales may vary in shape; they may be as high as 15 inches (38 cm) and falcate (curved) or less than 10 inches (25 cm) and triangular. The fin of this whale is located well behind the mid-section. Its flukes are large and rounded at the tips and may or may not be slightly notched in the center. Its flippers are small and rounded at the tips and fold back into little depressions on the side of the body.

Length and Weight: Maximum size is 23 feet (7 m). The average adult is 18 feet (5.5 m) and weighs 2.7 tons (2500 kg).

Feeding: Squid is its primary food, though it sometimes eats fish and, rarely, crustaceans.

MATING AND BREEDING Sexual maturity is reached when the animal is an average of about 19 feet (5.8 m) long for females and 18 feet (5.5 m) for males. Calves are between 6.5 to 10 feet (2-3 m) at birth and weigh about 600 pounds (272 kg).

Mating and Breeding: fs6-breeding

Cuvier's beaked whale range map
range map
Distribution and Migration: Cuvier's beaked whales are found in all the oceans of the world except the polar regions of both hemispheres. They prefer deep water of over 3,300 feet (1,000 m) and avoid shallow coastal areas.

Natural History: Cuvier's beaked whales are almost never seen at sea, so we know very little about their habits. Sightings of single animals (which are probably males) have been reported, but they are more commonly seen in groups of 2 to 7. Their life span is believed to be at least 25 years.

Status: We know so little about this whale that there are no estimates of past or present population size. Though Cuvier's beaked whales are found stranded more often than any other species of beaked whales, only two mass strandings have been reported; one in the Galapagos and the other in Puerto Rico. These whales beach themselves singly all over the world, more often in some locations than in others. A few Cuvier's beaked whales were taken by hunters in the 1940s to 1960s in Japan's coastal whaling operations, but the numbers were so few that there was no threat to the survival of the species. This whale is not hunted at the present time. More recently, acoustical trauma has been implicated in the mass strandings of Cuvier's beaked whales in the Caribean, Azores, and the Gulf of California.

An old adage says high taxes don't redistribute income, they redistribute people. For new evidence look no further than migration patterns within the United States, as documented in a new survey by the moving company United Van Lines.

A record eight million Americans -- some 20,000 people every day -- relocated to another state last year. So where are these families headed and why? The general picture is this: Americans are continuing to flee the Northeast and Midwest, while the leading destinations continue to be Southern and Western states.

The United Van Lines study finds that the biggest population loser last year was Michigan, where two families moved out of the state for every new family that moved in. Americans are also fleeing New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Illinois. Without interviewing the departed, it's impossible to know the reasons for this outward migration. No doubt overall economic prospects, climate, quality of life and housing prices play a role.

But one reason to conclude that taxes are also a motivator is because the eight states without an income tax are stealing talent from other states. They are Florida, Nevada, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Washington and Wyoming, and each one gained in net domestic migrants. Each one except Florida -- which has sky-high property taxes on new homesteaders -- also ranked in the top 12 of destination states. The nearby table ranks the top five destination and departure states.

Politicians who think taxes don't matter might want to explain the Dakotas. North Dakota ranked second worst in out-migration last year, while South Dakota ranked in the top 10 as a destination. The two are similar in most regards, with one large difference: North Dakota has an income tax and South Dakota doesn't.

Here's another example. The only Pacific Coast state to lose migrant population in 2007 was California, which has the highest state income tax in the nation. This is the continuation of a dismal 10-year performance with nearly one and a half million Golden Staters leaving what was once the premier destination state in America.

Meanwhile, next door, Nevada was second among the states in new families -- and a big percentage of the new arrivals are Californians. Nevada has no income tax. High income Californians can buy a house in Las Vegas for the amount of money they save in three or four years by not paying California income taxes.

One of the few Northeastern states that gained interstate migrants in 2007 was New Hampshire, the only state in New England without an income tax. For the exception that proves the tax rule, we should also mention Vermont, a high-tax state with a big net influx last year. Maybe these folks like the Ben & Jerry's lifestyle, and we also hope they like the government they're paying for.

We invite readers to visit the U-Haul Moving Company Web site (www.uhaul.com), where you can type in a pair of U.S. cities to learn what it costs to move from point A to B. If you want to move, say, from Austin, Texas to Southern California, the moving van will cost you $407 to rent. But if you want to move out of California to Austin, the same van costs $1,831. A move from Dallas to Philadelphia costs $663, versus $2,433 to swap homes in the other direction. The biggest discrepancy we could find was $557 from Nashville, Tennessee to Los Angeles, but the trip costs nearly eight times more, or $4,285, to move to Nashville from L.A.

Our friends on the left say Americans are willing to pay more taxes to get better government services, but their migration patterns reveal the opposite. Governors would be wise to heed these interstate migration trends as they try to cope with what may be one of the worst years in recent memory for state finances. The people who tend to be the most mobile in American society are the educated and motivated -- in other words, the taxpaying class. Tax them too much, and you'll soon find they aren't there to tax at all.

America is back to working on the railroads.

For decades, stretches of track west of this town were so rough that trains couldn't run faster than 25 miles an hour. Lanie Keith, a locomotive engineer for Kansas City Southern, recalls waiting for hours when trains stalled on a steep curve on a stretch of single track between Meridian and Shreveport, La.

But over the past two years, at a cost of $300 million, track crews have transformed the 320-mile route. Installing 960,000 crossties and 80 miles of new rail, they've turned a railroad backwater into a key link in a resurging national transport network. Mr. Keith now skims parts of the improved track, called the Meridian Speedway, at nearly 60 miles an hour. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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"You went from moving like a turtle to a jack rabbit," he says.

The upgrade is part of a railroad renaissance under way across much of the U.S. For the first time in nearly a century, railroads are making large investments in their networks -- adding sets of tracks, straightening curves that force engines to slow and expanding tunnels for bigger trains. Their campaign is altering the corridors of American commerce, more so than any other development since interstate highways spread to the interior.

For decades, railroads spent little on expansion, even tore up surplus track and shrank routes. But since 2000 they've spent $10 billion to expand tracks, build freight yards and buy locomotives, and they have $12 billion more in upgrades planned.

The buildout comes as the industry transitions away from its chief role in recent decades of hauling coal, timber and other raw materials in manufacturing regions. Now, increasingly, railroads are moving finished consumer goods, often made in Asia, from ports to major cities. Their new higher-volume routes, called corridors, often serve the South, where the rail system is less developed and the population is rising.

Railroad operators are pressing for advantage over their main competitor, long-haul trucking, which has struggled with rising fuel prices, driver shortages and highway congestion. Railroads say a load can be moved by rail using about a third as much fuel as it takes to haul it by truck. And rail transport is becoming more efficient still, they say, as operators speed their lines and logistics companies build huge warehouse areas along routes.

Demand for rail service increased sharply when the U.S. economy and Asian imports surged starting in 2003. Tight capacity on major routes enabled railroads to raise prices. The growth in freight volume has slowed along with economic growth, but shippers say they're still planning to increase their use of rail transport because of the cost.

"The railroad industry is finally making some money," says Charles "Wick" Moorman IV, chief executive officer of Norfolk Southern Corp., based in Norfolk, Va. "And we're pumping that money into our infrastructure."

Trucking accounted for 82% of the U.S.'s truck-and-rail intercity-freight spending in 2004, up from 78% in 1990, according to Eno Transportation Foundation, a research organization in Washington, D.C. But trucking companies, notably industry giant J.B. Hunt Transport Services Inc. of Lowell, Ark., are using railroads for the long-haul part of some trips because it's cheaper. Some rail promoters believe that as a result of their investments, they could cut into the business of the two million long-haul freight trucks in the U.S., which account for 350 million shipments a year.

Attracting Interest

For the first time in years, the industry is attracting interest among big-name investors. Last spring, Berkshire Hathaway Inc., disclosed an 11% stake in Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corp., the second-largest U.S. railroad by revenue. Berkshire has since raised the stake to more than 18%. In a move recalling rail boardroom battles of the past, Children's Investment Fund Management LLP, a London hedge fund, and other shareholders have put up a slate of directors for a coming annual meeting of the nation's No. 3 railroad, CSX Corp. (Union Pacific Corp. is the largest U.S. railroad in revenue terms; Norfolk Southern and Kansas City Southern are fourth and fifth, respectively.)

The expansion is stirring conflict with some old customers, the shippers who move raw materials such as chemicals, grain and logs, who feel they're being charged unnecessarily high rates to pay for capital improvements. Trade groups representing such shippers are seeking federal legislation to rein in railroad rate increases.

"I think the railroads are investing in corridors to serve a different customer, and heavy U.S. industry will be left in the dust," says Kenneth Walker, a transportation manager of Graphic Packaging International Corp., a cardboard manufacturer in Marietta, Ga.

It's been a century since railroads embarked on a similar spate of capital investment. Between 1900 and World War I, they launched a huge rebuilding program across the U.S. midsection to handle freight and passenger trains. Traffic was booming as the economy roared back from a financial panic in the 1890s. Railroads added second, third and fourth sets of tracks along main routes, built tunnels and bridges and installed stronger locomotives.

After World War II, though, cars began wiping out passenger-train service. New interstate highways unleashed trucks as a freight competitor. By the 1970s, U.S. railroads were deep into a decline, other than adding new track to the coal fields of Wyoming.

Burlington Northern was the first to pursue the strategy of building a high-capacity corridor to link ports with population centers needing consumer goods, rather than linking industrial centers. In the 1990s, it set out to complete a second set of tracks on its Chicago-Los Angeles Transcon line. "It came right out of the 'Field of Dreams': Build it and they will come," says Rob Krebs, a retired Burlington CEO.

Wall Street analysts objected to the big spending, and Mr. Krebs throttled down the expansion in 1999 and 2000. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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But his successor, Matt Rose, resumed work on the project in 2003, and it is now nearing completion.

Problems with old infrastructure were becoming clear elsewhere. Union Pacific was plagued with freight jams and service breakdowns during a surge of Asian imports a few years ago. Union Pacific hired thousands of new train crew members, and it has since launched a massive track-installation program across the Southwest.

It is upgrading its Sunset Route, from Los Angeles to El Paso, Texas, with a second set of tracks. It's planning to build new freight yards and a fueling station along the way. When the $2 billion project is finished in 2010, Union Pacific will be able to roughly double the number of freight cars crossing the Sunset each day to more than 9,000 from about 5,000 currently.

Railroads are generating development in the same way they spawned towns and industrial sites over a century ago. Warehouse complexes are popping up next to new rail yards designed to load and unload trains carrying containerized goods. Major distribution operations have opened or are planned in places like Elwood, Ill., Kansas City, Mo., and Columbus, Ohio.

The social consequences are evident in developments like AllianceTexas. In the late 1980s, Hillwood Development Co., founded by Ross Perot Jr., son of the former presidential candidate, built a cargo airport outside Fort Worth, thinking that would be the best way to attract companies to 17,000 acres of land north of the city. As an afterthought, the company says, it made room for a rail yard.

A decade later, it's the rail yard that has attracted huge warehouses, for companies such as J.C. Penney Co. and Bridgestone Corp. These and others get container loads of jeans, electronics, tires and such from Southern California ports. "I never would have thought having a rail hub in the middle of our development would have attracted so much interest," says Thomas Harris, a Hillwood senior vice president.

The development, which employs 27,000, has spawned a nearby minicity of shopping centers, a golf course, a racetrack and 6,200 houses. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/
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More than 300 of the homes are high-priced models in gated communities.

Railroads have found friends among environmentalists, who see moving freight by train rather than truck as a way to reduce fuel burning and emissions. Method Products Inc., a San Francisco maker of nontoxic home and personal-care products, says it plans to use rail for 50% of its shipments this year, up from 33% in 2007. "We view rail as a solution to lower our greenhouse-gas emissions," says Jason Bowman, the firm's global logistics manager.

States Climb Aboard

States have also started to climb aboard. In a 2002 report, the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials said transportation capacity could be increased more cheaply in some intercity corridors by adding railways rather than expanding highways.

Norfolk Southern is seeking public funding to accelerate rail-corridor projects, arguing that they provide a public benefit by limiting fuel use, traffic congestion and air pollution. The idea is gaining backers. Virginia created a rail-enhancement fund in 2005 from car-rental fees and is spending $40 million to improve a Norfolk Southern freight line in the state. The railroad industry is urging Congress to pass a railroad investment tax credit to fund rail improvements.

Many old lines need work. Norfolk Southern's most direct route to the Midwest from the docks of Norfolk, Va., has tunnels high enough for coal trains. But they are too low for double-stack trains, which haul shipping containers one above the other. Norfolk Southern has begun a three-year, $260 million project to raise the height of 28 tunnels on the route, which it has renamed the Heartland Corridor.

Norfolk Southern's most ambitious project is the Crescent Corridor, a network of tracks between the New York City area and New Orleans. The company touts the corridor as a cheaper and more environmentally friendly alternative to widening highways such as Interstate 81, which runs through Virginia's scenic Shenandoah Valley.

Trucks make four million to 4.5 million trips annually along I-81 in Virginia, according to the Virginia Department of Transportation. Norfolk Southern envisions a route with enough speed and capacity to displace about a million truck trips a year. It is seeking funding for most of the $2 billion project from the U.S. government and states along the corridor.

Tim Lynch, an executive of the American Trucking Associations in Arlington, Va., says it's "folly" to think rail corridors can take the place of additional highways. "You need to do both, because you have growth in freight traffic that will keep both modes busy," he says.

Work continues on the Meridian Speedway between Meridian and Shreveport. Kansas City Southern bought the line in 1994 as a shortcut for freight moving between Los Angeles and Atlanta, bypassing crowded gateways in Memphis, Tenn., and New Orleans. The railroad began to improve the line, at one point easing a hilly curve near the river town of Vicksburg, Miss., that for years hampered Mr. Keith and other engineers when trains stalled there.

Additional Overhauls

Two years ago, Norfolk Southern agreed to contribute more than $300 million for additional overhauls in exchange for a 30% stake in the Speedway. The money has helped replace tracks and install a signal system on a line that had none. It allowed construction of sidings so trains can pass each other in more places.

Union Pacific uses the Speedway for a leg of a longer run that begins near the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, Calif. Improvements on the line have enabled Union Pacific to launch a new train packed with Asian goods that can cross the Southern U.S. in 72 hours, down from the 120-hour service it offered in past years. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/
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Such numbers translate into big savings for railroads, which figure that each mile per hour of speed they can add systemwide translates into fewer cars, locomotives and crew members.

Mr. Keith says his trips between Meridian and Vicksburg now take six or seven hours, compared with 11 or 12 before the upgrades. He says he saved 30 minutes on a recent run by pulling onto a newly lengthened siding in Meehan, Miss., to pass another train.

Mr. Keith says the work will clear the Speedway to handle more and faster trains. "I love it," he says. "It guarantees me work stability."

Marsh & McLennan Cos.' fourth-quarter profit fell 62% as weakness continued in its insurance-brokerage business.

Marsh, one of the world's largest insurance brokers, reported net income of $85 million, or 16 cents a share, as revenue increased 8.1% to $2.93 billion.

Earnings in Marsh's risk-and-insurance business fell 54%, which the company blamed on a revenue drop at its Risk Capital Holdings that cut per-share earnings by eight cents. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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The risk-and-insurance segment's operating margin, which has severely trailed Marsh's rivals, slumped to 4.2%.

Marsh also reported that profit in its consulting firms rose 38% on a 19% revenue increase.

The company hired a chief executive last month and fired the head of its insurance-brokerage unit in September over rising expenses, poor operating margins and weak revenue in the segment. Competitors such as Aon Corp. and Willis Group Holdings Ltd. are outflanking Marsh in the insurance business, and speculation on an asset sale or merger abounds as investors try to discern how new CEO Brian Duperreault will right the ship.

Pricing is an issue that has been of paramount concern to insurers of late. The current profit equation must factor how low to price policies so as to attract customers less concerned with risk in a time of fewer disasters.

Shares of Marsh & McLennan were up 69 cents, or 2.7%, to $25.99 in 4 p.m. trading on the New York Stock Exchange.


Since taking over in 2005 as American International Group Inc.'s chief executive, Martin Sullivan has pushed the big insurer to be transparent, hoping to move past the accounting scandal that helped get him the top job.

Suddenly, though, analysts and investors are trying to assess the significance of a new accounting problem that has put Mr. Sullivan in an awkward spot: the "material weakness" that AIG's auditor found relating http://louis-j-sheehan.com/
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to exposure to subprime-linked securities.

So far, Wall Street seems willing to cut him some slack -- but patience is limited. After sinking to a five-year low Monday, AIG shares rose 3.1%, or $1.40, yesterday to $46.14 in 4 p.m. composite trading on the New York Stock Exchange.

The scope of the accounting problems appears far narrower than those that swamped the insurer in 2005 and led to the exit of longtime leader Maurice R. "Hank" Greenberg. It also helps AIG that so many other financial companies are wrestling with the valuations of their own subprime exposures.

Still, the current situation could become more painful, especially if AIG has to keep on valuing its exposures in the same way going forward. The change the company announced Monday increased the size of its write-down for a single month, November, by $3.6 billion.

For the full fourth quarter, Goldman Sachs analyst Thomas Cholnoky estimated in a research report yesterday that AIG may be forced to write down $10 billion for those exposures. AIG hasn't announced when it will report quarterly results, but it has until Feb. 29 to file its annual report.

"The estimated market values are having a real-world impact in that they reduce reported earnings, they reduce reported shareholders' equity," says Bruce Ballantine, an analyst at Moody's Investors Service. They also could reduce the company's financial flexibility "to some extent."

Yesterday, both Moody's and Standard & Poor's said they revised their outlook on AIG downward to "negative" from "stable." Among the things S&P said could trigger a downgrade is "if accounting losses are sufficiently large to cause market issues for the company." It added that a downgrade could follow if it determines the material weakness is "significant."

The hit to AIG's credibility was severe not just because of the size of the change in the expected write-down but because analysts and investors found the company's explanation of what caused the increased loss to be difficult to decipher.

At issue for AIG is the valuation of a portfolio of what are essentially insurance contracts that the company sold, known as credit default swaps.

The swaps serve as credit protection on, among other things, $62.4 billion in collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs, backed by collateral that includes subprime mortgages.

The key question now: How to value that portfolio? These kinds of highly specialized instruments aren't traded even in normal circumstances, making them hard to price. Valuing them becomes more difficult when the market for the securities and assets they're linked to is in the kind of distressed situation that currently exists.

A Look in the Pool

Analysts believe AIG originally valued these contracts by looking to prices supplied for a pool of CDOs, among other factors. The company then adjusted these values based on indexes that track subprime securities, analysts surmise.

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AIG held these contracts, not the underlying CDOs.

AIG's auditor, PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP, appears to have taken issue with the process. That prompted AIG to use market prices of CDOs, which in many cases are considered to be at fire-sale levels, rather than values for a pool of CDOs. In addition, the insurer eliminated the premium that typically applies to the value of the insurance contracts. That was done because it said market conditions had become too uncertain to calculate this.

The moves seem designed to make AIG's valuation place greater weight on market factors that immediately affect the value of the company's contracts. AIG's models seemed to place less emphasis on this and greater weight on the fact that the company doesn't believe it will ultimately suffer losses related to the contracts.

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AIG drew a distinction between whatever losses it records based on the current value of the portfolio (an estimate of what someone would pay to take the risk off AIG's hands) and what it may actually have to pay to fulfill its obligations under the contracts.

In a statement, the company said it believes any losses "will not be material."

That calmed investors a bit. "That was a minorly helpful statement," says Ed Walczak, who runs the U.S. value funds for Vontobel Asset Management Inc., which has 3.5% of its $350 million holdings in AIG. As for the company's overall situation, "the grounds are still changing," Mr. Walczak adds.

Still, the wording of yesterday's statement varied slightly from AIG's statement last fall that it was "highly unlikely" the company would http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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have to "make payments" on the portfolio, Kathleen Shanley, an analyst at Gimme Credit, noted in a report yesterday.

Meaning of 'Not Material'

"'Not material' can still be a pretty big number when you are talking about a firm the size of AIG," Ms. Shanley wrote. "And investors are right to wonder if the next step on the slippery slope will be from 'not material' to 'material,' especially considering that AIG has not yet finalized its year-end numbers."

In response, a spokesman for AIG said of the prospect of any losses: "We would say it's slightly less than 'highly unlikely,' simply because of further deterioration in the default frequency of underlying mortgages." But if there were any losses, he added, "they would be immaterial" to the company's income statement or balance sheet.

Write to Liam Pleven at liam.plev

St. Jude Medical, Inc. (NYSE:STJ) announced it has received an Investigational Device Exemption (IDE) from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to begin enrollment in a controlled, multi-site, blinded, clinical study of deep brain stimulation for major depressive disorder, a severe form of depression.

The BROADEN™ (BROdmann Area 25 DEep brain Neuromodulation) study will http://louis-j-sheehan.com/
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evaluate the safety and effectiveness of deep brain stimulation in patients with depression for whom currently-available treatments are not effective. The study will build upon the pioneering depression work of a research team from the University of Toronto, led by neurologist Helen S. Mayberg, M.D. (now with Emory University School of Medicine), and neurosurgeon Andres Lozano, M.D.

"Major depressive disorder is severely disabling," said Dr. Lozano. "Currently, there are no widely-accepted treatment options for patients with this condition once multiple medications, psychotherapy and electroconvulsive therapy have failed."

Drs. Mayberg and Lozano conducted the first study of deep brain stimulation (DBS) for depression in Toronto, Canada, in 2003 and published their findings in Neuron in March 2005. As reported in this journal article, imaging studies led them to an area of the brain thought to be involved in depression called Brodmann Area 25. This area appears to become overactive when people are profoundly sad and depressed.

St. Jude Medical owns the intellectual property rights and has various patents pending for the use of neurostimulation at Brodmann Area 25. The Libra® Deep Brain Stimulation System, which is being evaluated in this study, is designed to deliver mild electrical pulses from a device implanted near the collarbone and connected to small electrical leads placed at specific targets in the brain.

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more than 21 million adults suffer from some kind of depressive disorder, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. Of these, only about 80 percent can be effectively treated with currently available therapies, according to the National Advisory Mental Health Council. Unfortunately, that means approximately 4 million adult Americans live with depression that does not respond to medications, psychotherapy and, in certain cases, electroconvulsive therapy.

"St. Jude Medical is dedicated to researching and developing neuromodulation therapies for people who live with conditions such as severe depression," said Chris Chavez, president of St. Jude Medical's ANS Division. "We are hopeful that this trial will lead to the successful development of a sustainable therapy for those patients who have exhausted other treatment options."

About St. Jude Medical

St. Jude Medical is dedicated to making life better for cardiac, neurological and chronic pain patients worldwide through excellence in medical device technology and services. The Company has five major focus areas that include: cardiac rhythm management, atrial fibrillation, cardiac surgery, cardiology and neuromodulation. Headquartered in St. Paul, Minn., St. Jude Medical employs approximately 12,000 people worldwide. For more information, please visit http://www.sjm.com.

About the ANS Division of St. Jude Medical

The ANS Division (Advanced Neuromodulation Systems) became a part of St. Jude Medical in 2005. The ANS Division is an innovative technology leader dedicated to the design, development, manufacturing and marketing of implantable neuromodulation systems to improve the quality of life for people suffering from disabling chronic pain and other nervous system disorders (http://www.ans-medical.com).

Using a cosmic magnifying glass to peer into the deepest reaches of space, two teams of astronomers have discovered tiny galaxies that may be among the most distant known. Images suggest that one of the galaxies is so remote that the light now reaching Earth left this starlit body when the 13.7-billion-year-old universe was only about 700 million years old.

LONG AGO, FAR AWAY. Gravity of the cluster Abell 1689 acts as a gravitational lens, http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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bending into arcs and magnifying the light from remote background galaxies. One galaxy appears so remote that it doesn't show up in visible light but only in the infrared.

The discoveries are important, notes Tim Heckman of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, because they probe a special time in the universe, when the cosmos changed from a place filled with neutral gas to a place ionized by the emergence of the first substantial population of stars and black holes. Studies of distant galaxies help pinpoint when that critical era happened.

All of the galaxies are so small that even the keen eye of the Hubble Space Telescope couldn't have spotted them without nature providing a gravitational assist. According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, a massive foreground body acts like a lens, bending and magnifying light from a more remote galaxy that lies along the same line of sight to Earth.
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That's why Garth Illingworth and Rychard Bouwens of the University of California, Santa Cruz and their colleagues went hunting for distant galaxies around a nearby cluster of galaxies called Abell 1689.

The cluster's gravity distorts images of background galaxies, bending them into arcs and magnifying their brightness. One of these galaxies proved especially intriguing because it appeared bright at several infrared wavelengths recorded by Hubble but disappeared in visible light.

That's a sign that the galaxy, dubbed A1689-zD1, is both extraordinarily distant and youthful. The data also indicate that the galaxy forms stars at a rate equivalent to five suns a year, typical of the small galaxies thought to be common in the early universe, says Bouwens.

The researchers don't have a spectrum for the galaxy and therefore can't be sure of its distance, but they calculate in an upcoming Astrophysical Journal paper that the galaxy most likely lies 13 billion light-years from Earth and has a redshift of 7.6. That redshift signifies that cosmic expansion has stretched the wavelengths emitted by the galaxy by a factor of 8.6.

"The reason we are excited about this [galaxy] is that we can look at it in great detail because of the factor of 10 gravitational amplification by the foreground cluster," Bouwens says. A1689-zD1 is the brightest known galaxy that's likely to be extremely distant, his team notes.
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The Hubble images show several dense clumps, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. Follow-up images, taken at longer infrared wavelengths with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, provide additional evidence that the galaxy is remote and also yield a more accurate measurement of the galaxy's mass.

"It looks pretty convincing" that A1689-zD1 is remote, but proof may require spectra taken by Hubble's proposed successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, Heckman says.

In searching for distant galaxies, a second team, which includes Richard Ellis and Johan Richard of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, also surveyed several galaxy clusters. The team found evidence of six distant galaxies, which may lie between 12.9 billion and 13.1 billion light-years from Earth, Richard reported this week at an astrophysics meeting at the Aspen Center for Physics in http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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Colorado. Because the galaxies don't appear as bright—the clusters magnify them by a factor of only two to four—astronomers have less information about these faint bodies than about A1689-zD1, Richard notes.

At first, it may seem like a treat to stay up late—but the next day will be no picnic. There'll be yawning, heavy limbs, and a cranky disposition.

At times like these, the desire to sleep can feel overwhelming.

And it should.

Growing kids need sleep, as do people of all ages. Indeed, research shows that health and safety both suffer when we try to get by with too little shut-eye. So it's fortunate that our bodies do such a good job of alerting us when it's time to hit the sack.

Like people, other animals also take time out to rest. You've probably seen a lion dozing at the zoo, or maybe watched your dog snooze away, curled up in its bed. In fact, sleep is a necessity for every animal that's ever been studied. This includes whales, octopuses—even fruit flies.
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How long animals slumber, though, varies widely. Elephants and giraffes sleep only about 2 to 4 hours a day, while bats and opossums may nod off for up to 20 hours. By studying similarities and differences in when and how long various animals sleep, researchers hope to better understand why the need for rest is critical to creatures throughout the animal kingdom.

Getting sleepy? Yawning is just one trait we share with many animals that are tired.

Getting sleepy? Yawning is just one trait we share with many animals that are tired.

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What is sleep?

It's obvious what your mom means when she says it's time to go sleep, But how do scientists describe this restful period? When we sleep, our eyes usually close and we lose consciousness. You might even think that your brain shuts down. But it doesn't.

By attaching sensors to the surface of a sleeper's scalp, researchers can listen in on patterns of electrical waves within the brain. Such measurements show that the patterns of these waves change throughout the night as the body alternates between two types of sleep.

In the first type, brain activity slows as the body enters an especially deep sleep. In the second type, known as rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep, our eyes flutter rapidly under their lids (hence the name)—and our brains become almost as active as they are when we're awake. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/
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This period is also when we dream.

Unlike reptiles, amphibians, and fish, all land mammals and birds experience this type of resting. "REM sleep is quite a mystery," says Jerome Siegel, who studies slumber in animals at the University of California, Los Angeles. Researchers don't know why people or any other animals do it.

One thing REM-sleeping animals have in common, though, is that they're all relatively intelligent. Researchers wonder if the need for REM sleep, with its buzzing brain activity, has something to do with that.
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The need for sleep is important, which is why many animals—including cats and dogs—grab a nap when there's little need for activity.

The need for sleep is important, which is why many animals—including cats and dogs—grab a nap when there's little need for activity.

"We have always joked and used the term 'birdbrain' to indicate that somebody's stupid," says Niels Rattenborg, who studies bird sleep at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Starnberg, Germany. But birds are better at certain intelligence tests than are some mammals, so perhaps "birdbrain" should be considered a compliment, he says.

On the other hand, Siegel has found that the duck-billed platypus, which isn't a particularly brainy animal, has "spectacular" REM sleep—twitching its bill and legs throughout this stage. And some of the smartest animals—dolphins and whales—experience no REM sleep. So its purpose remains a puzzle.

That's not the only baffling thing about the sleep habits of dolphins and whales. A second mystery is that just half of their brain dozes—and one eye closes—at a time. Keeping partly alert may be one way that these mammals protect themselves in the open ocean, Siegel says: "They have no safe place to sleep."

Ducks do something similar. When sleeping together, the birds on the edge of the group slumber with the outside eye open and half of their brain awake—presumably to keep watch while the other half of their brain snoozes.
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Some birds may even sleep while flying. Rattenborg's team has designed instruments to attach to birds that spend most of their life in flight. Using these tools, the scientists will measure the birds' brain waves as the animals fly, looking for signs that they might nap in the air.

The fact that all animals make time for sleeping, even under potentially dangerous circumstances, suggests that sleep must serve a crucial function. And indeed, some evidence suggests that sleep is essential for learning and forming permanent memories.

But sleep may also be primarily a way for animals to save energy and stay out of harm's way, Siegel says. This may help explain why meat-eating critters sleep more than herbivores, which are animals that dine solely on plants. Herbivores like cows and zebras need to spend more time searching for and grazing on food than do meat eaters, such as lions and other big cats. A lion that has just fed on an antelope won't have to eat again for several days. So a big cat might be better off snoozing for a spell after it eats, rather than prowling around and risking injury. http://louis-j-sheehan.de/
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Top predators, like this polar bear, may slumber for a long time after a major meal.

Top predators, like this polar bear, may slumber for a long time after a major meal.

But that's just an educated guess, really, based on a growing number of observations. Scientists need to study the animals they've already looked at in greater detail. And they need to study other animals as well before they can fully understand the benefits of sleep and identify which benefits are most important for a particular species.
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One thing is certain: ample slumber is essential to health and learning. So give in when a strong urge to sleep hits, and catch plenty of ZZZ's.

Jupiter’s twin found… 60 light years away!Triple asteroid amateur imageDid salt lick Martian life?AstroShaqCarnival of Space 41XKCD has SETI’s numberGLAST’s rocket arrives at CapeJupiter’s twin found… 60 light years away!
Astronomers have just announced that they have found a near twin of Jupiter orbiting the star HD 154345, a fairly sunlike star about 60 light years away. This is very cool news, and has some pretty big implications for finding another Earth around some distant star.
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Finding a planet like this isn’t as easy as it sounds! Finding planets with the same mass as Jupiter isn’t hard; many have been found with even lower mass. The hard part is finding one that is orbiting a sun-like star at the same distance Jupiter orbits our Sun. The closer in a planet is to its star, the easier it is to find: the method used measures how hard the planet’s gravity tugs on its parent star as it orbits; the planet pulls the star around just like the star pulls the planet, and we see this as a change in the velocity of the star toward and away from us (called the radial velocity; Wikipedia has a nice animated GIF for this), and that effect gets bigger with bigger planets, and the closer they orbit.
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superjupiters orbiting close in, and some lighter planets also close to their parent stars. But finding a Jupiter-like planet on an orbit like Jupiter’s, well, that takes a long time to do. Jupiter takes 12 years to orbit the Sun, so it would take many observations over many years to detect a planet like that.
But they’ve done it! The team (Jason White, Geoff Marcy, Paul Butler, and Steven Vogt) have been using the monster 10-meter Keck telescope for ten years, observing HD 154345. This star is a lot like the Sun (it’s a G8, and the Sun is a G0 G2, meaning it’s a little smaller, lower mass, and cooler than the Sun). The planet (called HD 154345b) has a mass of no less than 0.95 times that of Jupiter, and orbits the star 4.2 AU out — 1 AU is the Earth-Sun distance, and Jupiter’s orbit is about 5.2 AU from the Sun. The planet takes a little over 9 years to orbit the star, and the orbit is circular.

This makes HD 154345b the first true Jupiter analog discovered. It’s a tremendous achievement!
So why is this important?
The superjupiters in tight orbits that have been discovered probably didn’t form that close to their stars; it’s a tough environment to form a big planet. The commonly accepted theory is that a planet like that forms farther out from the star and migrates closer in over millions of years, probably due to friction from the disk of gas and dust from which it formed.
Now imagine: you’re a planet that’s about the size of Earth, orbiting your star at about the same distance Earth is from the Sun. You’re pretty happy, thinking that in a few hundred million years, things’ll cool off, you’ll form oceans, and continents, and life. But then, hey, what’s that? Oh, it’s a planet with 5000 times your mass, headed right for you! When it passes you by, its tremendous gravity either drops you into the star, or ejects you right out of the system!
Bummer.
So we don’t think that the stars that have close-in massive planets will have Earth-like planets. It may be that the only solar systems with planets like Earth will have their Jupiter analogs orbiting farther out, where they can’t hurt the smaller planets.
And hey, that’s just what we have here! http://louis-j-sheehan.de/
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So, does HD 154345 have a blue-green ball orbiting it as well? These observations can’t say; they are only sensitive enough to find the Jupiter-like planet (and they can’t rule out planets farther out either). It might, or it might not. But here’s an interesting point: the system is probably about 2 billion years old. By that age, the Earth was already teeming with microscopic life. Provocative, eh?
I expect that future missions will spend quite a bit of time peering at this system. As of right now, it holds a lot of promise for those of us hoping that one day we’ll find another Earth.

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Did salt lick Martian life?
Scientists working to see if Mars ever had life have concentrated, of course, on looking for water. It appears to have been abundant on Mars a long time ago, but what was it like?

On Earth, water can be pure, or salty, or laden with minerals and metals. On Mars, the presence of minerals like jarosite indicate that at least in some spots, Martian water was high in minerals, with a corresponding high acidity. That’s bad enough, but now evidence from the rover Opportunity indicates that the water was also very salty, far higher in salinity than Earth’s oceans.
This has dimmed somewhat the idea of life on Mars, at least lately — meaning, the last few billion years. It’s possible that the water was in better shape to develop life as we know it early on in the history of Mars, but over time, the water got more acidic and more salty. At first blush, this precludes life arising and flourishing on the Red Planet, but I wonder. One scientist said "This tightens the noose on the possibility of life," but I think that’s a hasty conclusion.
Life arose on Earth almost immediately after the asteroid and comet bombardment ceased, just a billion or so years after Earth formed. Conditions then were very different than they are now, and yet here we are. Whatever life started back then, it evolved, adapted. Every corner of the Earth has life in it, from miles down under the surface to pools of chemicals that would kill a human (and most bacteria) instantly. Check out D. radiodurans for a real eye-opener on how tough life can be. I have little doubt our oceans have changed their salinity numerous times over the past 3 billion years, and life adapted.
From this press release, it’s impossible to say how much things have changed on Mars — besides, of course, the loss of its atmosphere, its water, and the drop in temperature. In this case, I mean how the water on Mars changed over time, and how rapidly. If it happened overnight, then sure, it’s not hard to imagine it wiping out all life on the planet. But what if it took, say, a few million years? Life on Earth has survived horrific circumstances in the past. Could any possible Martian life have done the same? http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/
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We still have no idea if life ever arose on Mars or not — Mars cooled more rapidly than the Earth did, and so may have had life on it before we did. If any life did form there, it may not be around anymore, and there could be any number of causes. We simply don’t know, and I think it’s way too early in our exploration of the planet to rule anything out.

Cupid is the Roman love god associated with the cherubic archer of Valentine's Day. Cupid is also the fully adult god associated with Psyche in the story of the marriage of Cupid and Psyche, our first record of which comes from the Golden Ass of Apuleius, and was retold in C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces. The story of Cupid and Psyche has also interested Jungian psychologists, including Erich Newman and Marie-Louise Von Franz. Cupid is the son of the Roman goddess of love and beauty Venus. The Roman love god is Eros.
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In 1957, marketing executive James Vicary claimed that during screenings of the film Picnic, the words “eat popcorn” and “drink Coca-Cola” were flashed on the screen every five seconds for 1/3,000 second—well below the threshold of conscious awareness. Vicary said soda and popcorn sales spiked as a result of what he called “subliminal advertising.”

Psychologists had been studying subliminal messages since the late 19th century. It was Vicary’s ideas, presented in Vance Packard’s 1957 best seller, The Hidden Persuaders, that catapulted the concept of subliminal advertising into the public consciousness. Even though in a 1962 interview with Advertising Age Vicary admitted that the amount of data he’d collected was “too small to be meaningful,” subliminal messages continued to attract public—and commercial—interest.

In 1974, the FCC held hearings about the perceived threat of subliminal advertising and issued a policy statement saying that “subliminal perception” was deceptive and “contrary to the public interest.”

Concerns about subliminal advertising continued for decades. As recently as 2000 during the presidential race, the Republican National Committee ran an ad attacking the policies of Al Gore in which the word rats briefly flashed on the screen. Many suspected subliminal intent, which the ad’s creator denied.

Matthew Erdelyi, a psychology professor at Brooklyn College, says that while Vicary’s methods were controversial, new studies continue to suggest the use of subliminal perception in advertising could be effective. “There’s a lot of interest, but the subject matter is a little bit taboo,” he says. Still, if subliminal messages in advertising have a resurgence in the future, “nobody should be terribly surprised.”

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An icy landscape studded with frozen lakes, the wintry terrain of southern Finland appears to be the birthplace of ice skating.

To trace the sport’s origins, researchers studied remnants of bone-and-leather skates found throughout northern Europe and dating to at least 2000 B.C. They re-created these ancient skates and gave them to volunteers, who glided on ice while scientists measured the energy spent. Then the researchers entered findings in a computer program that simulated journeys through five different European regions. For each region, the computer calculated the energy spent by travelers who walked around every lake as opposed to those who skated across them.

In places where lakes are relatively uncommon, like northern Germany, a human making a 10-kilometer trek would have saved two or three percent of his energy by skating across frozen lakes. But in southern Finland, there are so many lakes that those with skates could save as much as 10 percent of their metabolic energy.
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“These tools were used for traveling and to save energy and time when people had to go hunting and fishing,” said Federico Formenti, a human locomotion biomechanist at the University of Oxford and one of the study’s authors. “The energy saved in the southern area of Finland was far greater than the energy saved in any other area,” making it the most likely birthplace of the ice skate.

But the Finns don’t get all the credit, Formenti says. The next big innovation—the more efficient wooden skates with steel blades—likely originated http://louis-j-sheehan.de/
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in the Netherlands, where extensive, man-made canals provided new skating opportunities.

Do emotions influence a cancer patient’s prognosis? In one of the largest, longest, and most controlled studies of its kind, researchers investigated whether the emotional state of cancer patients has any relationship to their survival.

University of Pennsylvania psychologist James Coyne and his colleagues followed 1,093 adults, all of whom had advanced head and neck cancer with nonspreading tumors. All patients received standardized medical care through clinical trials run by the Radiation Therapy Oncology Group (RTOG).

At the start of the study, the participants completed a 27-item questionnaire used to evaluate the physical, social, and emotional quality of life in people with cancer and other chronic diseases. Five items targeted emotional state, asking patients to rate, on a scale of 0 to 4, the extent to which statements like “I feel sad” and “I am losing hope in my fight against my illness” had been true for them over the past seven days. The researchers then calculated a score for each person’s initial emotional well-being.
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Coyne tracked patients for an average of nine years, until they either dropped out of the study or died. The study reported 646 deaths. Once the records for the participants were complete, researchers analyzed the data. “We were surprised to find absolutely no relationship” between emotion and survival, Coyne says. http://louis1j1sheehan.us/ImageGallery/CategoryList.aspx?id=36f0e6c9-8b8a-4f0a-8630-e5d3b879fad4&m=0
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The researchers then looked at emotion and survival in greater detail, examining data for the most buoyant optimists, the most despondent individuals, and patients with complicating factors like smoking. In none of these analyses did emotional well-being affect survival. Because the study was so large and long, it gathered far more information than previous investigations of emotion and cancer survival. In smaller studies, Coyne says, it can be difficult to tell whether deaths were related to a factor like emotion or were simply due to chance.

While the huge pool of subjects and the controlled clinical trial conditions give the study statistical heft, Coyne acknowledges a few limitations. Having only people with head and neck cancers in the study eliminates the variability of a group suffering from different forms of the disease, but it also eliminates information about whether patients with other forms of cancer would show the same results. Additionally, patients had to be judged “mentally reliable”—able to follow instructions and keep appointments—in order to qualify for the clinical trials, so their emotional scores might not represent the full spectrum of psychological states among cancer patients.
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Coyne says this is the most in-depth study of its kind, and until a study with a similar sample size proves otherwise, he is convinced there is no conclusive relationship between emotional well-being and cancer survival. Many cancer patients struggling to maintain a positive outlook—and fearing that their lives depended on it—have contacted Coyne to express relief that their survival may not be dependent on their emotions. “Having a positive outlook is not going to extend the quantity of life,” Coyne says. “Not everybody is capable of being positive when they have cancer.”

• A 2004 study found that 72 percent of the public and 86 percent of cancer patients believe psychological factors affect cancer survival. Only 26 percent of oncologists agree.
• About 25 percent of breast cancer patients who joined support groups told researchers in a 2005 study that they attended to improve their immune systems.
• Four previous studies indicate that people with better psychological function do survive longer with cancer—but four others suggest that a healthier psychological condition predicts shorter survival time. More than a dozen studies have found no relationship between the two variables.
• A 2007 study found that the emotional, physical, and social questionnaire Coyne used is effective at predicting depression.
• Major depression afflicts about 25 percent of all cancer patients.
• The two clinical trials in Coyne’s study were conducted by the RTOG, which had a $13 million budget in 2007 and is funded by the National Cancer Institute.
• The American Cancer Society cited 1.4 million new cases of cancer in the United States in 2007 and more than 500,000 cancer deaths, with about 11,000 due to head and neck cancer.
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While this study attempts to correct factors that muddied previous research, few experts think the question of cancer and emotion is closed. Stanford psychiatrist David Spiegel notes that coping strategies are an important part of the picture and that they were not addressed by Coyne’s research. He points to a study of breast cancer patients that provides evidence that survival has to do more with how people deal with emotions than how they feel. (Coyne believes the sample size in that study was inadequate and says larger studies oppose Spiegel’s contention.) http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page1.aspx
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Spiegel says support groups and other therapies might improve outcomes by helping patients manage stress and improve communication with doctors. Coyne acknowledges the possibility that psychological support could affect survival by mechanisms other than emotional well-being but says no methodologically sound study has yet shown a relationship.

In 1957, marketing executive James Vicary claimed that during screenings of the film Picnic, the words “eat popcorn” and “drink Coca-Cola” were flashed on the screen every five seconds for 1/3,000 second—well below the threshold of conscious awareness. Vicary said soda and popcorn sales spiked as a result of what he called “subliminal advertising.”

Psychologists had been studying subliminal messages since the late 19th century. http://louis-j-sheehan.de/
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It was Vicary’s ideas, presented in Vance Packard’s 1957 best seller, The Hidden Persuaders, that catapulted the concept of subliminal advertising into the public consciousness. Even though in a 1962 interview with Advertising Age Vicary admitted that the amount of data he’d collected was “too small to be meaningful,” subliminal messages continued to attract public—and commercial—interest.

In 1974, the FCC held hearings about the perceived threat of subliminal advertising and issued a policy statement saying that “subliminal perception” was deceptive and “contrary to the public interest.”

Concerns about subliminal advertising continued for decades. As recently as 2000 during the presidential race, the Republican National Committee ran an ad attacking the policies of Al Gore in which the word rats briefly flashed on the screen. Many suspected subliminal intent, which the ad’s creator denied.

Matthew Erdelyi, a psychology professor at Brooklyn College, says that while Vicary’s methods were controversial, new studies continue to suggest the use of subliminal perception in advertising could be effective. “There’s a lot of interest, but the subject matter is a little bit taboo,” he says. Still, if subliminal messages in advertising have a resurgence in the future, “nobody should be terribly surprised.”
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We report the anticarcinogenic, anti-aging polyphenol resveratrol activates the radio- and chemo-inducible cancer gene therapy vector Ad.Egr.TNF, a replication-deficient adenovirus that expresses human tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-alpha) under control of the Egr-1 promoter. Like ionizing radiation or chemotherapeutic agents previously shown to activate Ad.Egr.TNF, resveratrol also induces Egr-1 expression from its chromosomal locus with a possible role for Egr-1 promoter CC(A+T)richGG sequences in the expression of TNF-alpha. Resveratrol induction of TNF-alpha in Ad.Egr.TNF-infected tumor xenografts demonstrated antitumor response in human and rat tumor models comparable to that of radio- or chemotherapy-induced TNF-alpha. Although sirtuins are known targets of resveratrol, in vitro inhibition of SIRT1 activity did not abrogate resveratrol induction of Egr-1 expression. This suggests that SIRT1 is not essential to mediate resveratrol induction of Egr-1. Nevertheless, control of transgene expression via resveratrol activation of Egr-1 may extend use of Ad.Egr.TNF to patients intolerant of radiation or cytotoxic therapy and offer a novel tool for development of other inducible gene therapies.
Keywords:

resveratrol, adenovirus, TNFerade, SIRT1, TNF-alpha

Dietary habits and incidence of prostate cancer (PCa) are very different in several parts of the world. Among the differences between Eastern and Western diets is the greater intake of soy in the Eastern cultures. This might be one factor contributing to a lower incidence of PCa in Asian men. Many studies using PCa cells and animal studies of chemical carcinogenesis have shown that a wide range of dietary compounds have cancer chemopreventive potential. Therefore, the interest in nutrition-based approaches for prevention and treatment of PCa is increasing. We reviewed all experimental preclinical in vitro and in vivo data as well as clinical trials performed with soy isoflavone genistein for prevention and treatment of PCa. The preclinical data for genistein presented in this review show a remarkable efficacy against PCa cells in vitro with molecular targets ranging from cell cycle regulation to induction of apoptosis. In addition, seemingly well-conducted animal experiments support the belief that genistein might have a clinical activity in human cancer therapy. However, it is difficult to make definite statements or conclusions on clinical efficacy of genistein because of the great variability and differences of the study designs, small patient numbers, short treatment duration and lack of a standardized drug formulation. Although some results from these genistein studies seem encouraging, reliable or long-term data on tumor recurrence, disease progression and survival are unknown. The presented data potentially allow recommending patients the use of genistein as in soy products in a preventive setting. However, at present there is no convincing clinical proof or evidence that genistein might be useful in PCa therapy.

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Using a cosmic magnifying glass to peer into the deepest reaches of space, two teams of astronomers have discovered tiny galaxies that may be among the most distant known. Images suggest that one of the galaxies is so remote that the light now reaching Earth left this starlit body when the 13.7-billion-year-old universe was only about 700 million years old.

LONG AGO, FAR AWAY. Gravity of the cluster Abell 1689 acts as a gravitational lens, bending into arcs and magnifying the light from remote background galaxies. One galaxy appears so remote that it doesn't show up in visible light but only in the infrared.

The discoveries are important, notes Tim Heckman of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, because they probe a special time in the universe, when the cosmos changed from a place filled with neutral gas to a place ionized by the emergence of the first substantial population of stars and black holes. Studies of distant galaxies help pinpoint when that critical era happened.

All of the galaxies are so small that even the keen eye of the Hubble Space Telescope couldn't have spotted them without nature providing a gravitational assist. According to Einstein's theory of general relativity, a massive foreground body acts like a lens, bending and magnifying light from a more remote galaxy that lies along the same line of sight to Earth.
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That's why Garth Illingworth and Rychard Bouwens of the University of California, Santa Cruz and their colleagues went hunting for distant galaxies around a nearby cluster of galaxies called Abell 1689.

The cluster's gravity distorts images of background galaxies, bending them into arcs and magnifying their brightness. One of these galaxies proved especially intriguing because it appeared bright at several infrared wavelengths recorded by Hubble but disappeared in visible light.

That's a sign that the galaxy, dubbed A1689-zD1, is both extraordinarily distant and youthful. The data also indicate that the galaxy forms stars at a rate equivalent to five suns a year, typical of the small galaxies thought to be common in the early universe, says Bouwens.

The researchers don't have a spectrum for the galaxy and therefore can't be sure of its distance, but they calculate in an upcoming Astrophysical Journal paper that the galaxy most likely lies 13 billion light-years from Earth and has a redshift of 7.6. That redshift signifies that cosmic expansion has stretched the wavelengths emitted by the galaxy by a factor of 8.6.

"The reason we are excited about this [galaxy] is that we can look at it in great detail because of the factor of 10 gravitational amplification by the foreground cluster," Bouwens says. A1689-zD1 is the brightest known galaxy that's likely to be extremely distant, his team notes.
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The Hubble images show several dense clumps, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. Follow-up images, taken at longer infrared wavelengths with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, provide additional evidence that the galaxy is remote and also yield a more accurate measurement of the galaxy's mass.

"It looks pretty convincing" that A1689-zD1 is remote, but proof may require spectra taken by Hubble's proposed successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, Heckman says.

In searching for distant galaxies, a second team, which includes Richard Ellis and Johan Richard of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, also surveyed several galaxy clusters. The team found evidence of six distant galaxies, which may lie between 12.9 billion and 13.1 billion light-years from Earth, Richard reported this week at an astrophysics meeting at the Aspen Center for Physics in Colorado. Because the galaxies don't appear as bright—the clusters magnify them by a factor of only two to four—astronomers have less information about these faint bodies than about A1689-zD1, Richard notes.

At first, it may seem like a treat to stay up late—but the next day will be no picnic. There'll be yawning, heavy limbs, and a cranky disposition.

At times like these, the desire to sleep can feel overwhelming.

And it should.

Growing kids need sleep, as do people of all ages. Indeed, research shows that health and safety both suffer when we try to get by with too little shut-eye. So it's fortunate that our bodies do such a good job of alerting us when it's time to hit the sack.

Like people, other animals also take time out to rest. You've probably seen a lion dozing at the zoo, or maybe watched your dog snooze away, curled up in its bed. In fact, sleep is a necessity for every animal that's ever been studied. This includes whales, octopuses—even fruit flies.
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How long animals slumber, though, varies widely. Elephants and giraffes sleep only about 2 to 4 hours a day, while bats and opossums may nod off for up to 20 hours. By studying similarities and differences in when and how long various animals sleep, researchers hope to better understand why the need for rest is critical to creatures throughout the animal kingdom.

Getting sleepy? Yawning is just one trait we share with many animals that are tired.

Getting sleepy? Yawning is just one trait we share with many animals that are tired.

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What is sleep?

It's obvious what your mom means when she says it's time to go sleep, But how do scientists describe this restful period? When we sleep, our eyes usually close and we lose consciousness. You might even think that your brain shuts down. But it doesn't.

By attaching sensors to the surface of a sleeper's scalp, researchers can listen in on patterns of electrical waves within the brain. Such measurements show that the patterns of these waves change throughout the night as the body alternates between two types of sleep.

In the first type, brain activity slows as the body enters an especially deep sleep. In the second type, known as rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep, our eyes flutter rapidly under their lids (hence the name)—and our brains become almost as active as they are when we're awake. This period is also when we dream.

Unlike reptiles, amphibians, and fish, all land mammals and birds experience this type of resting. "REM sleep is quite a mystery," says Jerome Siegel, who studies slumber in animals at the University of California, Los Angeles. Researchers don't know why people or any other animals do it.

One thing REM-sleeping animals have in common, though, is that they're all relatively intelligent. Researchers wonder if the need for REM sleep, with its buzzing brain activity, has something to do with that.
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The need for sleep is important, which is why many animals—including cats and dogs—grab a nap when there's little need for activity.

The need for sleep is important, which is why many animals—including cats and dogs—grab a nap when there's little need for activity.

"We have always joked and used the term 'birdbrain' to indicate that somebody's stupid," says Niels Rattenborg, who studies bird sleep at the Max Planck Institute for Ornithology in Starnberg, Germany. But birds are better at certain intelligence tests than are some mammals, so perhaps "birdbrain" should be considered a compliment, he says.

On the other hand, Siegel has found that the duck-billed platypus, which isn't a particularly brainy animal, has "spectacular" REM sleep—twitching its bill and legs throughout this stage. And some of the smartest animals—dolphins and whales—experience no REM sleep. So its purpose remains a puzzle.

That's not the only baffling thing about the sleep habits of dolphins and whales. A second mystery is that just half of their brain dozes—and one eye closes—at a time. Keeping partly alert may be one way that these mammals protect themselves in the open ocean, Siegel says: "They have no safe place to sleep."

Ducks do something similar. When sleeping together, the birds on the edge of the group slumber with the outside eye open and half of their brain awake—presumably to keep watch while the other half of their brain snoozes.
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Some birds may even sleep while flying. Rattenborg's team has designed instruments to attach to birds that spend most of their life in flight. Using these tools, the scientists will measure the birds' brain waves as the animals fly, looking for signs that they might nap in the air.

The fact that all animals make time for sleeping, even under potentially dangerous circumstances, suggests that sleep must serve a crucial function. And indeed, some evidence suggests that sleep is essential for learning and forming permanent memories.

But sleep may also be primarily a way for animals to save energy and stay out of harm's way, Siegel says. This may help explain why meat-eating critters sleep more than herbivores, which are animals that dine solely on plants. Herbivores like cows and zebras need to spend more time searching for and grazing on food than do meat eaters, such as lions and other big cats. A lion that has just fed on an antelope won't have to eat again for several days. So a big cat might be better off snoozing for a spell after it eats, rather than prowling around and risking injury.

Top predators, like this polar bear, may slumber for a long time after a major meal.

Top predators, like this polar bear, may slumber for a long time after a major meal.

But that's just an educated guess, really, based on a growing number of observations. Scientists need to study the animals they've already looked at in greater detail. And they need to study other animals as well before they can fully understand the benefits of sleep and identify which benefits are most important for a particular species.
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One thing is certain: ample slumber is essential to health and learning. So give in when a strong urge to sleep hits, and catch plenty of ZZZ's.

Jupiter’s twin found… 60 light years away!Triple asteroid amateur imageDid salt lick Martian life?AstroShaqCarnival of Space 41XKCD has SETI’s numberGLAST’s rocket arrives at CapeJupiter’s twin found… 60 light years away!
Astronomers have just announced that they have found a near twin of Jupiter orbiting the star HD 154345, a fairly sunlike star about 60 light years away. This is very cool news, and has some pretty big implications for finding another Earth around some distant star.
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Finding a planet like this isn’t as easy as it sounds! Finding planets with the same mass as Jupiter isn’t hard; many have been found with even lower mass. The hard part is finding one that is orbiting a sun-like star at the same distance Jupiter orbits our Sun. The closer in a planet is to its star, the easier it is to find: the method used measures how hard the planet’s gravity tugs on its parent star as it orbits; the planet pulls the star around just like the star pulls the planet, and we see this as a change in the velocity of the star toward and away from us (called the radial velocity; Wikipedia has a nice animated GIF for this), and that effect gets bigger with bigger planets, and the closer they orbit.
So we see lots ofhttp://louis-j-sheehan.biz/
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superjupiters orbiting close in, and some lighter planets also close to their parent stars. But finding a Jupiter-like planet on an orbit like Jupiter’s, well, that takes a long time to do. Jupiter takes 12 years to orbit the Sun, so it would take many observations over many years to detect a planet like that.
But they’ve done it! The team (Jason White, Geoff Marcy, Paul Butler, and Steven Vogt) have been using the monster 10-meter Keck telescope for ten years, observing HD 154345. This star is a lot like the Sun (it’s a G8, and the Sun is a G0 G2, meaning it’s a little smaller, lower mass, and cooler than the Sun). The planet (called HD 154345b) has a mass of no less than 0.95 times that of Jupiter, and orbits the star 4.2 AU out — 1 AU is the Earth-Sun distance, and Jupiter’s orbit is about 5.2 AU from the Sun. The planet takes a little over 9 years to orbit the star, and the orbit is circular.

This makes HD 154345b the first true Jupiter analog discovered. It’s a tremendous achievement!
So why is this important?
The superjupiters in tight orbits that have been discovered probably didn’t form that close to their stars; it’s a tough environment to form a big planet. The commonly accepted theory is that a planet like that forms farther out from the star and migrates closer in over millions of years, probably due to friction from the disk of gas and dust from which it formed.
Now imagine: you’re a planet that’s about the size of Earth, orbiting your star at about the same distance Earth is from the Sun. You’re pretty happy, thinking that in a few hundred million years, things’ll cool off, you’ll form oceans, and continents, and life. But then, hey, what’s that? Oh, it’s a planet with 5000 times your mass, headed right for you! When it passes you by, its tremendous gravity either drops you into the star, or ejects you right out of the system!
Bummer.
So we don’t think that the stars that have close-in massive planets will have Earth-like planets. It may be that the only solar systems with planets like Earth will have their Jupiter analogs orbiting farther out, where they can’t hurt the smaller planets.
And hey, that’s just what we have here!
So, does HD 154345 have a blue-green ball orbiting it as well? These observations can’t say; they are only sensitive enough to find the Jupiter-like planet (and they can’t rule out planets farther out either). It might, or it might not. But here’s an interesting point: the system is probably about 2 billion years old. By that age, the Earth was already teeming with microscopic life. Provocative, eh?
I expect that future missions will spend quite a bit of time peering at this system. As of right now, it holds a lot of promise for those of us hoping that one day we’ll find another Earth.

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Did salt lick Martian life?
Scientists working to see if Mars ever had life have concentrated, of course, on looking for water. It appears to have been abundant on Mars a long time ago, but what was it like?

On Earth, water can be pure, or salty, or laden with minerals and metals. On Mars, the presence of minerals like jarosite indicate that at least in some spots, Martian water was high in minerals, with a corresponding high acidity. That’s bad enough, but now evidence from the rover Opportunity indicates that the water was also very salty, far higher in salinity than Earth’s oceans.
This has dimmed somewhat the idea of life on Mars, at least lately — meaning, the last few billion years. It’s possible that the water was in better shape to develop life as we know it early on in the history of Mars, but over time, the water got more acidic and more salty. At first blush, this precludes life arising and flourishing on the Red Planet, but I wonder. One scientist said "This tightens the noose on the possibility of life," but I think that’s a hasty conclusion.
Life arose on Earth almost immediately after the asteroid and comet bombardment ceased, just a billion or so years after Earth formed. Conditions then were very different than they are now, and yet here we are. Whatever life started back then, it evolved, adapted. Every corner of the Earth has life in it, from miles down under the surface to pools of chemicals that would kill a human (and most bacteria) instantly. Check out D. radiodurans for a real eye-opener on how tough life can be. I have little doubt our oceans have changed their salinity numerous times over the past 3 billion years, and life adapted.
From this press release, it’s impossible to say how much things have changed on Mars — besides, of course, the loss of its atmosphere, its water, and the drop in temperature. In this case, I mean how the water on Mars changed over time, and how rapidly. If it happened overnight, then sure, it’s not hard to imagine it wiping out all life on the planet. But what if it took, say, a few million years? Life on Earth has survived horrific circumstances in the past. Could any possible Martian life have done the same? http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/
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We still have no idea if life ever arose on Mars or not — Mars cooled more rapidly than the Earth did, and so may have had life on it before we did. If any life did form there, it may not be around anymore, and there could be any number of causes. We simply don’t know, and I think it’s way too early in our exploration of the planet to rule anything out.

Cupid is the Roman love god associated with the cherubic archer of Valentine's Day. Cupid is also the fully adult god associated with Psyche in the story of the marriage of Cupid and Psyche, our first record of which comes from the Golden Ass of Apuleius, and was retold in C.S. Lewis' Till We Have Faces. The story of Cupid and Psyche has also interested Jungian psychologists, including Erich Newman and Marie-Louise Von Franz. Cupid is the son of the Roman goddess of love and beauty Venus. The Roman love god is Eros.
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In 1957, marketing executive James Vicary claimed that during screenings of the film Picnic, the words “eat popcorn” and “drink Coca-Cola” were flashed on the screen every five seconds for 1/3,000 second—well below the threshold of conscious awareness. Vicary said soda and popcorn sales spiked as a result of what he called “subliminal advertising.”

Psychologists had been studying subliminal messages since the late 19th century. It was Vicary’s ideas, presented in Vance Packard’s 1957 best seller, The Hidden Persuaders, that catapulted the concept of subliminal advertising into the public consciousness. Even though in a 1962 interview with Advertising Age Vicary admitted that the amount of data he’d collected was “too small to be meaningful,” subliminal messages continued to attract public—and commercial—interest.

In 1974, the FCC held hearings about the perceived threat of subliminal advertising and issued a policy statement saying that “subliminal perception” was deceptive and “contrary to the public interest.”

Concerns about subliminal advertising continued for decades. As recently as 2000 during the presidential race, the Republican National Committee ran an ad attacking the policies of Al Gore in which the word rats briefly flashed on the screen. Many suspected subliminal intent, which the ad’s creator denied.

Matthew Erdelyi, a psychology professor at Brooklyn College, says that while Vicary’s methods were controversial, new studies continue to suggest the use of subliminal perception in advertising could be effective. “There’s a lot of interest, but the subject matter is a little bit taboo,” he says. Still, if subliminal messages in advertising have a resurgence in the future, “nobody should be terribly surprised.”

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An icy landscape studded with frozen lakes, the wintry terrain of southern Finland appears to be the birthplace of ice skating.

To trace the sport’s origins, researchers studied remnants of bone-and-leather skates found throughout northern Europe and dating to at least 2000 B.C. They re-created these ancient skates and gave them to volunteers, who glided on ice while scientists measured the energy spent. Then the researchers entered findings in a computer program that simulated journeys through five different European regions. For each region, the computer calculated the energy spent by travelers who walked around every lake as opposed to those who skated across them.

In places where lakes are relatively uncommon, like northern Germany, a human making a 10-kilometer trek would have saved two or three percent of his energy by skating across frozen lakes. But in southern Finland, there are so many lakes that those with skates could save as much as 10 percent of their metabolic energy.
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“These tools were used for traveling and to save energy and time when people had to go hunting and fishing,” said Federico Formenti, a human locomotion biomechanist at the University of Oxford and one of the study’s authors. “The energy saved in the southern area of Finland was far greater than the energy saved in any other area,” making it the most likely birthplace of the ice skate.

But the Finns don’t get all the credit, Formenti says. The next big innovation—the more efficient wooden skates with steel blades—likely originated in the Netherlands, where extensive, man-made canals provided new skating opportunities.

Do emotions influence a cancer patient’s prognosis? In one of the largest, longest, and most controlled studies of its kind, researchers investigated whether the emotional state of cancer patients has any relationship to their survival.

University of Pennsylvania psychologist James Coyne and his colleagues followed 1,093 adults, all of whom had advanced head and neck cancer with nonspreading tumors. All patients received standardized medical care through clinical trials run by the Radiation Therapy Oncology Group (RTOG).

At the start of the study, the participants completed a 27-item questionnaire used to evaluate the physical, social, and emotional quality of life in people with cancer and other chronic diseases. Five items targeted emotional state, asking patients to rate, on a scale of 0 to 4, the extent to which statements like “I feel sad” and “I am losing hope in my fight against my illness” had been true for them over the past seven days. The researchers then calculated a score for each person’s initial emotional well-being.
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Coyne tracked patients for an average of nine years, until they either dropped out of the study or died. The study reported 646 deaths. Once the records for the participants were complete, researchers analyzed the data. “We were surprised to find absolutely no relationship” between emotion and survival, Coyne says.

The researchers then looked at emotion and survival in greater detail, examining data for the most buoyant optimists, the most despondent individuals, and patients with complicating factors like smoking. In none of these analyses did emotional well-being affect survival. Because the study was so large and long, it gathered far more information than previous investigations of emotion and cancer survival. In smaller studies, Coyne says, it can be difficult to tell whether deaths were related to a factor like emotion or were simply due to chance.

While the huge pool of subjects and the controlled clinical trial conditions give the study statistical heft, Coyne acknowledges a few limitations. Having only people with head and neck cancers in the study eliminates the variability of a group suffering from different forms of the disease, but it also eliminates information about whether patients with other forms of cancer would show the same results. Additionally, patients had to be judged “mentally reliable”—able to follow instructions and keep appointments—in order to qualify for the clinical trials, so their emotional scores might not represent the full spectrum of psychological states among cancer patients.
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Coyne says this is the most in-depth study of its kind, and until a study with a similar sample size proves otherwise, he is convinced there is no conclusive relationship between emotional well-being and cancer survival. Many cancer patients struggling to maintain a positive outlook—and fearing that their lives depended on it—have contacted Coyne to express relief that their survival may not be dependent on their emotions. “Having a positive outlook is not going to extend the quantity of life,” Coyne says. “Not everybody is capable of being positive when they have cancer.”

• A 2004 study found that 72 percent of the public and 86 percent of cancer patients believe psychological factors affect cancer survival. Only 26 percent of oncologists agree.
• About 25 percent of breast cancer patients who joined support groups told researchers in a 2005 study that they attended to improve their immune systems.
• Four previous studies indicate that people with better psychological function do survive longer with cancer—but four others suggest that a healthier psychological condition predicts shorter survival time. More than a dozen studies have found no relationship between the two variables.
• A 2007 study found that the emotional, physical, and social questionnaire Coyne used is effective at predicting depression.
• Major depression afflicts about 25 percent of all cancer patients.
• The two clinical trials in Coyne’s study were conducted by the RTOG, which had a $13 million budget in 2007 and is funded by the National Cancer Institute.
• The American Cancer Society cited 1.4 million new cases of cancer in the United States in 2007 and more than 500,000 cancer deaths, with about 11,000 due to head and neck cancer.
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While this study attempts to correct factors that muddied previous research, few experts think the question of cancer and emotion is closed. Stanford psychiatrist David Spiegel notes that coping strategies are an important part of the picture and that they were not addressed by Coyne’s research. He points to a study of breast cancer patients that provides evidence that survival has to do more with how people deal with emotions than how they feel. (Coyne believes the sample size in that study was inadequate and says larger studies oppose Spiegel’s contention.) http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page1.aspx
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Spiegel says support groups and other therapies might improve outcomes by helping patients manage stress and improve communication with doctors. Coyne acknowledges the possibility that psychological support could affect survival by mechanisms other than emotional well-being but says no methodologically sound study has yet shown a relationship.

In 1957, marketing executive James Vicary claimed that during screenings of the film Picnic, the words “eat popcorn” and “drink Coca-Cola” were flashed on the screen every five seconds for 1/3,000 second—well below the threshold of conscious awareness. Vicary said soda and popcorn sales spiked as a result of what he called “subliminal advertising.”

Psychologists had been studying subliminal messages since the late 19th century. It was Vicary’s ideas, presented in Vance Packard’s 1957 best seller, The Hidden Persuaders, that catapulted the concept of subliminal advertising into the public consciousness. Even though in a 1962 interview with Advertising Age Vicary admitted that the amount of data he’d collected was “too small to be meaningful,” subliminal messages continued to attract public—and commercial—interest.

In 1974, the FCC held hearings about the perceived threat of subliminal advertising and issued a policy statement saying that “subliminal perception” was deceptive and “contrary to the public interest.”

Concerns about subliminal advertising continued for decades. As recently as 2000 during the presidential race, the Republican National Committee ran an ad attacking the policies of Al Gore in which the word rats briefly flashed on the screen. Many suspected subliminal intent, which the ad’s creator denied.

Matthew Erdelyi, a psychology professor at Brooklyn College, says that while Vicary’s methods were controversial, new studies continue to suggest the use of subliminal perception in advertising could be effective. “There’s a lot of interest, but the subject matter is a little bit taboo,” he says. Still, if subliminal messages in advertising have a resurgence in the future, “nobody should be terribly surprised.”
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We report the anticarcinogenic, anti-aging polyphenol resveratrol activates the radio- and chemo-inducible cancer gene therapy vector Ad.Egr.TNF, a replication-deficient adenovirus that expresses human tumor necrosis factor alpha (TNF-alpha) under control of the Egr-1 promoter. Like ionizing radiation or chemotherapeutic agents previously shown to activate Ad.Egr.TNF, resveratrol also induces Egr-1 expression from its chromosomal locus with a possible role for Egr-1 promoter CC(A+T)richGG sequences in the expression of TNF-alpha. Resveratrol induction of TNF-alpha in Ad.Egr.TNF-infected tumor xenografts demonstrated antitumor response in human and rat tumor models comparable to that of radio- or chemotherapy-induced TNF-alpha. Although sirtuins are known targets of resveratrol, in vitro inhibition of SIRT1 activity did not abrogate resveratrol induction of Egr-1 expression. This suggests that SIRT1 is not essential to mediate resveratrol induction of Egr-1. Nevertheless, control of transgene expression via resveratrol activation of Egr-1 may extend use of Ad.Egr.TNF to patients intolerant of radiation or cytotoxic therapy and offer a novel tool for development of other inducible gene therapies.
Keywords:

resveratrol, adenovirus, TNFerade, SIRT1, TNF-alpha

Dietary habits and incidence of prostate cancer (PCa) are very different in several parts of the world. Among the differences between Eastern and Western diets is the greater intake of soy in the Eastern cultures. This might be one factor contributing to a lower incidence of PCa in Asian men. Many studies using PCa cells and animal studies of chemical carcinogenesis have shown that a wide range of dietary compounds have cancer chemopreventive potential. Therefore, the interest in nutrition-based approaches for prevention and treatment of PCa is increasing. We reviewed all experimental preclinical in vitro and in vivo data as well as clinical trials performed with soy isoflavone genistein for prevention and treatment of PCa. The preclinical data for genistein presented in this review show a remarkable efficacy against PCa cells in vitro with molecular targets ranging from cell cycle regulation to induction of apoptosis. In addition, seemingly well-conducted animal experiments support the belief that genistein might have a clinical activity in human cancer therapy. However, it is difficult to make definite statements or conclusions on clinical efficacy of genistein because of the great variability and differences of the study designs, small patient numbers, short treatment duration and lack of a standardized drug formulation. Although some results from these genistein studies seem encouraging, reliable or long-term data on tumor recurrence, disease progression and survival are unknown. The presented data potentially allow recommending patients the use of genistein as in soy products in a preventive setting. However, at present there is no convincing clinical proof or evidence that genistein might be useful in PCa therapy.

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Hot on the heels of that fabulous Spitzer image comes news that Hubble and Spitzer have teamed up to find what may be the most distant galaxy ever seen. It appears to be at a distance of 12.8 billion light years.
Yikes.
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The big image shows the incredible galaxy cluster Abell 1689, a well-studied city of galaxies. The combined gravity of the galaxies in that cluster act as a lens, distorting and magnifying the light of galaxies on the other side, more distant galaxies that might be too faint to be seen on their own. The arcs you see are all more distant galaxies, their light strewn out by the gravity if the intervening cluster (see how they all appear to have the center of the cluster as their own center of curvature?).
Even boosted by this gravitational lens, the light of the distant galaxy named A1689-zD1 is too faint to be detected in the visible, but Hubble’s infrared camera NICMOS got a peek at it. Then the Spitzer Space Telescope was able to see it even more clearly, as can be seen by the three images on the right.
The more distant galaxies we see, the younger they are, because it takes light a long time to cross the Universe. We see this galaxy as it was when the Universe itself was only about a billion years old. Astronomers are not sure how long it took galaxies to form after the Big Bang, but every time we look farther away, we still see galaxies. Mind you, the ones we see have to be fantastically bright, so they may be skewing our view (there may be much dimmer ones, but they are as yet too faint to see). But the point is, we do see galaxies at this fantastic distance.
The distance was determined by looking at the colors of the galaxy. The Universe is expanding, and more distant galaxies recede from us more quickly. This stretches the light from distant objects out, making them redder, a cosmic variation on the more familiar Doppler shift that makes car engines make that WWEWEEEEEOOOOOORRRR sound as they pass. By knowing what kind of light a young galaxy emits, and then comparing it to the amount of light in each image, the amount of redshift can be estimated, and the distance determined. For A1689-zD1, it’s invisible in visible light, detectable at near infrared wavelengths, and stronger yet in the longer infrared colors. This indicates a tremendous redshift, and therefore a great distance.
From my rough calculation, it may be possible to nail down the redshift using STIS, a camera on board Hubble. STIS is currently dead, the victim of an electrical short. However, astronauts will attempt a repair of it in September during the Hubble servicing mission. I wonder if it’s worth trying to observe the galaxy… it’s a marginal observation; it’s possible that even if STIS can detect this faint smudge, it will only be able to give us a lower limit to the distance (in other words, the data will say that the galaxy is at least at a distance of X billion light years, but not tell us what the actual distance is). Still, it might be worth a shot.
By knowing the distance to this galaxy, and examininghttp://louis-j-sheehan.org/
the way it emits light, we can put yet another data point in our models of the early Universe. We’re still trying to figure out just what the heck the cosmos was doing back then, and every time we see farther back, we nail down a little bit more about this place we live in. Observations like this one from Hubble and Spitzer propel us that much farther in our understanding.

Cognitive side effects like memory loss and fuzzy thinking aren't listed on the patient information sheet for Lipitor, the popular cholesterol-lowering drug. But some doctors are voicing concerns that in a small portion of patients, statins like Lipitor may be helping hearts but hurting minds.

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• Like every medication, statins also have side effects such as muscle aches and memory loss that can be difficult to measure. What's your experience been with statins? Join a discussion.
• Health Mailbox: Melinda Beck reviews the procedure recommended to care for someone who is unconscious.

"This drug makes women stupid," Orli Etingin, vice chairman of medicine at New York Presbyterian Hospital, declared at a recent luncheon discussion sponsored by Project A.L.S. to raise awareness of gender issues and the brain. Dr. Etingin, who is also founder and director of the Iris Cantor Women's Health Center in New York, told of a typical patient in her 40s, unable to concentrate or recall words. Tests found nothing amiss, but when the woman stopped taking Lipitor, the symptoms vanished. When she resumed taking Lipitor, they returned.

"I've seen this in maybe two dozen patients," Dr. Etingin said later, adding that they did better on other statins. "This is just observational, of course. We really need more studies, particularly on cognitive effects and women."

Pfizer Inc.'s Lipitor is the world's best-selling medicine, with revenues of $12.6 billion in 2007. The company says that its safety and efficacy have been demonstrated in more than 400 clinical trials and 145 million patient years of experience, and that the extensive data "do not establish a casual link between Lipitor and memory loss." Pfizer also says it draws conclusions about adverse events from a variety of sources "as opposed to anecdotal inferences by individual providers with a limited data pool."
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World-wide, some 25 million people take statins, including Zocor, Mevacor, Crestor, Pravachol and Vytorin. As a group, they are widely credited with reducing heart attacks and strokes in people at high risk, though the benefits are less clear in people who are not at high risk, particularly women and the elderly. Some 15% of patients complain of side effects; muscle aches and liver toxicity are the most recognized to date. But anecdotes linking statins to memory problems have been rampant for years.

On balance, most cardiologists see little cause for concern. "The benefits far outweigh the risks," says Antonio Gotto, dean of the Weill-Cornell Medical School and past president of the American Heart Association. Dr. Gotto, who has consulted for most of the statin makers and been involved in many of the trials, says "I would hate to see people frightened off taking statins because they think it's going to cause memory loss."

Thinking and memory problems are difficult to quantify, and easy for doctors to dismiss. Many people who take statins are elderly and have other conditions and medications that could have cognitive side effects.
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Still, the chronology can be very telling, says Gayatri Devi, an associate professor of neurology and psychiatry at New York University School of Medicine, who says she's seen at least six patients whose memory problems were traceable to statins in 12 years of practice. "The changes started to occur within six weeks of starting the statin, and the cognitive abilities returned very quickly when they went off," says Dr. Devi. "It's just a handful of patients, but for them, it made a huge difference."

Researchers at the University of California at San Diego are nearing completion of a randomized controlled trial examining the effects of statins on thinking, mood, behavior, and quality of life. Separately, the UCSD researchers are collecting anecdotal experiences of patients, good and bad, on statins; memory problems are the second most common side effect, after muscle aches, in about 5,000 reports to date.

"We have some compelling cases," says Beatrice Golomb, the study's lead researcher. In one of them, a San Diego woman, Jane Brunzie, was so forgetful that her daughter was investigating Alzheimer's care for her and refused to let her babysit for her 9-year-old granddaughter. Then the mother stopped taking a statin. "Literally, within eight days, I was back to normal -- it was that dramatic," says Mrs. Brunzie, 69 years old.

Doctors put her on different statins three more times. "They'd say, 'Here, try these samples.' Doctors don't want to give up on it," she says. "Within a few days of starting another one, I'd start losing my words again," says Mrs. Brunzie, who has gone back to volunteering at the local elementary school she loves and is trying to bring her cholesterol down with dietary changes instead.

"I feel very blessed -- I got about 99% of my memory back," she adds. "But I worry about people like me who are starting to lose their words who may think they have just normal aging and it may not be."
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Of course, not every case of mental decline can be reversed by stopping statins. In fact, there's some evidence that statins may ward off Alzheimer's by reducing plaque and inflammation in the brain.

On the other hand, the brain is largely cholesterol, much of it in the myelin sheaths that insulate nerve cells and in the synapses that transmit nerve impulses. Lowering cholesterol could slow the connections that facilitate thought and memory. Statins may also lead to the formation of abnormal proteins seen in the brains of Alzheimer's patients.

The cognitive changes can affect men as well as women. But women on statins are often simultaneously losing estrogen due to menopause, which can also cause cognitive changes. "Women are getting hit with a double whammy," says Elizabeth Lee Vliet, a women's health physician in Tucson, Ariz., who has a background in neuroendochronology.
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Side effects are always highly individual. Most patients tolerate statins very well, and heart disease remains the leading cause of death in the U.S. for men and women.

But it pays to think hard about whether you really need to be on a statin -- or if you could accomplish your goals with diet and exercise instead. "Some people want to take a pill and think they can eat whatever they want," says Nieca Goldberg, a cardiologist and medical director of the Women's Heart Program at the New York University School of Medicine. She says she typically prescribes statins for women who have elevated cholesterol and have already had a heart attack. But for younger women with high cholesterol and no other risk factors, she encourages lifestyle changes.

"I try to initiate diet modifications and physical activity in all my patients -- even if they still need medication, I can give them a lower dose," says Dr. Goldberg. "I try to make the point that we are all in this together."

If you do need to be on cholesterol-lowering medication, pay close attention to any side effects and talk with your doctor. You may have a different experience with a different dose or different statin. Also remember that the doctor taking care of your heart condition may not be as experienced in other body parts. "You really need a balanced approach," says Dr. Vliet. But "each physician may be looking at only one part of the elephant -- that's the way medicine is practiced in the U.S.

As Jane Brunzie says, "I learned through this experience that you have to use your own brain, as well as your doctor's brain, when it comes to your health."
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The drug of the week is Zetia—another tale of a good drug potentially gone bad. Zetia lowers bad cholesterol (LDL) by preventing it from being "recycled" in the intestines. This is different from the more commonly used "statins" that prevent bad cholesterol from being formed in the liver. The news stories have highlighted research suggesting that lowering your cholesterol with Zetia may not have the same benefits as doing so with statins. There is even a suggestion that Zetia may have a negative effect on fat deposits in blood vessels.

This story has a lot of angles. There are allegations that these new data were not released in a timely manner. Other stories suggest that guidelines encouraging ultralow levels of bad cholesterol were influenced by the makers of Zetia. Some of the more insightful stories have pointed out that Zetia, unlike statins, has never been

There is some merit to all of these concerns. For me, though, the big question is what this new information tells us about treating heart disease in general and LDL in particular. Over the past few years, many studies have shown that statins prevent heart disease and stroke, saving lives. The medical community has centered on the role of LDL in this story, with the mantra being that lower is better. But statins do much more than lower LDL—they affect the function of the lining of our blood vessels and reduce some markers of inflammation, for instance.

Why then the emphasis on LDL? Probably because it's something that makes intuitive sense: Statins save lives. Statins lower LDL. So a lower LDL must save lives. (Kind of like the old Woody Allen joke: Socrates is a man. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page.aspx
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http://louis1j1sheehan.us/All men are mortal. So all men are Socrates.) What the Zetia story tells us is that there’s more to preventing heart disease than lowering LDL, and that how we lower LDL may be more important than we thought.



An unidentified flying object, or UFO, is any real or apparent flying object that cannot be identified by the observer, especially those which remain unidentified after investigation. UFOs have been spotted in many different places around the world.

Reports of unusual aerial phenomena date back to ancient times, but modern reports and first official investigations began during World War II with sightings of so-called foo fighters by Allied airplane crews and in 1946 with widespread sightings of European "ghost rockets." UFO reports became even more common after the first widely publicized United States UFO sighting, by private pilot Kenneth Arnold in the summer of 1947.

Many tens of thousands of UFO reports have since been made worldwide. But many sightings may yet remain unreported, due to fear of public ridicule because of the social stigma surrounding the subject of UFOs, and because most nations lack any officially sanctioned authority to receive and evaluate UFO reports.

Once a UFO has been identified as a known object; it can be reclassified as an Identified flying object.

On April 14, 1561 the skies over Nuremberg, Germany were reportedly filled with a multitude of objects.

Unusual aerial phenomena have been reported throughout history.Some of these phenomena were undoubtedly astronomical in nature: comets, bright meteors, one or more of the five planets which can be seen with the naked eye, planetary conjunctions, or atmospheric optical phenomena such as parhelia and lenticular clouds.An example is the Comet Halley, which was recorded first by Chinese astronomers in 240 B.C. and possibly as early as 467 B.C.

"The Baptism of Christ", 1710, by Aert de Gelder. UFO proponents have drawn comparisons between modern UFO reports and aerial objects depicted in historical art, such as this religious painting.

Other historical reports seem to defy prosaic explanation, but assessing such accounts is difficult, because the information in a historical document may be insufficient, inaccurate, or embellished enough to make an informed evaluation difficult.

For example, in the Old Testament of the Bible, Ezekiel apparently had a first-hand encounter with something that might now be described as an Unidentified Flying Object, but which the Bible describes as a fiery chariot.

Whatever their actual cause, such sightings throughout history were often treated as supernatural portents, angels, or other religious omens. Art historian Daniela Giordano cites many Medieval-era paintings, frescoes, tapestries and other items that depict unusual aerial objects; she acknowledges many of these paintings are difficult to interpret, but cites some that depict airborne saucers and domed-saucer shapes that are often strikingly similar to UFO reports from later centuries.
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Before the terms “flying saucer” and “UFO” were coined in the late 1940s, there were a number of reports of unidentified aerial phenomena in the West. These reports date from the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century. They include:

* On January 25, 1878, The Denison Daily News wrote that local farmer John Martin had reported seeing a large, dark, circular flying object resembling a balloon flying “at wonderful speed.” He compared its shape when overhead to that of a "large saucer".
* On November 17, 1882, a UFO was observed by astronomer Edward Walter Maunder of the Greenwich Royal Observatory and some other European astronomers. Maunder in The Observatory reported “a strange celestial visitor” that was "disc-shaped," "torpedo-shaped," "spindle-shaped," or "just like a Zeppelin" dirigible (as he described it in 1916). According to Maunder, it was much brighter than the concurrent auroral displays, had well-defined edges and was opaque in the center, whitish or greenish-white, about 30 degrees long and 3 degrees wide, and moved steadily across the northern sky in less than 2 minutes from east to west. Maunder said it was very different in characteristics from a meteor fireball or any aurora he had ever seen. Nonetheless, Maunder thought it was probably related to the huge auroral magnetic sunspot storm occurring at the same time; Maunder called it an "auroral beam."
* On February 28, 1904, there was a sighting by three crew members on the USS Supply 300 miles west of San Francisco, reported by Lt. Frank Schofield, later to become Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Battle Fleet. Schofield wrote of three bright red egg-shaped and circular objects flying in echelon formation that approached beneath the cloud layer, then changed course and “soared” above the clouds, departing directly away from the earth after 2 to 3 minutes. The largest had an apparent size of about six suns.

Drawing of E. W. Maunder's Nov. 17, 1882, "auroral beam" by astronomer Rand Capron, Guildown Observatory, Surrey, UK, who also observed it.
Drawing of E. W. Maunder's Nov. 17, 1882, "auroral beam" by astronomer Rand Capron, Guildown Observatory, Surrey, UK, who also observed it.

* On 5 August 1926, while traveling in the Humboldt Mountains of Tibet's Kokonor region, Nicholas Roerich reported that members of his expedition saw "something big and shiny reflecting sun, like a huge oval moving at great speed”.
* In both the European and Japanese aerial theatres during World War II, “Foo-fighters” (balls of light and other shapes that followed aircraft) were reported by both Allied and Axis pilots.
* On February 25, 1942, the U.S. Army detected unidentified aircraft both visually and on radar over the Los Angeles, California region. No readily-apparent explanation was offered. The incident later became known as the Battle of Los Angeles, or the West coast air raid.

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* In 1946, there were over 2000 reports of unidentified aircraft in the Scandinavian nations, along with isolated reports from France, Portugal, Italy and Greece, then referred to as “Russian hail,” and later as “ghost rockets,” because it was thought that these mysterious objects were Russian tests of captured German V1 or V2 rockets. Over 200 were tracked on radar and deemed to be “real physical objects” by the Swedish military.

The post World War II UFO phase in the United States began with a reported sighting by American businessman Kenneth Arnold on June 24, 1947 while flying his private plane near Mount Rainier, Washington. He reported seeing nine brilliantly bright objects flying across the face of Rainier towards nearby Mount Adams at “an incredible speed”, which he "calculated" as at least 1200 miles per hour by timing their travel between Rainier and Adams.

His sighting subsequently received significant media and public attention. Arnold would later say they “flew like a saucer would if you skipped it across the water” (it would ricochet) and also said they were “flat like a pie pan”, “shaped like saucers,” and “half-moon shaped, oval in front and convex in the rear. ...they looked like a big flat disk.” (One, however, he would describe later as being almost crescent-shaped.) Arnold’s reported descriptions caught the media’s and the public’s fancy and gave rise to the terms flying saucer and flying disk. Arnold’s sighting was followed in the next few weeks by hundreds of other reported sightings, mostly in the U.S., but in other countries as well.

Another case was a United Airlines crew sighting of nine more disc-like objects over Idaho on the evening of July 4. At the time, this sighting was even more widely reported than Arnold’s and lent considerable credence to Arnold’s report. In fact, American UFO researcher Ted Bloecher, in his comprehensive review of newspaper reports, found a sudden surge upwards in sightings on July 4, peaking on July 6-8. Bloecher noted that for the next few days most American newspapers were filled with front-page stories of the new “flying saucers” or “flying discs.” Starting with official debunkery that began the night of July 8 with the Roswell UFO incident, reports rapidly tapered off, ending the first big U.S. UFO wave.

Over several years in the 1960s, Bloecher (aided by physicist James E. McDonald) discovered 853 flying disc sightings that year from 140 newspapers from Canada, Washington D.C, and every U.S. state save Montana.
The Falcon Lake incident report filed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on Stephen Michalak claimed incident with a UFO.
The Falcon Lake incident report filed by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on Stephen Michalak claimed incident with a UFO.

Starting July 9, Army Air Force intelligence, in cooperation with the FBI, began a formal investigation into selected sightings with characteristics that could not be immediately rationalized, which included Arnold’s and the United crew’s. The FBI used “all of its scientists” to determine whether or not “such a phenomenon could, in fact, occur.” The research was “being conducted with the thought that the flying objects might be a celestial phenomenon,” or that “they might be a foreign body mechanically devised and controlled.”Three weeks later they concluded that, “This ‘flying saucer’ situation is not all imaginary or seeing too much in some natural phenomenon. Something is really flying around.”A further review by the intelligence and technical divisions of the Air Materiel Command at Wright Field reached the same conclusion, that “the phenomenon is something real and not visionary or fictitious,” that there were objects in the shape of a disc, metallic in appearance, and as big as man-made aircraft. They were characterized by “extreme rates of climb [and] maneuverability,” general lack of noise, absence of trail, occasional formation flying, and “evasive” behavior “when sighted or contacted by friendly aircraft and radar,” suggesting a controlled craft. It was thus recommended in late September 1947 that an official Air Force investigation be set up to investigate the phenomenon.This led to the creation of the Air Force’s Project Sign at the end of 1947, which became Project Grudge at the end of 1948, and then Project Blue Book in 1952. Blue Book closed down in 1970, ending the official Air Force UFO investigations.

Use of UFO instead of flying saucer was first suggested in 1952 by Capt. Edward J. Ruppelt, the first director of Project Blue Book, who felt that flying saucer did not reflect the diversity of the sightings. Ruppelt suggested that UFO should be pronounced as a word — you-foe. However it is generally pronounced by forming each letter: U.F.O. His term was quickly adopted by the Air Force, which also briefly used “UFOB” circa 1954, for Unidentified Flying Object. Ruppelt recounted his experiences with Project Blue Book in his memoir, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects (1956), also the first book to use the term.

Air Force Regulation 200-2, issued in 1954, defined an Unidentified Flying Object (UFOB) as “any airborne object which by performance, aerodynamic characteristics, or unusual features, does not conform to any presently known aircraft or missile type, or which cannot be positively identified as a familiar object.” The regulation also said UFOBs were to be investigated as a “possible threat to the security of the United States” and “to determine technical aspects involved.” As with any then-ongoing investigation, Air Force personnel did not discuss the investigation with the press.

In Canada, the Department of National Defence has dealt with reports, sightings and investigations of UFOs across Canada. In addition to conducting investigations into crop circles in Duhamel, Alberta, it still identifies the Falcon Lake incident in Manitoba and the Shag Harbour incident in Nova Scotia as "unsolved".



Ufology is a neologism coined to describe the collective efforts of those who study UFO reports and associated evidence. Not all ufologists believe that UFOs are necessarily extraterrestrial spacecraft, or even that they are objective physical phenomena. Even UFO cases that are exposed as hoaxes, delusions or misidentifications may still be worthy of serious study from a psychosocial point of view. While Ufology does not represent an academic research program, UFOs have been subject to various investigations over the years, varying widely in scope and scientific rigor. Governments or independent academics in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Belgium, Sweden, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, and the Soviet Union are known to have investigated UFO reports at various times. No national government has ever publicly admitted that UFOs represent any form of alien intelligence. Perhaps the best known study was Project Blue Book, previously Project Sign and Project Grudge, conducted by the United States Air Force from 1947 until 1969. Other notable investigations include the Robertson Panel (1953), the Brookings Report (1960), the Condon Committee (1966-1968), the Project Twinkle investigation into green fireballs (1948-1951), the Sturrock Panel (1998), and the French GEIPAN (1977-) and COMETA (1996-1999) study groups.

In March 2007, the French Centre National d'Études Spatiales (CNES) published an archive of UFO sightings and other phenomena online.



At 11am on November 12, 2007, Former Arizona Governor Fife Symington moderated a panel of former high-ranking government, aviation and military officials from seven countries at the National Press Club; discussing the UFO topic and governmental investigations. The press conference was open for credentialed media and congressional staff only.
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The following officials and former officials participated in the press conference:

* Fife Symington, Former Arizona Governor, Moderator
* Ray Bowyer, Captain, Aurigny Air Services, Channel Islands
* Rodrigo Bravo, Captain and Pilot for the Aviation Army of Chile
* General Wilfried De Brouwer, former Deputy Chief of Staff, Belgian Air Force (Ret.)
* John Callahan, Chief of Accidents and Investigations for the FAA, 1980’s (Ret.)
* Dr. Anthony Choy, founder, 2001, OIFAA, Peruvian Air Force
* Jean-Claude Duboc, Captain, Air France (Ret.)
* Charles I. Halt, Col. USAF (Ret.), Former Director, Inspections Directorate, DOD I.G.
* General Parviz Jafari, Iranian Air Force (Ret.) As a young Iranian Air Force pilot, Jafari was a participant in the 1976 Tehran UFO incident, one of the most famous and well-documented UFO incidents in modern times. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/page1.aspx
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* Jim Penniston, TSgt USAF (Ret.)
* Dr. Claude Poher, Centre National d’Etudes Spatiales, founder, French GEPAN
* Nick Pope, Ministry of Defence, UK, 1985-2006
* Dr. Jean-Claude Ribes, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, France, 1963-98
* Comandante Oscar Santa Maria, Peruvian Air Force (Ret.)

Although it is sometimes contended that astronomers never report UFOs, the Air Force's Project Blue Book files indicate that approximately 1% of all their reports came from amateur and professional astronomers or other users of telescopes (such as missile trackers or surveyors). In the 1970s, astrophysicist Peter A. Sturrock conducted two surveys of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and American Astronomical Society. About 5% of the members polled indicated that they had had UFO sightings. In 1980, a survey of 1800 members of various amateur astronomer associations by Gert Helb and astronomer J. Allen Hynek of the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) found that 24% responded "yes" to the question "Have you ever observed an object which resisted your most exhaustive efforts at identification?"

Astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, who admitted to 6 UFO sightings[, including 3 green fireballs supported the Extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) for UFOs and stated he thought scientists who dismissed it without study were being "unscientific." Another astronomer was Dr. Lincoln La Paz, who had headed the Air Force's investigation into the green fireballs and other UFO phenomena in New Mexico. La Paz reported 2 personal sightings, one of a green fireball, the other of an anomalous disc-like object. Even later UFO debunker Dr. Donald Menzel filed a UFO report in 1949.
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Various public scientific studies over the past half century have examined UFO reports in detail. None of these studies have officially concluded that any reports are caused by extraterrestrial spacecraft (e.g., Seeds 1995:A4). Some studies were neutral in their conclusions, but argued the inexplicable core cases called for continued scientific study. Examples are the Sturrock Panel study of 1998 and the 1970 AIAA review of the Condon Report. Other private or governmental studies, some secret, have concluded in favor of the ETH, or have had members who disagreed with the official conclusions. The following are examples of such studies and individuals:

* One of the earliest government studies to come to a secret ETH conclusion was Project Sign, the first official Air Force UFO investigation. In 1948, they wrote a top-secret intelligence estimate to that effect. The Air Force Chief of Staff ordered it destroyed. The existence of this suppressed report was revealed by several insiders who had read it, such as astronomer and USAF consultant Dr. J. Allen Hynek and Edward J. Ruppelt, the first head of the USAF's Project Blue Book. (Ruppelt, Chapt. 3) http://louis-j-sheehan.org/
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* An early U.S. Army study, of which little is known, was called the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit (IPU). In 1987, British UFO researcher Timothy Good received a letter confirming the existence of the IPU from the Army Director of Counter-intelligence, in which it was stated, "...the aforementioned Army unit was disestablished during the late 1950s and never reactivated. All records pertaining to this unit were surrendered to the U.S. Air Force Office of Special Investigations in conjunction with operation BLUEBOOK." The IPU records have never been released. (Good, 484).
* In 1967, Greek physicist Paul Santorini, a Manhattan Project scientist, publicly stated that a 1947 Greek government investigation that he headed into the European Ghost rockets of 1946 quickly concluded that they were not missiles. Santorini claimed the investigation was then quashed by military officials from the U.S., who knew them to be extraterrestrial, because there was no defense against the advanced technology and they feared widespread panic should the results become public. (Good, 23)
* Various European countries conducted a secret joint study in 1954, also concluding that UFOs were extraterrestrial. This study was revealed by German rocketry pioneer Hermann Oberth, a member of the study, who also made many public statements supporting the ETH. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/
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* In 1958, Brazil's main UFO investigator, Dr. Olavo T. Fuentes wrote a letter to the American UFO group APRO summarizing a briefing he had received from two Brazilian Naval intelligence officers. Fuentes said he was told that every government and military on Earth was aware that UFOs were extraterrestrial craft and there was absolute proof of this in the form of several crashed craft. The subject was classified Top Secret by the world's militaries. The objects were deemed dangerous and hostile when attacked, many planes had been lost, and it was generally believed that Earth was undergoing an invasion of some type, perhaps a police action to keep us confined to the planet. This information had to be withheld from the public by any means necessary because of the likelihood of widespread panic and social breakdown. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/page1.aspx
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* An FBI field office letter to the FBI Director, dated January 31, 1949, stated "...the matter of 'Unidentified Aircraft' or 'Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,' otherwise known as 'Flying Discs,' 'Flying Saucers,' and 'Balls of Fire' ...is considered Top Secret by Intelligence Officers of both the Army and Air Forces." (emphasis included in original).
* During the height of the flying saucer epidemic of July 1952, including highly publicized radar/visual and jet intercepts over Washington, D.C., the FBI was informed by the Air Force Directorate of Intelligence that they thought the "flying saucers" were either "optical illusions or atmospheric phenomena" but then added that, "some Military officials are seriously considering the possibility of interplanetary ships." FBI document
* The CIA started their own internal scientific review the following day. Some CIA scientists were also seriously considering the ETH. An early memo from August was very skeptical, but also added, "...as long as a series of reports remains 'unexplainable' (interplanetary aspects and alien origin not being thoroughly excluded from consideration) caution requires that intelligence continue coverage of the subject." http://louis-j-sheehan.biz/
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A report from later that month was similarly skeptical but nevertheless concluded "...sightings of UFOs reported at Los Alamos and Oak Ridge, at a time when the background radiation count had risen inexplicably. Here we run out of even 'blue yonder' explanations that might be tenable, and we still are left with numbers of incredible reports from credible observers." A December 1952 memo from the Assistant CIA Director of Scientific Intelligence (O/SI) was much more urgent: "...the reports of incidents convince us that there is something going on that must have immediate attention. Sightings of unexplained objects at great altitudes and traveling at highs speeds in the vicinity of U.S. defense installation are of such nature that they are not attributable to natural phenomena or known types of aerial vehicles." http://louis-j-sheehan.us/
Some of the memos also made it clear that CIA interest in the subject was not to be made public, partly in fear of possible public panic. (Good,331-335)
* The CIA organized the January 1953 Robertson Panel of scientists to debunk the data collected by the Air Force's Project Blue Book. This included an engineering analysis of UFO maneuvers by Blue Book (including a motion picture film analysis by Naval scientists) that had concluded UFOs were under intelligent control and likely extraterrestrial. (Dolan, 189; Good, 287, 337; Ruppelt, Chapt. 16))
* Extraterrestrial "believers" within Project Blue Book including Major Dewey Fournet, in charge of the engineering analysis of UFO motion. Director Edward J. Ruppelt is also thought to have held these views, though expressed in private, not public. Another defector from the official Air Force party line was consultant Dr. J. Allen Hynek, who started out as a staunch skeptic. After 20 years of investigation, he changed positions and generally supported the ETH. He became the most publicly known UFO advocate scientist in the 1970s and 1980s.
* The first CIA Director, Vice Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, stated in a signed statement to Congress, also reported in the New York Times, February 28, 1960, "It is time for the truth to be brought out... Behind the scenes high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about the UFOs. However, through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense.... I urge immediate Congressional action to reduce the dangers from secrecy about unidentified flying objects." In 1962, in his letter of resignation from NICAP, he told director Donald Keyhoe, "I know the UFOs are not U.S. or Soviet devices. All we can do now is wait for some actions by the UFOs." (Good, 347)
* Although the 1968 Condon Report came to a negative conclusion (written by Condon), it is known that many members of the study strongly disagreed with Condon's methods and biases. Most quit the project in disgust or were fired for insubordination. A few became ETH supporters. Perhaps the best known example is Dr. David Saunders, who in his 1968 book UFOs? Yes lambasted Condon for extreme bias and ignoring or misrepresenting critical evidence. Saunders wrote, "It is clear... that the sightings have been going on for too long to explain in terms of straightforward terrestrial intelligence. It is in this sense that ETI (Extra Terrestrial Intelligence) stands as the `least implausible' explanation of `real UFOs'."
* Nick Pope, the head of the UK government UFO desk for a number of years, is an advocate of the ETH based on the inexplicable cases he reviewed, such as the Rendlesham UFO incident, although the British government has never made such claims.
* Jean-Jacques Velasco, the head of the official French UFO investigation SEPRA, wrote a book in 2005 saying that 14% of the 5800 cases studied by SEPRA were utterly inexplicable and extraterrestrial in origin. http://louis-j-sheehan.de/
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Yves Sillard, the head of the new official French UFO investigation GEIPAN and former head of the French space agency CNES, echoes Velasco's comments and adds the U.S. is guilty of covering up this information. Again, this isn't the official public posture of SEPRA, CNES, or the French government. (CNES recently announced that their 5800 case files will be placed on the Internet starting March 2007.)
* The 1999 French COMETA committee of high-level military analysts/generals and aerospace engineers/scientists declared the ETH was the best hypothesis for the unexplained cases.

Besides visual sightings, cases sometimes have an indirect physical evidence, including many cases studied by the military and various government agencies of different countries. Indirect physical evidence would be data obtained from afar, such as radar contact and photographs. More direct physical evidence involves physical interactions with the environment at close range—Hynek's "close encounter" or Vallee's "Type-I" cases—which include "landing traces," electromagnetic interference, and physiological/biological effects.

* Radar contact and tracking, sometimes from multiple sites. These are often considered among the best cases since they usually involve trained military personnel and control tower operators, simultaneous visual sightings, and aircraft intercepts. One such recent example were the mass sightings of large, silent, low-flying black triangles in 1989 and 1990 over Belgium, tracked by multiple NATO radar and jet interceptors, and investigated by Belgium's military (included photographic evidence).[53] Another famous case from 1986 was the JAL 1628 case over Alaska investigated by the FAA.
* Photographic evidence, including still photos, movie film, and video, including some in the infrared spectrum (rare).
* Recorded visual spectrograms (extremely rare) — (see Spectrometer)
* Recorded gravimetric and magnetic disturbances (extremely rare)
* Landing physical trace evidence, including ground impressions, burned and/or desiccated soil, burned and broken foliage, magnetic anomalies, increased radiation levels, and metallic traces. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page.aspx
See, e.g. Height 611 UFO Incident or the 1964 Lonnie Zamora's Socorro, New Mexico encounter, considered one of the most inexplicable of the USAF Project Blue Book cases). A well-known example from December 1980 was the USAF Rendlesham Forest Incident in England. Another less than 2 weeks later, in January 1981, occurred in Trans-en-Provence and was investigated by GEPAN, then France's official government UFO-investigation agency.[55] Project Blue Book head Edward J. Ruppelt described a classic 1952 CE2 case involving a patch of charred grass roots.[56] Catalogs of several thousand such cases have been compiled, particularly by researcher Ted Phillips.[57][58]
* Physiological effects on people and animals including temporary paralysis, skin burns and rashes, corneal burns, and symptoms superficially resembling radiation poisoning, such as the Cash-Landrum incident in 1980. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page1.aspx
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One such case dates back to 1886, a Venezuelan incident reported in Scientific American magazine.[59]
* So-called animal/cattle mutilation cases, that some feel are also part of the UFO phenomenon. Such cases can and have been analyzed using forensic science techniques.
* Biological effects on plants such as increased or decreased growth, germination effects on seeds, and blown-out stem nodes (usually associated with physical trace cases or crop circles)
* Electromagnetic interference (EM) effects, including stalled cars, power black-outs, radio/TV interference, magnetic compass deflections, and aircraft navigation, communication, and engine disruption.[60] A list of over 30 such aircraft EM incidents was compiled by NASA scientist Dr. Richard F. Haines.[61] A famous 1976 military case over Tehran, recorded in CIA and DIA classified documents, resulted in communication losses in multiple aircraft and weapons system failure in an F-4 Phantom II jet interceptor as it was about to fire a missile on one of the UFOs. This was also a radar/visual case. (Fawcett & Greenwood, 81-89; Good, 318-322, 497-502).
* Remote radiation detection, some noted in FBI and CIA documents occurring over government nuclear installations at Los Alamos National Laboratory and Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 1950, also reported by Project Blue Book director Ed Ruppelt in his book.
* Actual hard physical evidence cases, such as 1957, Ubatuba, Brazil, magnesium fragments analyzed by the Brazilian government and in the Condon Report and by others. The 1964 Socorro/Lonnie Zamora incident also left metal traces, analyzed by NASA.
* Misc: Recorded electromagnetic emissions, such as microwaves detected in the well-known 1957 RB-47 surveillance aircraft case, which was also a visual and radar case;polarization rings observed around a UFO by a scientist, explained by Dr. James Harder as intense magnetic fields from the UFO causing the Faraday effect.

These various reported physical evidence cases have been studied by various scientist and engineers, both privately and in official governmental studies (such as Project Blue Book, the Condon Committee, and the French GEPAN/SEPRA). A comprehensive scientific review of physical evidence cases was carried out by the 1998 Sturrock UFO panel.

Attempts have been made to reverse engineer the possible physics behind UFOs through analysis of both eyewitness reports and the physical evidence. Examples are former NASA and nuclear engineer James McCampbell in his book Ufology online, NACA/NASA engineer Paul R. Hill in his book Unconventional Flying Objects, and German rocketry pioneer Hermann Oberth. Among subjects tackled by McCampbell, Hill, and Oberth was the question of how UFOs can fly at supersonic speeds without creating a sonic boom. McCampbell's proposed solution of a microwave plasma parting the air in front of the craft is currently being researched by Dr. Leik Myrabo, Professor of Engineering Physics at the Rensselaer

An Air Force study by Battelle Memorial Institute scientists from 1952-1955 of 3200 USAF cases found 22% were unknowns, and with the best cases, 33% remained unsolved. Similarly about 30% of the UFO cases studied by the 1969 USAF Condon Committee were deemed unsolved when reviewed by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). The official French government UFO scientific study (GEIPAN) from 1976 to 2004 listed about 13% of 5800 cases as very detailed yet still inexplicable (with 46% deemed to have definite or probable explanations and 41% having inadequate information).

Despite the remaining unexplained cases in the cited scientific studies above, many skeptics still argue that the general opinion of the mainstream scientific community is that all UFO sightings could ultimately be explained by prosaic explanations such as misidentification of natural and man-made phenomena (either known or still unknown), hoaxes, and psychological phenomena such as optical illusions or dreaming/sleep paralysis (often given as an explanation for purported alien abductions).

Other skeptical arguments against UFOs include:

* Most evidence is ultimately derived from notoriously unreliable eyewitness accounts and very little in the way of solid or other physical evidence has been reported.[citation needed]
* Most UFO sightings are transitory events and there is usually no opportunity for the repeat testing called for by the scientific method.

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* Occam's razor of hypothesis testing, since it is considered less incredible for the explanations to be the result of known scientifically verified phenomena rather than resulting from novel mechanisms (e.g. the extraterrestrial hypothesis).
* The market being biased in favor of books, TV specials, etc. which support paranormal interpretations, leaving the public poorly informed regarding more mundane explanations for UFOs as a possibly socio-cultural phenomenon only.[citation needed]

What appears interesting is that UFO sightings depend on the technological environment of their time. At late 1800s UFOs were described as airships larger,sturdier and more maneuverable than those commonly used. As planes were developed UFO descriptions appeared as planes with speed and maneuverability greater than in any known design. Nowadays UFOs have many shapes, but are still described to perform maneuvers no known aircraft is able to. These include complete or near complete silence when spotted, hovering, great speeds and very small turn radius. Also capability for rapid change in altitude have been sighted.

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To account for unsolved UFO cases, a number of explanations have been proposed by both proponents and skeptics.

Among proponents, some of the more common explanations for UFOs are:

* The Extraterrestrial Visitation Hypothesis (ETH) (most popular)
* The Interdimensional Hypothesis
* The Paranormal/Occult Hypothesis
* The hypothesis that they are time machines or vehicles built in a future time.
* Another is the Extraterrestrial energyzoa theory

Similarly, skeptics usually propose one of the following explanations:

* The Psychological-Social Hypothesis
* The man-made craft hypothesis
* The unknown natural phenomena hypothesis, e.g. ball lightning, sprites
* Peter F Coleman advanced a meteorological theory that many so-called UFOs or unexplained lights seen now and in the past are actually instances of visible combustion of a fuel (e.g. natural gas) inside an atmospheric vortex. He has argued his case in his book, Great Balls of Fire-a unified theory. This vortex fireball theory was first published in Weather and later in the Journal of Scientific Exploration
* Earthquake lights/Tectonic Strain hypothesis
* One explanation is that (some) UFOs are misidentified "shiny-bodied insects".

Among the many people who have reported UFO sightings, some have been exposed as hoaxers. Not all alleged hoax exposures are certain, however, and many claimants have stuck by their stories, leaving the determination of specific cases as hoaxes contentious. Some of the controversial subjects include these:
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* Perhaps most notably, Ed Walters' 1987 hoax, perpetrated in Gulf Breeze, Florida. Walters claimed at first having seen a small UFO flying near his home, and then in a second incident seeing the same UFO and a small alien being standing by his back door after being alerted by his dog. Several photographs were taken of the craft, but none of the being. Three years later in 1990, after the Walters family had moved, the new residents discovered a model of a UFO poorly hidden in the attic that bore an undeniable resemblance to the craft in Walters' photographs. Various witnesses and detractors came forward after the local Pensacola newspaper printed a story about the discovered model, and some investigators now consider the sightings to be a hoax. In addition, a six-figure television miniseries and book deal were nearly struck with Walters.
* Contactees such as George Adamski, who claimed he went on flights in UFOs. (Even some believers contend he had real http://louis9j9sheehan.blogspot.com/
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experiences and later fictionalized others, leaving the subject murky.)
* Bob White (UFO hunter) claims to have an alleged UFO artifact.
* Billy Meier, some of whose photographs have been discredited.
* The Maury Island Incident
* The Ummo affair, a decades-long series of detailed letters and documents allegedly from extraterrestrials. The total length of the documents is at least 1000 pages, and some estimate that further undiscovered documents may total nearly 4000 pages. A Jose Luis Jordan Pena came forward in the early nineties claiming responsibility for the phenomenon, and most consider there to be little reason to challenge his claims.
* The Sci-fi channel ran an advertising promo of a UFO near the World Trade Center being seen by a group of tourists in a helicopter. Created prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks, the commercial used realistic special effects to simulate the encounter. The video has subsequently been aired on East Asian television and posted to video-sharing sites like YouTube as genuine footage.[76]
* A video was posted as genuine footage to Youtube.com by a "barzolff814". It depicts two large UFOs flying over an observer on a tropical island, said to be Haiti in the title "Haiti Ufo". The video was quickly debunked by rense.com, AboveTopSecret.com and other sites. The video was done entirely with CGI 3D Animation programs by French animator David Nicolas, also known as "Numero 6." It managed to fool many people; many still thoroughly believe that the video is real. http://louis1j1sheehan.blog.ca/
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The hoax was discerned by the identical palm trees in the video, which were the same as in a promo video for a 3D program called Vue Infinite.

Several physicists, some working for the US Military, others said to be associated with the US Intelligence Community are seriously interested in UFOs as alien extraterrestrial flying machines. Dr. Jack Sarfatti, in his book "Super Cosmos" (2005), has the most detailed "theory" based on the recent discovery of the repulsive anti-gravity field "dark energy" that is accelerating the expansion of the 3D space of our universe. Sarfatti also cites Alcubierre's weightless warp drive without time dilation as essential conditions for "propellantless propulsion" in what Puthoff has called "metric engineering." However, in his book "The Physics of Star Trek," Lawrence M. Krauss reveals that it would be physically impossible to concentrate enough energy in one place to "warp" the fabric of space. Sarfatti's key idea is that the ship is able to control its own zero-g force geodesic flight path using small amounts of energy, despite the evident lack of external propulsion visible in most UFO sightings.

The study of UFO claims over the years has led to valuable discoveries about atmospheric phenomena and psychology. In psychology, the study of UFO sightings has revealed information on misinterpretation, perceptual illusions, hallucination and fantasy-prone personality.
Many have questioned the reliability of hypnosis in UFO abduction cases.

Famous psychologist Carl Gustav Jung compared the UFO's "saucer" shape with mandala symbolism and speculated with the idea of UFO sightings being linked to his theory of Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious, suggesting UFOs are projection carriers of the archetype of "psychic wholeness" (also known in Jungian terms as The Self). http://louis1j1sheehan.blog.ca/
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Such projections endow the carrier with numinous and mythical powers giving it a highly suggestive effect and rapidly turning it into a saviour myth.

Some researchers recommend that observations be classified according to the features of the phenomenon or object that are reported or recorded. Typical categories include:

* Saucer, toy-top, or disk-shaped "craft" without visible or audible propulsion. (day and night)
* Large triangular "craft" or triangular light pattern
* Cigar-shaped "craft" with lighted windows (Meteor fireballs are sometimes reported this way, but are very different phenomena).
* Other: chevrons, equilateral triangles, spheres (usually reported to be shining, glowing at night), domes, diamonds, shapeless black masses, eggs, and cylinders.

Dr. J. Allen Hynek developed another commonly used system of description, dividing sightings into six categories. It first separates sightings based on proximity, arbitrarily using 500 feet as the cutoff point. It then subdivides these into divisions based on viewing conditions or special features. The three distant sighting categories are:
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* Nocturnal Lights (NL): Anomalous lights seen in the night sky.
* Daylight Discs (DD): Any anomalous object, generally but not necessarily "discoidal", seen in the distant daytime sky.
* Radar/Visual cases (RV). Objects seen simultaneously by eye and on radar.

The distant classification is useful in terms of evidentiary value, with RV cases usually considered to be the highest because of radar corroboration and NL cases the lowest because of the ease in which lights seen at night are often confused with prosaic phenomena such as meteors, bright stars, or airplanes. RV reports are also fewest in number, while NL are largest.
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In addition were three "close encounter" (CE) subcategories, again thought to be higher in evidentiary value, because it includes measurable physical effects and the objects seen up close are less likely to be the result of misperception. As in RV cases, these tend to be relatively rare:

* CE1: Strange objects seen nearby but without physical interaction with the environment.
* CE2: A CE1 case but creating physical evidence or causing electromagnetic interference (see below).
* CE3: CE1 or CE2 cases where "occupants" or entities are seen. (Hence the title of Steven Spielberg's movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind)

Hynek's CE classification system has since been expanded to include such things as alleged alien abductions (CE4s) and cattle mutilation phenomena.

Jacques Vallee has devised a UFO classification system which is preferred by many UFO investigators over Hynek's system as it is considerably more descriptive than Hynek's, especially in terms of the reported behavior of UFOs.
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Type I (a, b, c, d): Observation of an unusual object, spherical discoidal, or of another geometry, on or situated close to the ground (tree height, or lower), which may be associated with traces - thermal, luminous, or mechanical effects.

1. On or near ground.
2. Near or over body of water.
3. Occupants appear to display interest in witnesses by gestures or luminous signals.
4. Object appears to be "scouting" a terrestrial vehicle.

Type II (a, b, c): Observation of an unusual object with vertical cylindrical formation in the sky, associated with a diffuse cloud. This phenomenon has been given various names such as "cloud-cigar" or "cloud-sphere."

1. Moving erratically through the sky.
2. Object is stationary and gives rise to secondary objects (sometimes referred to as "satellite objects").
3. Object is surrounded by secondary objects.

Type III (a, b, c, d, e): Observation of an unusual object of spherical, discoidal or elliptical shape, stationary in the sky.

1. Hovering between two periods of motion with "falling-leaf" descent, up and down, or pendulum motion.
2. Interruption of continuous flight to hover and then continue motion.
3. Alters appearance while hovering - e.g., change of luminosity, generation of secondary object, etc.
4. "Dogfights" or swarming among several objects.
5. Trajectory abruptly altered during continuous flight to fly slowly above a certain area, circle, or suddenly change course.

Type IV (a, b, c, d): Observation of an unusual object in continuous flight.

1. Continuous flight.
2. Trajectory affected by nearby conventional aircraft.
3. Formation flight.
4. Wavy or zig-zag trajectory.

Type V (a, b, c): Observation of an unusual object of indistinct appearance, i.e., appearing to be not fully material or solid in structure.

1. Extended apparent diameter, non-point source luminous objects ("fuzzy").
2. Starlike objects (point source), motionless for extended periods.
3. Starlike objects rapidly crossing the sky, possibly with peculiar trajectories.

Source: 1. Jacques and Janine Vallee: Challenge To Science: The UFO Enigma, LC# 66-25843
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UFOs are sometimes an element of elaborate conspiracy theories in which the government is said to be intentionally covering up the existence of aliens, or sometimes collaborating with them. There are many versions of this story; some are exclusive, while others overlap with various other conspiracy theories.

In the U.S., opinion polls again indicate that a strong majority of people believe the U.S. government is withholding such information. Various notables have also expressed such views. Some examples are astronauts Gordon Cooper and Edgar Mitchell, Senator Barry Goldwater, Vice Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter (the first CIA director), Lord Hill-Norton (former British Chief of Defense Staff and NATO head), the 1999 high-level French COMETA report by various French generals and aerospace experts, and Yves Sillard (former director of the French space agency CNES, new director of French UFO research organization GEIPAN).
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There is also speculation that UFO phenomena are tests of experimental aircraft or advanced weapons. In this case UFOs are viewed as failures to retain secrecy, or deliberate attempts at misinformation: to deride the phenomenon so that it can be pursued unhindered. This explanation may or may not feed back into the previous one, where current advanced military technology is considered to be adapted alien technology. (See also: skunk works and Area 51)

It has also been suggested by a few fringe authors that all or most human technology and culture is based on extraterrestrial contact. See also ancient astronauts.

Some also contend regarding physical evidence that it exists abundantly but is swiftly and sometimes clumsily suppressed by governments, aiming to insulate a population they regard as unprepared for the social, theological, and security implications of such evidence. See the Brookings Report.
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There have been allegations of suppression of UFO related evidence for many decades. There are also conspiracy theories which claim that physical evidence might have been removed and/or destroyed/suppressed by some governments. (See also Men in Black) Some examples are:

* On July 7, 1947, William Rhodes took photos of an unusual object over Phoenix, Arizona.[81] The photos appeared in a Phoenix newspaper and a few other papers. According to documents from Project Bluebook, an Army counter-intelligence (CIC) agent and an FBI agent interviewed Rhodes on August 29 and convinced him to surrender the negatives. The CIC agent deliberately concealed his true identity, leaving Rhodes to believe both men were from the FBI. Rhodes said he wanted the negatives back, but when he turned them into the FBI the next day, he was informed he wouldn't be getting them back, though Rhodes later tried unsuccessfully.The photos were extensively analyzed and would eventually show up in some classified Air Force UFO intelligence reports. (Randle, 34-45, full account)
* A June 27, 1950, movie of a "flying disk" over Louisville, Kentucky, taken by a Louisville Courier-Journal photographer, had the USAF Directors of counterintelligence (AFOSI) and intelligence discussing in memos how to best obtain the movie and interview the photographer without revealing Air Force interest. One memo suggested the FBI be used, then precluded the FBI getting involved. Another memo said "it would be nice if OSI could arrange to secure a copy of the film in some covert manner," but if that wasn't feasible, one of the Air Force scientists might have to negotiate directly with the newspaper. In a recent interview, the photographer confirmed meeting with military intelligence and still having the film in his possession until then, but refused to say what happened to the film after that.
* In another 1950 movie incident from Montana, Nicholas Mariana filmed some unusual aerial objects and eventually turned the film over to the U.S. Air Force, but insisted that the first part of the film, clearly showing the objects as spinning discs, had been removed when it was returned to him. (Clark, 398)
* During the military investigation of green fireballs in New Mexico, UFOs were photographed by a tracking camera over White Sands Proving Grounds on April 27, 1949. The final report in 1951 on the green fireball investigation claimed there was insufficient data to determine anything. However, documents later uncovered by Dr. Bruce Maccabee indicate that triangulation was accomplished. The data reduction and photographs showed four objects about 30 feet in diameter flying in formation at high speed at an altitude of about 30 miles. Maccabee says this result was apparently suppressed from the final report.
* Project Blue Book director Edward J. Ruppelt reported that, in 1952, a U.S. Air Force pilot fired his jet's machine guns at a UFO, and that the official report which should have been sent to Blue Book was quashed. 1952 newspaper articles of USAF jets being ordered to shoot down saucers.
* Astronaut Gordon Cooper reported suppression of a flying saucer movie filmed in high clarity by two Edwards AFB range photographers on May 3, 1957. Cooper said he viewed developed negatives of the object, clearly showing a dish-like object with a dome on top and something like holes or ports in the dome. The photographers and another witness, when later interviewed by Dr. James McDonald, confirmed the story. Cooper said military authorities then picked up the film and neither he nor the photographers ever heard what happened to it. The incident was also reported in a few newspapers, such as the Los Angeles Times. The official explanation, however, was that the photographers had filmed a weather balloon distorted by hot desert air. McDonald, 1968 Congressional testimony, Case 41 http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/page1.aspx
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* On January 22, 1958, when NICAP director Donald Keyhoe appeared on CBS television, his statements on UFOs were pre-censored by the Air Force. During the show when Keyhoe tried to depart from the censored script to "reveal something that has never been disclosed before," CBS cut the sound, later stating Keyhoe was about to violate "predetermined security standards" and about to say something he wasn't "authorized to release." What Keyhoe was about to reveal were four publicly unknown military studies concluding UFOs were interplanetary (including the 1948 Project Sign Estimate of the Situation and Blue Book's 1952 engineering analysis of UFO motion). (Good, 286-287; Dolan 293-295)
* Astronomer Jacques Vallee reported that in 1961 he witnessed the destruction of the tracking tapes of unknown objects orbiting the Earth. (However, Vallee indicated that this didn't happen because of government pressure but because the senior astronomers involved didn't want to deal with the implications.)
* In 1965, Rex Heflin took four Polaroid photos of a hat-shaped object. Two years later (1967), two men posing as NORAD agents confiscated three prints. Just as mysteriously, the photos were returned to his mailbox in 1993. detailed article and photos
* A March 1, 1967 memo directed to all USAF divisions, from USAF Lt. General Hewitt Wheless, Assistant Vice Chief of Staff, stated that unverified information indicated that unknown individuals, impersonating USAF officers and other military personnel, had been harassing civilian UFO witnesses, warning them not to talk, and also confiscating film, referring specifically to the Heflin incident. AFOSI was to be notified if any personnel were to become aware of any other incidents. (Document in Fawcett & Greenwood, 236). http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/page1.aspx
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* In 1996, the CIA revealed an instance from 1964 where two CIA agents posed as USAF representatives in order to recover a film canister from a Corona spy satellite that had accidentally come down in Venezuela. The event was then publicly dismissed as an unsuccessful NASA space experiment.

UFOs constitute a widespread international cultural phenomenon of the last half-century.Gallup polls rank UFOs near the top of lists for subjects of widespread recognition. In 1973, a survey found that 95 percent of the public reported having heard of UFOs, whereas only 92 percent had heard of US President Gerald Ford in a 1977 poll taken just nine months after he left the White House. (Bullard, 141) A 1996 Gallup poll reported that 71 percent of the United States population believed that the government was covering up information regarding UFOs. A 2002 Roper poll for the Sci Fi channel found similar results, but with more people believing UFOs were extraterrestrial craft. In that latest poll, 56 percent thought UFOs were real craft and 48 percent that aliens had visited the Earth. Again, about 70 percent felt the government was not sharing everything it knew about UFOs or extraterrestrial life.

Documentary channels, such as the Discovery Channel and the History Channel, air UFO and alien related material from time to time.(e.g., UFO Files)

In a 2006 survey, 24.6% of Americans agreed (or strongly agreed) that some UFOs are probably spaceships from other worlds.[89]



Several mechanisms have been suggested for the Moon's formation. The formation of the Moon is believed to have occurred 4.527 ± 0.010 billion years ago, about 30–50 million years after the origin of the solar system.

* Fission Theory - Early speculation proposed that the Moon broke off from the Earth's crust because of centrifugal forces, leaving a basin (presumed to be the Pacific Ocean) behind as a scar.This fission concept, however, requires too great an initial spin of the Earth. Furthermore, it would have resulted in an orbit following Earth's equatorial plane, which is not the case.
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* Capture Theory - Others speculated that the Moon formed elsewhere and was captured into Earth's orbit. However, the conditions required for this capture mechanism to work (such as an extended atmosphere of the Earth for dissipating energy) are improbable.

* CoFormation Theory - The coformation hypothesis posits that the Earth and the Moon formed together at the same time and place from the primordial accretion disk. In this hypothesis, the Moon formed from material surrounding the proto-Earth, similar to the formation of the planets around the Sun. Some suggest that this hypothesis fails adequately to explain the depletion of metallic iron in the Moon.

A major deficiency with all of these hypotheses is that they cannot easily account for the high angular momentum of the Earth–Moon system.

* Giant Impact Theory - Today, the giant impact hypothesis for forming the Earth–Moon system is widely accepted by the scientific community. In this hypothesis, the impact of a Mars-sized body (Theia) on the proto-Earth is postulated to have put enough material into circumterrestrial orbit to form the Moon. Given that planetary bodies are believed to have formed by the hierarchical accretion of smaller bodies to larger ones, giant impact events such as this are thought to have affected most planets. Computer simulations modelling this impact are consistent with measurements of the angular momentum of the Earth–Moon system, as well as the small size of the lunar core. Unresolved questions regarding this theory have to do with determining the relative sizes of the proto-Earth and impactor, and with determining how much material from the proto-Earth and impactor ended up in the Moon.

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Silicon Valley is the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California in the United States. The term originally referred to the region's large number of silicon chip innovators and manufacturers, but eventually came to refer to all the high-tech businesses in the area; it is now generally used as a metonym for the high-tech sector. Despite the development of other high-tech economic centers throughout the United States, Silicon Valley continues to be the leading high-tech hub because of its large number of engineers and venture capitalists. Geographically, Silicon Valley encompasses the northern part of Santa Clara Valley and adjacent communities.

The term Silicon Valley was coined by Ralph Vaerst, a Northern California entrepreneur. His journalist friend, Don Hoefler, first published the term in 1971. He used it as the title of a series of articles "Silicon Valley USA" in a weekly trade newspaper Electronic News which started with the January 11, 1971 issue. Valley refers to the Santa Clara Valley, located at the southern end of San Francisco Bay, while Silicon refers to the high concentration of semiconductor and computer-related industries in the area. These and similar technology and electricity firms slowly replaced the orchards which gave the area its initial nickname, the Valley of Heart's Delight.
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Perhaps the strongest thread that runs through the Valley’s past and present is the drive to “play” with novel technology, which, when bolstered by an advanced engineering degree and channeled by astute management, has done much to create the industrial powerhouse we see in the Valley today.

Looking west over northern San Jose (downtown is at far left) and other parts of Silicon Valley
Looking west over northern San Jose (downtown is at far left) and other parts of Silicon Valley

Since the early twentieth century, Silicon Valley has been home to a vibrant, growing electronics industry. The industry began through experimentation and innovation in the fields of radio, television, and military electronics. Stanford University, its affiliates, and graduates have played a major role in the evolution of this area.

The San Francisco Bay Area had long been a major site of U.S. Navy research and technology. In 1909, Charles Herrold started the first radio station in the United States with regularly scheduled programming in San Jose. Later that year, Stanford University graduate Cyril Elwell purchased the U.S. patents for Poulsen arc radio transmission technology and founded the Federal Telegraph Corporation (FTC) in Palo Alto. Over the next decade, the FTC created the world's first global radio communication system, and signed a contract with the U.S. Navy in 1912.

In 1933, Air Base Sunnyvale, California was commissioned by the United States Government for the use as a Naval Air Station (NAS). The station was renamed NAS Moffett Field, and between 1933 and 1947, US Navy blimps were based here. A number of technology firms had set up shop in the area around Moffett to serve the Navy. When the Navy gave up its airship ambitions and moved most of its West Coast operations to San Diego[citation needed], NACA (the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, forerunner of NASA) took over portions of Moffett for aeronautics research. Many of the original companies stayed, while new ones moved in. The immediate area was soon filled with aerospace firms such as Lockheed.

After World War II, universities were experiencing enormous demand due to returning students. To address the financial demands of Stanford's growth requirements, and to provide local employment opportunities for graduating students, Frederick Terman proposed the leasing of Stanford's lands for use as an office park, named the Stanford Industrial Park (later Stanford Research Park). http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/

Leases were limited to high technology companies. Its first tenant was Varian Associates, founded by Stanford alumni in the 1930s to build military radar components. However, Terman also found venture capital for civilian technology start-ups . One of the major success stories was Hewlett-Packard. Founded in Packard's garage by Stanford graduates William Hewlett and David Packard, Hewlett-Packard moved its offices into the Stanford Research Park slightly after 1953. In 1954, Stanford created the Honors Cooperative Program to allow full-time employees of the companies to pursue graduate degrees from the University on a part-time basis. The initial companies signed five-year agreements in which they would pay double the tuition for each student in order to cover the costs. Hewlett-Packard has become the largest personal computer manufacturer in the world, and transformed the home printing market when it released the first ink jet printer in 1984. In addition, the tenancy of Eastman Kodak and General Electric undoubtedly made Stanford Industrial Park a center of technology in the mid-1990's.

In 1953, William Shockley left Bell Labs in a disagreement over the handling of the invention of the transistor. After returning to California Institute of Technology for a short while, Shockley moved to Mountain View, California in 1956, and founded Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. http://louis-j-sheehan.org/page1.aspx
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Unlike many other researchers who used germanium as the semiconductor material, Shockley believed that silicon was the better material for making transistors. Shockley intended to replace the current transistor with a new three-element design (today known as the Shockley diode), but the design was considerably more difficult to build than the "simple" transistor. In 1957, Shockley decided to end research on the silicon transistor. As a result, eight engineers left the company to form Fairchild Semiconductor. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/page1.aspx
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Two of the original employees of Fairchild Semiconductor, Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore, would go on to found Intel.

By the early 1970s there were many semiconductor companies in the area, computer firms using their devices, and programming and service companies serving both. Industrial space was plentiful and housing was still inexpensive. The growth was fueled by the emergence of the venture capital industry on Sand Hill Road, beginning with Kleiner Perkins in 1972; the availability of venture capital exploded after the successful $1.3 billion IPO of Apple Computer in December 1980.

Although semiconductors are still a major component of the area's economy, Silicon Valley has been most famous in recent years for innovations in software and Internet services. Silicon Valley has significantly influenced computer operating systems, software, and user interfaces.

Using money from NASA and the U.S. Air Force, Doug Engelbart invented the mouse and hypertext-based collaboration tools in the mid-1960s, while at Stanford Research Institute (now SRI International). When Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center declined in influence due to personal conflicts and the loss of government funding, Xerox hired some of Engelbart's best researchers. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/page1.aspx
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In turn, in the 1970s and 1980s, Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) played a pivotal role in object-oriented programming, graphical user interfaces (GUIs), Ethernet, PostScript, and laser printers.

While Xerox marketed equipment using its technologies, for the most part its technologies flourished elsewhere. The diaspora of Xerox inventions led directly to 3Com and Adobe Systems, and indirectly to Cisco, Apple Computer and Microsoft. Apple's Macintosh GUI was largely a result of Steve Jobs' visit to PARC and the subsequent hiring of key personnel.[citation needed] Microsoft's Windows GUI is based on Apple's work, more or less directly.[citation needed] Cisco's impetus stemmed from the need to route a variety of protocols over Stanford's campus Ethernet.

Silicon Valley is generally considered to have been the center of the dot-com bubble which started from the mid-1990s and collapsed after the NASDAQ stock market began to decline dramatically in April of 2000. During the bubble era, real estate prices reached unprecedented levels. For a brief time, Sand Hill Road was home to the most expensive commercial real estate in the world, and the booming economy resulted in severe traffic congestion.

Even after the dot-com crash, Silicon Valley continues to maintain its status as one of the top research and development centers in the world. A 2006 Wall Street Journal story found that 13 of the 20 most inventive towns in America were in California, and 10 of those were in Silicon Valley. [6] San Jose led the list with 3,867 utility patents filed in 2005, and number two was Sunnyvale, at 1,881 utility patents.

Thousands of high technology companies are headquartered either in or near Silicon Valley; among those, the following are in the Fortune 1000:

* Adobe Systems
* Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)
* Agilent Technologies
* Apple Inc.
* Applied Materials
* Business Objects
* Cisco Systems
* eBay
* Electronic Arts (actually in Redwood Shores north of the Valley)
* Google
* Hewlett-Packard
* Intel
* Intuit
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* LSI Logic
* Maxtor
* National Semiconductor
* Network Appliance
* Nvidia
* Oracle Corporation (actually in Redwood Shores north of the Valley)
* SanDisk
* Solectron
* Symantec
* Sun Microsystems
* Yahoo!

Additional notable companies headquartered (or with a significant presence) in Silicon Valley include (some defunct or subsumed):

* 3Com (headquartered in Marlborough, Massachusetts)
* Actuate Corporation
* Adaptec
* Amdahl
* Aricent
* Asus
* Atari
* Atmel
* BEA Systems
* Cypress Semiconductor
* Computer Literacy Bookstore
* Foundry Networks
* Fujitsu (headquartered in Tokyo, Japan)
* Gaia Online
* Hitachi Global Storage Technologies
* Juniper Networks
* Knight-Ridder (acquired by The McClatchy Company)
* Logitech
* McAfee
* Memorex (acquired by Imation and moved to Cerritos, California)
* Microsoft (headquartered in Redmond, Washington)
* Netscape (acquired by AOL)
* NeXT Computer, Inc. (acquired by Apple)
* Nintendo of America
* Opera Software
* OPPO
* Palm, Inc.
* PalmSource, Inc. (acquired by ACCESS)
* PayPal (now part of eBay)
* Rambus
* Redback Networks
* SAP AG (headquartered in Walldorf, Germany)
* Silicon Graphics
* Silicon Image
* Sony
* SRI International
* Tesla Motors
* Tellme Networks
* TiVo
* VA Software (Slashdot)
* WebEx
* VeriSign
* Veritas Software (acquired by Symantec)
* VMware (acquired by EMC)
* Xilinx

Silicon Valley is also home to the high-tech superstore retail chain Fry's Electronics.
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* Northwestern Polytechnic University (Fremont)
* Carnegie Mellon University (West Coast Campus)
* San José State University
* Santa Clara University
* Stanford University
* International Technological University(Sunnyvale), this is NOT an accredited school.
* University of California, Santa Cruz (NASA Ames UARC & UC Extension)

A number of cities are located in Silicon Valley (in alphabetical order):

* Campbell
* Cupertino
* East Palo Alto (San Mateo County)
* Fremont
* Los Altos
* Los Altos Hills
* Los Gatos
* Menlo Park (San Mateo County)
* Milpitas
* Mountain View
* Newark
* Palo Alto
* San Jose
* Santa Clara
* Saratoga
* Sunnyvale

Cities sometimes associated with the region:

* Redwood City (home to Oracle and PDI/DreamWorks)
* San Mateo
* Scotts Valley
* Santa Cruz

* List of technology centers around the world
* List of research parks around the world
* List of places with 'Silicon' names
* Pirates of Silicon Valley — Movie about the early development of Microsoft and Apple.
* Science park

As the first wave of baby boomers hits retirement age, life overseas beckons. But be warned: Retiring abroad can have its logistical headaches.

Many of today's graying expatriates are heading permanently offshore to stretch their nest egg. Jon and Gretchen Nickel, formerly of Portland, Ore., settled in Panama, where they say they can live like the rich without needing a big bankroll. Lee Harrison and Julie Lowrey, from Vermont, moved to Uruguay because the lower living costs allowed them to retire years early. Other expat retirees are seeking foreign adventure, cultural experiences and exotic travel, without having to board an airplane.

But retiring to a foreign land can present a number of challenges, from opening a local bank account to avoiding being gouged for services. And while many countries, from Belize to South Africa, offer inducements to attract foreign retirees, making sure you've got health insurance can be a big problem.

Moving abroad also means leaving behind family and friends, though Internet communications can shorten the distances. There can also be safety and security concerns, depending on where you end up.

"People go on a vacation and love the place and say 'I want to live here.' But that's very different than living there day to day and buying groceries and dealing with your finances," says Hugh Bromma, chief executive of Entrust Group, a financial-services firm that caters to many expat retirees.
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Roger and Jennifer Miller retired to the Caribbean nation of Dominica in 2005, expecting that meeting residency requirements "would be a cakewalk, and it wasn't," says Mr. Miller, 61, a former analytical chemist in St. Louis. What's more, he says, "expenses you expect to be cheaper often aren't" because locals expect Americans have money and charge more for services. He says life in Dominica "is about two times more expensive than I was led to believe when we started asking around down here about retiring here."

No agency tracks how many U.S. retirees live overseas. The federal government requires no forms. To help start you in the right direction, here are some things you should consider before making a move:

Banking and Finance

Online banking and brokerage accounts make managing money easy from anywhere you can find an Internet connection. But working with local banks can be frustrating.

Mr. Harrison, a former project manager with power company Exelon Corp., first retired to Ecuador at the age of 49, before relocating last year to a $160,000 beach house near Punta del Este, Uruguay, and a 1,000-square-foot apartment in Montevideo, Uruguay's cosmopolitan capital. In Ecuador, which uses the U.S. dollar as the national currency, he could deposit dollar-denominated checks at his local bank, though they generally took three weeks to clear. But Uruguay uses the peso, and local banks don't accept dollar checks.

So, like many retired expats, Mr. Harrison operates his finances from the U.S. He maintains a Citibank account in the U.S. and wires blocks of money to Uruguay three times a year at a cost of $45 per transaction. Other retirees also rely on local ATMs to tap their cash in the U.S., though fees for currency conversion and non-network ATM use can add up quickly.

Most retirees also keep their credit cards based in the U.S. Mr. Harrison says he buys lots of merchandise online "and American vendors generally don't let you use a foreign credit card." Bills also are paid online.

Opening accounts can range from simple to vexing. Mr. Harrison's bank in Uruguay "just wanted my passport. It was so easy." For the Millers, the process took weeks. They didn't bring any documents, and the Dominican bank they chose wanted letters of credit and references from the couple's U.S. bank.
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Banks are trying to make some of these processes easier. HSBC PLC has revamped its Premier Account to help customers moving overseas arrange for bank accounts and mortgages in their new country. The bank also provides documents necessary for obtaining services such as a mobile phone, which often requires a local credit history. Charles Schwab & Co. has begun allowing its overseas customers, located in more than 200 countries, to establish standing letters of authorization so they can request with just an email that money be wired to an account abroad.

Health and Social Security

Social Security won't be much of a problem. The Social Security Administration will electronically deposit a monthly Social Security check in many banks around the world, though not all. Still, many expat retirees, to avoid challenges with local banking, have their Social Security checks electronically deposited into their U.S. bank, which they can then access online.

Health care is a bigger concern. Few U.S. employers offer health-care coverage to expat retirees, and U.S. carriers typically don't provide individual coverage to Americans living abroad. Moreover, the federal Medicare program generally doesn't cover costs outside the U.S. As such, many retirees either pay out of pocket or, once eligible for Medicare at age 65, return to the U.S. from time to time for care.

The Nickels bought a catastrophic health-care policy from a European insurer to cover them in case a pricey medical emergency arises in Panama. The policy costs less than $2,000 a year, but kicks in only after the first $10,000 in expenses. "I'm gambling at the moment that my health will hold out to 65," says Mr. Nickel, 62 years old. "Once I get Medicare in three years, I'll be flying to Houston or Miami more often for my health care."

There is some good news. Health insurer Cigna Corp. a year ago rolled out a new insurance plan, covering health, dental and vision, that allows employers to extend health coverage to retired workers who move abroad. The plan currently covers about 200 retirees living abroad, but the insurer expects larger numbers because "we anticipate the trend to retire overseas will grow," says a Cigna spokeswoman.

Many retirees also say that basic health care in many parts of the world is very good and inexpensive. http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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Many doctors are Western trained, and some local hospitals are affiliated with U.S. institutions. Hospital Punta Pacifica in Panama City, for instance, has partnered with Baltimore's Johns Hopkins Medicine International.

In some countries, retirees who become residents gain access to the national health-care system. Mr. Harrison, who just gained Uruguayan residency, is considering joining the national health plan. He says a friend recently joined and pays the equivalent of $65 a month for coverage that includes hospitalization, doctor visits and prescriptions.

Measuring one country's quality of health care against another isn't easy, since so many variables exist. However, the World Health Organization's World Health Report 2006 (available at www.who.int) contains some statistical indicators to help compare health systems across various countries.

Still, for most major medical issues, "you probably want to return to the U.S.," because of superior medical technology in U.S. hospitals, says Robert Gallo, who founded Escapeartist.com, a Web site that offers information about overseas living. Internationalliving.com, to which Mr. Harrison is a contributor, also offers information on living overseas.

Some expat retirees rent property, others buy. The Millers bought land in Dominica and are building a 900-square-foot home with a big veranda in southern Dominica overlooking the Caribbean. The Nickels gutted and remodeled an apartment on the 24th floor of a Panama City apartment building and built a "very nice kitchen area" because they like to cook and entertain.

In some situations, there can be legal issues to owning property abroad. Mr. Gallo, of Escapeartist.com, encourages people to set up and own their property in the name of a Panamanian or British Virgin Islands corporation. When you go to sell it, you sell the corporation and the property just switches hands, easing transfer of title, Mr. Gallo says.
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Taxes and Legal Issues

Many countries try to lure foreign retirees. Belize's nearly decade-old Retired Persons Incentive Act, for instance, allows retirees over age 45 to import their personal effects duty free, and to earn retirement income tax free. Countries from Italy to Panama to South Africa and Thailand offer a "pensioner visa" or "retirement visa" to Americans who can prove a certain level of monthly income. The visas can provide a variety of benefits, such as automatic discounts on certain purchases and the ability to obtain a local passport.

Still, the Internal Revenue Service taxes Americans on income no matter where it's earned in the world. Tax regimens vary widely overseas, and you may or may not be subject to local taxes. Many countries have tax treaties with the U.S. to alleviate double taxation. A list of countries with such tax treaties is available at IRS.gov; search "tax treaties A to Z."

Yamato (大和), named after the ancient Japanese Yamato Province, was a battleship of the Imperial Japanese Navy. She was lead ship of her class. She and her sister Musashi were the largest, heaviest, and most powerful battleships ever constructed, displacing 72,800 tonnes at full load. The class carried the largest naval artillery ever fitted to any warship - 460 mm (18.1 in) guns which fired 1.36 tonne shells.

The ship held special significance for the Empire of Japan as a symbol of the nation's naval power ('Yamato' was sometimes used to refer to Japan itself), and its sinking by US aircraft in the final days of the war during the suicide Operation Ten-Go is sometimes considered symbolic of Japan's defeat itself.
The Yamato class was built after the Japanese withdrew from the Washington Naval Treaty at the Second London Conference of 1936. The treaty, as extended by the London Naval Treaty of 1930, forbade signatories to build battleships before 1937.
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Design work on the class began in 1934 and after modifications the design for a 68,000 ton vessel was accepted in March 1937. Yamato was built in intense secrecy at a specially prepared dock to hide her construction at Kure Naval Dockyards beginning on 4 November 1937. She was launched on 8 August 1940 and commissioned on 16 December 1941.

Originally, five ships of this class were planned. The third, Shinano, was converted to an aircraft carrier during construction after the defeat at the Battle of Midway. The un-named "Hull Number 111" was scrapped in 1943 when roughly 30% complete, and "Hull Number 797", proposed in the 1942 5th Supplementary Program, was never ordered.

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Plans for a "Super Yamato" class, with 20 inch (508 mm) guns, provisionally designated as "Hull Number 798" and "Hull Number 799", were abandoned in 1942.

The class was designed to be superior to any ship that the United States was likely to produce. Her 460 mm main guns were selected over 406 mm (16 in) ones because the width of the Panama Canal would make it impractical for the U.S. Navy to construct a battleship with the same caliber guns without severe design restrictions or inadequate defensive arrangement. To further confuse the intelligence agencies of other countries, Yamato's main guns were officially named 40.6 cm Special, and civilians were never notified of the true nature of the guns. This worked so well that as late as 1945, the U.S. believed the Yamato had 16 inch (406 mm) guns and a 40,823 tonne displacement, comparable to the Iowas. Funding for the Yamato class was also scattered among various projects so the huge costs would not be immediately noticeable.
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At the Kure Navy Yard, the construction dock was deepened, the gantry crane capacity was increased to 100 tonnes, and part of the dock was roofed over to prevent observation of the work. Many low-level designers and even senior officers were not informed of the true dimensions of the battleship until after the war. When the ship was launched, there was no commissioning ceremony or fanfare.
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Yamato was designed by Keiji Fukuda and followed the trend of unique and generally excellent indigenous Japanese warship designs begun in the 1920s by Fukuda's predecessor Yuzuru Hiraga. The design of Yamato contained a number of unique features, some of which contributed to the striking appearance of the vessel. To begin with, unlike most of the designs of the 1920s and 1930s, Yamato's deck was not flush. The undulating line of the main deck forward saved structural weight without reducing hull girder strength. Tests of models in a model basin led to the adoption of a semitransom stern and a bulbous bow, which reduced hull resistance by 8%.

The nine 460 mm main battery were the largest ever fielded at sea, a major technological challenge to construct and operate. Their successful implementation in the Yamato class constitutes a major achievement on the part of Japanese naval constructors. The exponentially higher blast effect of the main armament prevented the stowage of boats on deck or the stationing of unshielded personnel in combat. As a result, all anti-aircraft positions (even the smallest) were enclosed in blast shields as designed. Later in their career the anti-aircraft armament of both ships were considerably augmented by open positions of both light and heavy weapons. Presumably AA gun crews would evacuate the weather deck prior to the firing of the main armament. This might help explain Yamato's ineffectiveness at the Battle off Samar; the ship was under almost continual air attack and may have been prevented from firing her main armament at the risk of killing or disabling gunners in open positions. For similar reasons, the superstructure of the ship was extremely compact, which reduced armored citadel length but also hampered anti-aircraft arcs of fire.
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Boats were stowed in below-deck hangars and launched via an unusual traveling crane arrangement mounted on both quarters. The quarter deck aft of Turret 3 was paved with concrete, beneath which a hangar for the stowage of up to seven spotter aircraft was provided for via a wide elevator-like opening in the stern. Contrary to some descriptions the Yamato and Musashi did not have "Pagoda" masts as did previous Japanese battleships, but modern tower bridge structures to house command and fire control facilities. The mainmast, funnel and tower bridge were all unique in design and appearance, differing markedly both from other Japanese battleships and from capital ships of other navies. There is a general "familial" resemblance however between the architecture of the Yamatos and the Hiraga/Fujimoto designed series of cruisers of the 1920s and 30s, particularly the Takao and Mogami classes.
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The immense beam of these ships made them perhaps the most stable of all battleships. Both ships were reported to be very stable even in heavy seas. However, the increased width of the hull also meant that any loss of stability required a correspondingly greater righting-arm to correct in the event of significant flooding. The ship had one single large rudder (at frame 231), which gave it a small (for a ship of that size) turning circle of 640 m. By comparison the U.S. Iowa-class fast battleship had one of over 800 m. There was also a smaller auxiliary rudder installed (at frame 219) which turned out to be virtually useless.

The steam turbine power plant was a relatively low powered design (25 kgf/cm² (2.5 MPa), 325 °C), and as such, their fuel usage rate was very high. This is a primary reason why they were not used during the Solomon Islands campaign and other mid-war operations. In addition, installed horsepower was only 147,948 (110,324kW), limiting her ability to operate with carriers.

Arc welding, a relatively new procedure at that time, was used extensively. The lower side-belt armor was used as a strength member of the hull structure. This was done to save weight, an important concern for the designers, despite the lack of treaty limitations. There were a total of 1,147 watertight compartments in the ship (1,065 of these beneath the armored deck).

Combat
Battle of the Sibuyan Sea, 24 October 1944. Yamato is hit by a bomb near her forward 460 mm gun turret, during attacks by U.S. carrier planes as she transited the Sibuyan Sea. This hit did not produce serious damage.
Battle of the Sibuyan Sea, 24 October 1944. Yamato is hit by a bomb near her forward 460 mm gun turret, during attacks by U.S. carrier planes as she transited the Sibuyan Sea. This hit did not produce serious damage.
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Yamato was the flagship of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto from 12 February 1942, replacing Nagato. She sailed with Nagato, Mutsu, Hosho, Sendai, nine destroyers, and four auxiliary ships as Yamamoto's Main Body during the attempted invasion of Midway Atoll in June 1942, but took no active part in the Battle of Midway. She remained the flagship for 364 days until February 11, 1943, when the flag was transferred to her sister ship Musashi. From 29 August 1942 to 8 May 1943, she spent all of her time at Truk, being underway for only one day during this entire time. In May 1943, she returned to Kure, where the two wing 155 mm turrets were removed and replaced by 25 mm machine guns, and Type-22 surface search radars were added. She returned to Truk on 25 December 1943. On the way there, she was damaged by a torpedo from the submarine USS Skate, and was not fully repaired until April 1944. During these repairs, additional 127 mm anti-aircraft guns were installed in the place of the 155 mm turrets removed in May, and additional 25 mm anti-aircraft guns were added.

She joined the fleet in the Battle of the Philippine Sea in June 1944. In October, she participated in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, during which she first fired her main guns at enemy aircraft and surface ships. During the initial air attack, she received two bomb hits from aircraft which did little damage. However, her sister, Musashi, bore the brunt of the US carrier aircraft attacks and was sunk. Yamato compatriots later sank an escort carrier and some escort vessels at Samar, but Yamato herself was largely absent from the climax of this engagement due to her having turned away from American torpedoes launched from USS Heermann (DD-532). She returned home in November and her anti-aircraft capability was again upgraded over the winter. She was attacked in the Inland Sea on 19 March 1945 by carrier aircraft from Task Force 58 as they attacked Kure, but suffered little damage.

On 6 April 1945, Yamato was sent on a suicidal mission (operation Ten-Go) against more than 1000 US ships off Okinawa. US carrier-based aircraft sank her before she was close to her target.

Operation Ten-Go
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Her final mission was as part of Operation Ten-Go following the invasion of Okinawa on 1 April 1945. It was a suicide mission (commanded by Admiral Seiichi Ito) to attack the U.S. fleet supporting the U.S. troops landing on the west of the island; her mission was to beach herself on the coast, in effect becoming an unsinkable gun battery. In addition, the Yamato's crew was to join the defending Japanese forces on Okinawa after the beaching. On 6 April Yamato and her escorts, the light cruiser Yahagi and eight destroyers, left port at Tokuyama. They were detected by US submarines on the night of 6 April as they exited the Inland Sea southbound.

Yamato had no air cover for her final mission, nor did she have many escorts. All of the officers and crew assumed it would be her last voyage. On her final evening, as it was expected U.S. carrier planes would attack the next morning, the officers allowed or even ordered the crew to indulge in sake.

At about 0830 hours on 7 April 1945, United States fighter planes were launched to pinpoint the Japanese task force. By 1000 hours, Yamato's radar picked up the U.S. planes and a state of battle readiness was commanded. Within seven minutes all doors, hatches and ventilators were closed, and battle stations were fully manned.

Yamato fired beehive shells (三式燃散弾, san-shiki shosan dan ) from her main guns against the US planes. Each of these anti-aircraft shells contained thousands of pellets that would be scattered upon explosion - analogous to a massive shotgun round. However, the beehive shells were ineffective against the incoming US planes, and performed little more than pyrotechnic displays. Strafing attacks by the US warplanes would decimate many of the AA gun crews, reducing the battleship's ability to fend off the attacking US aircraft.
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Planes from the carrier Hornet joined the strike force from Bennington. Bennington's VB-82, led by Lieutenant Commander Hugh Wood, was flying at 6,000 m (20,000 ft) altitude in heavy clouds on the bearing to intercept the ships. Although the radar indicated they were very close, the pilots were startled when they realized they were directly above the Japanese task force and within range of anti-aircraft fire. Lieutenant Commander Wood immediately pushed his Helldiver into the clouds and made a sharp left turn, commencing their attack. Wood's wingman was unable to stay with the formation, leaving Lieutenant (jg) Francis R. Ferry and Lieutenant (jg) Edward A. Sieber to follow Wood into the first strike on the Yamato.

The dives began at 20,000 ft directly over the Yamato, bearing from stern to bow. Bombs were released at an altitude of less than about 500 m (1,500 ft). The dives were made as close to a 90-degree angle as possible to avoid most anti-aircraft guns. Each of the three planes released eight 127 mm (5 in) rockets; two armor-piercing bombs and bursts of 20 mm machine gun fire. Lt. (jg) Ferry remembers that "at this distance a miss was impossible".

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The first two bombs dropped by Lt. Commander Wood hit on the starboard side of the weather deck, knocking out several of the 25 mm machine guns and the high-angle gun turret and ripping a hole in the flying deck. Seconds later came the two bombs from Lt. (jg) Ferry, destroying secondary battery fire control station as they blew through the flying deck, and starting a fire that was never extinguished. This fire continued to spread and is believed to have caused the explosion of the main ammunition magazine as the Yamato capsized some two hours later. Hot on Ferry's tail was Lt. (jg) Sieber, delivering two bomb hits forward of the island, ripping more holes in the decks in the vicinity of the number three main gun turret.

The torpedo plane pilots were ordered to aim for the parts of the Yamato's hull unprotected by her torpedo defense system: the bow and stern. They were also ordered to attack her on one side only, so that their target would capsize more easily since counter-flooding would become more difficult. Within minutes of the Avengers' torpedo attacks, the Yamato suffered three torpedo hits to her port side and began listing.
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Over the next two hours, two more attacks would be launched, pounding the Yamato with torpedoes and bombs. Attempts at counter-flooding failed, and shortly after 1400 hours, the commanding officer gave the word to prepare to abandon ship. As the ship listed beyond a 90° angle and began sinking, a gigantic explosion of the stern ammunition magazines tore the ship apart. The huge mushroom of fire and smoke exploded almost four miles into the air and the fire was seen by sentries 125 miles away in Kagoshima prefecture on Kyushu, the southernmost of Japan's four main islands. Only 280 of the Yamato 2,778-man crew were rescued from the sinking ship. The end had come for the Yamato, foreshadowing the coming end of the Imperial Japanese Military. Ten aircraft and 12 airmen were lost in the attack on the Yamato.

Naval gunfire took no part in Yamato's demise. The sinking of the world's largest battleship by aircraft alone confirmed the lessons learned by the sinking of the Prince of Wales, Repulse, and Musashi: The battleship had been supplanted by the aircraft carrier as queen of the sea and the capital ship of any fleet.

The wreckage lies in around 300 meters of water and was surveyed in 1985 and 1999. These surveys show the hull to be in two pieces with the break occurring in the area of the second ('B') main turret.
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The senior surviving bridge officer Mitsuru Yoshida claims that a fire alert for the magazine of the forward superfiring 155 mm guns was observed as the ship sank. This fire appears to have detonated the shell propellant stored as the ship rolled over, which in turn set off the magazine in Turret No. 2, resulting in the famous pictures of the actual explosion and subsequent smoke column photographed by US aircraft.

The bow section landed upright, with the stern section remaining keel up. The three main turrets fell away as the ship turned over and landed in the wreckage field around the separated hull pieces.

A further large hole was found in the stern section, strongly suggesting that a third magazine explosion occurred, possibly the aft 155 mm gun magazine.

Further examples of capital ships being lost due to magazine detonations of this nature during or after battle are the British battlecruisers HMS Queen Mary, Invincible and Indefatigable at the battle of Jutland in 1916, Hood at battle of the Denmark Strait in 1941, and USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor in 1941. A magazine or shell room explosion occurred aboard HMS Barham in the Eastern Mediterranean in 1941, but she was already sinking fast - in fact rapidly capsizing - as the explosion occurred.
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Commanding officers
Rank Name Command Notes
Chief Equipping Officer
Captain / RADM Shutoku Miyazato 5 September 1941 –
1 November 1941 Promoted to Rear Admiral on 15 October 1941.
Chief Equipping Officer
Captain Gihachi Takayanagi 1 November 1941 –
16 December 1941
Captain / RADM Gihachi Takyanagi 16 December 1941 –
17 December 1942 Promoted to Rear Admiral on 1 May 1942.
Captain / RADM Chiaki Matsuda 17 December 1942 –
7 September 1943 Promoted to Rear Admiral on 1 May 1943.
Captain / RADM Takeji Ono 7 September 1943 –
25 January 1944 Promoted to Rear Admiral on 1 November 1943.
Captain / RADM Nobuei Morishita 25 January 1944 –
25 November 1944 Promoted to Rear Admiral on 15 October 1944.
Captain / VADM* Kosaku Aruga 25 November 1944 –
7 April 1945 *Posthumous 2-rank promotion upon special request of CinC Combined Fleet.

Nature changed the rules of the game of radioactivity 10 billion years ago, probably long before the Earth was formed. It was then that potassium, an element essential to life, began disintegrating radioactively, Dr. A.K. Brewer, chemist of the U.S. Department of Agriculture here, has determined.
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Measuring the rate of breakdown of potassium into a kind of calcium, a component of limestone, then determining the time that this breakdown has been going on from the amount of this calcium now existing, Dr. Brewer finds that the process has been going on for about 10 billion years. In reaching this figure, he assumes that all of this special calcium, which has an atomic weight of 40 instead of 40.08 as does ordinary calcium, was derived from the breakdown of potassium, and that the breakdown rate has been uniform since it started. A similar time has elapsed since a variety of rubidium, a rare earth, started to break down into a kind of strontium, another rare earth.

Attempts to determine our planet's age by studying the end products of radioactive breakdown, such as calcium derived from the decay of potassium, may be as futile as trying to find out how old a stove is by weighing the ashes. The method will show, Dr. Brewer believes, how long the disintegration has been going on or, more simply, how long the fire has been burning.

Dr. Brewer's new studies in no way affect the ages determined for a number of rocks by radioactive methods. The amount of uranium, another radioactive element, in rocks is measured and then compared with the lead that it has added to the rock by uranium's previous decay. The oldest rocks dated by this method are about 1.5 billion years old.

With Earth age estimated from a number of sources at not more than 2.5 billion years, some of the breakdown of potassium must have occurred before Earth was formed. Under present theories, the breakdown began on the sun, 7 or 8 billion years before that little star was torn apart to create the solar system.
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How matter behaved under the old rules, in force until 10 billion or so years ago, before the formation of the solar system, Dr. Brewer will not state. His studies give no clue to older, now nonexistent states of matter.

Life, in the early days of our planet, hundreds of millions of years ago, may have been greatly affected by the radioactivity of potassium, says Dr. Brewer. Potassium is necessary to life, and if the minute fraction that is radioactive gets into a plant or animal, its radiations may damage the plant or animal and cause a sudden change of form, called a mutation.
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Recently, by exposing fruit flies to X rays, similar to radium radiations, Dr. Calvin Bridges, California Institute of Technology geneticist, was able to produce freak flies in a very few generations. Millions of years ago, when radioactivity was stronger than at present, changes in life forms may have been greatly accelerated by radiations from this type of potassium.

Studies of the ages of rocks, using radioactive potassium as the clock, indicate to Dr. Brewer that their age cannot exceed 6 billion years and probably they are very much younger. Disintegration long ago of other elements, now completely broken down, may make this age entirely too large. More work on radioactivity, leading to a more exact, and probably smaller, value for rock age, is suggested by Dr. Brewer.

NEW FEATURES DISCOVERED ON FACE OF THE MOON

Revision of our maps of the moon may be necessary as a result of the discovery of a series of craters and walled plains near the edge of our satellite's visible disk by H. Percy Wilkins, British astronomer.
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Occupying 20 degrees of latitude on the southeast edge of the moon, this tangle of walled valleys, craters, and high peaks has escaped discovery for many years, chiefly because nobody looked there carefully enough until now. Commenting on Mr. Wilkins' discovery, Dr. Walter Goodacre, acting director of the British Astronomical Society, recommended further observations of the moon's edges, which may lead to additional discoveries.
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In the 1967 film classic The Graduate, a businessman corners Benjamin Braddock at a cocktail party and gives him a bit of career advice. "Just one word…plastics."

Although Benjamin didn't heed that recommendation, plenty of other young graduates did. Today, the planet is awash in products spawned by the plastics industry. Residues of plastics have become ubiquitous in the environment—and in our bodies.

A federal government study now reports that bisphenol A (BPA)—the building block of one of the most widely used plastics—laces the bodies of the vast majority of U.S. residents young and old.

Manufacturers link BPA molecules into long chains, called polymers, to make polycarbonate plastics. All of those clear, brittle plastics used in baby bottles, food ware, and small kitchen appliances (like food-processor bowls) are made from polycarbonates. BPA-based resins also line the interiors of most food, beer, and soft-drink cans. With use and heating, polycarbonates can break down, leaching BPA into the materials they contact. Such as foods.

And that could be bad if what happens in laboratory animals also happens in people, because studies in rodents show that BPA can trigger a host of harmful changes, from reproductive havoc to impaired blood-sugar control and obesity (SN: 9/29/07, p. 202).

For the new study, scientists analyzed urine from some 2,500 people who had been recruited between 2003 and 2004 for the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Roughly 92 percent of the individuals hosted measurable amounts of BPA, according to a report in the January Environmental Health Perspectives. It's the first study to measure the pollutant in a representative cross-section of the U.S. population.
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Typically, only small traces of BPA turned up, concentrations of a few parts per billion in urine, note chemist Antonia M. Calafat and her colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, with hormone-mimicking agents like BPA, even tiny exposures can have notable impacts.

Overall, concentrations measured by Calafat's team were substantially higher than those that have triggered disease, birth defects, and more in exposed animals, notes Frederick S. vom Saal, a University of Missouri-Columbia biologist who has been probing the toxicology of BPA for more than 15 years.

The BPA industry describes things differently. http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page1.aspx
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Although Calafat's team reported urine concentrations of BPA, in fact they assayed a breakdown product—the compound by which BPA is excreted, notes Steven G. Hentges of the American Chemistry Council's Polycarbonate/BPA Global Group. As such, he argues, "this does not mean that BPA itself is present in the body or in urine."

On the other hand, few people have direct exposure to the breakdown product.

Hentges' group estimates that the daily BPA intake needed to create urine concentrations reported by the CDC scientists should be in the neighborhood of 50 nanograms per kilogram of bodyweight—or one millionth of an amount at which "no adverse effects" were measured in multi-generation animal studies. In other words, Hentges says, this suggests "a very large margin of safety."

No way, counters vom Saal. If one applies the ratio of BPA intake to excreted values in hosts of published animal studies, concentrations just reported by CDC suggest that the daily intake of most Americans is actually closer to 100 micrograms (µg) per kilogram bodyweight, he says—or some 1,000-fold higher than the industry figure.
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Clearly, there are big differences of opinion and interpretation. And a lot may rest on who's right.

Globally, chemical manufacturers produce an estimated 2.8 million tons of BPA each year. The material goes into a broad range of products, many used in and around the home. BPA also serves as the basis of dental sealants, which are resins applied to the teeth of children to protect their pearly whites from cavities (SN: 4/6/96, p. 214). The industry, therefore, has a strong economic interest in seeing that the market for BPA-based products doesn't become eroded by public concerns over the chemical.

And that could happen. About 2 years after a Japanese research team showed that BPA leached out of baby bottles and plastic food ware (see What's Coming Out of Baby's Bottle?), manufacturers of those consumer products voluntarily found BPA substitutes for use in food cans. Some 2 years after that, a different group of Japanese scientists measured concentrations of BPA residues in the urine of college students. About half of the samples came from before the switch, the rest from after the period when BPA was removed from food cans.

By comparing urine values from the two time periods, the researchers showed that BPA residues were much lower—down by at least 50 percent—after Japanese manufacturers had eliminated BPA from the lining of food cans.

Concludes vom Saal, in light of the new CDC data and a growing body of animal data implicating even low-dose BPA exposures with the potential to cause harm, "the most logical thing" for the United States to do would be to follow in Japan's footsteps and "get this stuff [BPA] out of our food."

Kids appear most exposed

Overall, men tend to have statistically lower concentrations of BPA than women, the NHANES data indicate. But the big difference, Calafat says, traces to age. "Children had higher concentrations than adolescents, and they in turn had higher levels than adults," she told Science News Online.

This decreasing body burden with older age "is something we have seen with some other nonpersistent chemicals," Calafat notes—such as phthalates, another class of plasticizers.

The spread between the average BPA concentration that her team measured in children 6 to 11 years old (4.5 µg/liter) and adults (2.5 µg/L) doesn't look like much, but proved reliably different.
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The open question is why adults tended to excrete only 55 percent as much BPA. It could mean children have higher exposures, she posits, or perhaps that they break it down less efficiently. "We really need to do more research to be able to answer that question."

Among other differences that emerged in the NHANES analysis: urine residues of BPA decreased with increasing household income and varied somewhat with ethnicity (with Mexican-Americans having the lowest average values, blacks the highest, and white's values in between).

There was also a time-of-day difference, with urine values for any given group tending to be highest in the evening, lowest in the afternoon, and midway between those in the morning. Since BPA's half-life in the body is only about 6 hours, that temporal variation in the chemical's excretion would be consistent with food as a major source of exposure, the CDC scientists note.

In the current NHANES paper, BPA samples were collected only once from each recruit. However, in a paper due to come out in the February Environmental Health Perspectives, Calafat and colleagues from several other institutions looked at how BPA excretion varied over a 2-year span among 82 individuals—men and women—seen at a fertility clinic in Boston.

In contrast to the NHANES data, the upcoming report shows that men tended to have somewhat higher BPA concentrations than women. Then again both groups had only about one-quarter the concentration typical of Americans.

The big difference in the Boston group emerged among the 10 women who ultimately became pregnant. Their BPA excretion increased 33 percent during pregnancy. Owing to the small number of participants in this subset of the study population, the pregnancy-associated change was not statistically significant. However, the researchers report, these are the first data to look for changes during pregnancy and ultimately determining whether some feature of pregnancy—such as a change in diet or metabolism of BPA—really alters body concentrations of the pollutant could be important. It could point to whether the fetus faces an unexpectedly high exposure to the pollutant.
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If it does, the fetus could face a double whammy: Not only would exposures be higher during this period of organ and neural development, but rates of detoxification also would be diminished, vom Saal says.

Indeed, in a separate study, one due to be published soon in Reproductive Toxicology, his team administered BPA by ingestion or by injection to 3-day-old mice. Either way, the BPA exposure resulted in comparable BPA concentrations in blood.

What's more, that study found, per unit of BPA delivered, blood values in the newborns were "markedly higher" than other studies have reported for adult rodents exposed to the chemical. And that makes sense, vom Saal says, because the enzyme needed to break BPA down and lead to its excretion is only a tenth as active in babies as in adults. That's true in the mouse, he says, in the rat—and, according to some preliminary data, in humans.

Vom Saal contends that since studies have shown BPA exhibits potent hormonelike activity in human cells at the parts-per-trillion level, and since http://louis-j-sheehan.info/
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the new CDC study finds that most people are continually exposed to concentrations well above the parts-per-trillion ballpark, it's time to reevaluate whether it makes sense to use BPA-based products in and around foods.

LETTER FROM POLAND about novelist Krystian Bala and the murder of Dariusz Janiszewski. Writer describes the discovery of Janiszewski’s body in the Oder River in December, 2000. Janiszewski had run a small advertising firm in the city of Wroclaw. He had no apparent enemies and no criminal record. After six months, the investigation was dropped. Tells about police detective Jacek Wroblewski taking an interest in the Janiszewski case in 2003. In cold cases the key to solving the crime is often an overlooked clue in the original file. The file detailed a series of calls to Janiszewski’s cell phone on the day of the murder, some from a phone booth down the street from his office. Yet the cell phone had never been found. Wroblewski and a colleague traced the cell phone, which had been sold on an Internet auction site four days after Janiszewski disappeared. The seller, investigators learned, was a thirty-year old Polish intellectual named Krystian Bala. Bala had recently published a sadistic, pornographic, creepy novel called “Amok.” The book featured a murder not unlike Janiszewski’s and a narrator named Chris, the English version of Bala’s first name. Discusses Bala’s interest in postmodern thinkers such as Jacques Derrida, Georges Bataille, and Michel Foucault. Bala constructed myths about himself so that friends often had trouble distinguishing his real character from the one he had invented. Bala married his high-school sweetheart, Stasia, in 1995; they had a son in 1997. To support his family, he left the university and started a cleaning business, which went bankrupt in 2000. His marriage also collapsed. He left Poland, traveling widely, and worked on his novel, finishing the book in 2002. The book came out in 2003 but it did not sell well. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/
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Describes Wroblewski using the book as a guide to his investigation of Bala’s possible involvement in the murder and discusses similarities between events in the book and Bala’s life. When Bala returned to Poland, he was arrested. Bala claims that he was violently beaten during the interrogation, a claim Wroblewski denies. Bala took a polygraph test but the results were inconclusive. Further investigation revealed a darker picture of the years during which Bala’s business and marriage failed (and during which Janiszewski was murdered). Investigators were able to connect Bala to the card that was used to make calls to Janiszewski’s cell phone on the day he was murdered. A friend of Bala’s ex-wife then told Wroblewski that, in the summer of 2000, Stasia had met Janiszewski at a night club. Bala had then confronted Stasia in a jealous rage. Tells about Bala’s trial and conviction for the murder. He was sentenced to twenty-five years. Writer visits Bala in prison. Bala tells him about a new novel he is working on called “De Liryk.”

Sometime after midnight on September 6, 2007, at least four low-flying Israeli Air Force fighters crossed into Syrian airspace and carried out a secret bombing mission on the banks of the Euphrates River, about ninety miles north of the Iraq border. The seemingly unprovoked bombing, which came after months of heightened tension between Israel and Syria over military exercises and troop buildups by both sides along the Golan Heights, was, by almost any definition, an act of war. But in the immediate aftermath nothing was heard from the government of Israel. In contrast, in 1981, when the Israeli http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/page1.aspx
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Air Force destroyed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, near Baghdad, the Israeli government was triumphant, releasing reconnaissance photographs of the strike and permitting the pilots to be widely interviewed.

Within hours of the attack, Syria denounced Israel for invading its airspace, but its public statements were incomplete and contradictory—thus adding to the mystery. A Syrian military spokesman said only that Israeli planes had dropped some munitions in an unpopulated area after being challenged by Syrian air defenses, “which forced them to flee.” Four days later, Walid Moallem, the Syrian foreign minister, said during a state visit to Turkey that the Israeli aircraft had used live ammunition in the attack, but insisted that there were no casualties or property damage. It was not until October 1st that Syrian President Bashar Assad, in an interview with the BBC, acknowledged that the Israeli warplanes had hit their target, which he described as an “unused military building.” Assad added that Syria reserved the right to retaliate, but his comments were muted.

Despite official silence in Tel Aviv (and in Washington), in the days after the bombing the American and European media were flooded with reports, primarily based on information from anonymous government sources, claiming that Israel had destroyed a nascent nuclear reactor that was secretly being assembled in Syria, with the help of North Korea. Beginning construction of a nuclear reactor in secret would be a violation of Syria’s obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and could potentially yield material for a nuclear weapon.

The evidence was circumstantial but seemingly damning. The first reports of Syrian and North Korean nuclear coöperation came on September 12th in the Times and elsewhere. By the end of October, the various media accounts generally agreed on four points: the Israeli intelligence community had learned of a North Korean connection to a construction site in an agricultural area in eastern Syria; three days before the bombing, a “North Korean ship,” identified as the Al Hamed, had arrived at the Syrian port of Tartus, on the Mediterranean; satellite imagery strongly suggested that the building under construction was designed to hold a nuclear reactor when completed; as such, Syria had crossed what the Israelis regarded as the “red line” on the path to building a bomb, and had to be stopped. There were also reports—by ABC News and others—that some of the Israeli intelligence had been shared in advance with the United States, which had raised no objection to the bombing.
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The Israeli government still declined to make any statement about the incident. Military censorship on dispatches about the raid was imposed for several weeks, and the Israeli press resorted to recycling the disclosures in the foreign press. In the first days after the attack, there had been many critical stories in the Israeli press speculating about the bombing, and the possibility that it could lead to a conflict with Syria. Larry Derfner, a columnist writing in the Jerusalem Post, described the raid as “the sort of thing that starts wars.” But, once reports about the nuclear issue and other details circulated, the domestic criticism subsided.

At a news conference on September 20th, President George W. Bush was asked about the incident four times but said, “I’m not going to comment on the matter.” The lack of official statements became part of the story. http://louis-j-sheehan.com/page1.aspx
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“The silence from all parties has been deafening,” David Ignatius wrote in the Washington Post, “but the message to Iran”—which the Administration had long suspected of pursuing a nuclear weapon—“is clear: America and Israel can identify nuclear targets and penetrate air defenses to destroy them.”

It was evident that officials in Israel and the United States, although unwilling to be quoted, were eager for the news media to write about the bombing. Early on, a former officer in the Israel Defense Forces with close contacts in Israeli intelligence approached me, with a version of the standard story, including colorful but, as it turned out, unconfirmable details: Israeli intelligence tracking the ship from the moment it left a North Korean port; Syrian soldiers wearing protective gear as they off-loaded the cargo; Israeli intelligence monitoring trucks from the docks to the target site. On October 3rd, the London Spectator, citing much of the same information, published an overheated account of the September 6th raid, claiming that it “may have saved the world from a devastating threat,” and that “a very senior British ministerial source” had warned, “If people had known how close we came to World War Three that day there’d have been mass panic.”

However, in three months of reporting for this article, I was repeatedly told by current and former intelligence, diplomatic, and congressional officials that they were not aware of any solid evidence of ongoing nuclear-weapons programs in Syria. It is possible that Israel conveyed intelligence directly to senior members of the Bush Administration, without it being vetted by intelligence agencies. (This process, known as “stovepiping,” overwhelmed U.S. intelligence before the war in Iraq.) But Mohamed ElBaradei, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the United Nations group responsible for monitoring compliance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, said, “Our experts who have carefully analyzed the satellite imagery say it is unlikely that this building was a nuclear facility.” http://louis-j-sheehan.biz
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Joseph Cirincione, the director for nuclear policy at the Center for American Progress, a Washington, D.C., think tank, told me, “Syria does not have the technical, industrial, or financial ability to support a nuclear-weapons program. I’ve been following this issue for fifteen years, and every once in a while a suspicion arises and we investigate and there’s nothing. There was and is no nuclear-weapons threat from Syria. This is all political.” Cirincione castigated the press corps for its handling of the story. “I think some of our best journalists were used,” he said.

A similar message emerged at briefings given to select members of Congress within weeks of the attack. The briefings, conducted by intelligence agencies, focussed on what Washington knew about the September 6th raid. One concern was whether North Korea had done anything that might cause the U.S. to back away from ongoing six-nation talks about its nuclear program. A legislator who took part in one such briefing said afterward, according to a member of his staff, that he had heard nothing that caused him “to have any doubts” about the North Korean negotiations—“nothing that should cause a pause.” The legislator’s conclusion, the staff member said, was “There’s nothing that proves any perfidy involving the North Koreans.”

Morton Abramowitz, a former Assistant Secretary of State for intelligence and research, told me that he was astonished by the lack of response. “Anytime you bomb another state, that’s a big deal,” he said. “But where’s the outcry, particularly from the concerned states and the U.N.? Something’s amiss.”

Israel could, of course, have damning evidence that it refuses to disclose. But there are serious and unexamined contradictions in the various published accounts of the September 6th bombing.

The main piece of evidence to emerge publicly that Syria was building a reactor arrived on October 23rd, when David Albright, of the Institute for Science and International Security, a highly respected nonprofit research group, released a satellite image of the target. The photograph had been taken by a commercial satellite company, DigitalGlobe, of Longmont, Colorado, on August 10th, four weeks before the bombing, and showed a square building and a nearby water-pumping station. In an analysis released at the same time, http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx

Albright, a physicist who served as a weapons inspector in Iraq, concluded that the building, as viewed from space, had roughly the same length and width as a reactor building at Yongbyon, North Korea’s main nuclear facility. “The tall building in the image may house a reactor under construction and the pump station along the river may have been intended to supply cooling water to the reactor,” Albright said. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/
He concluded his analysis by posing a series of rhetorical questions that assumed that the target was a nuclear facility:

How far along was the reactor construction project when it was bombed? What was the extent of nuclear assistance from North Korea? Which reactor components did Syria obtain from North Korea or elsewhere, and where are they now?
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He was later quoted in the Washington Post saying, “I’m pretty convinced that Syria was trying to build a nuclear reactor.”

When I asked Albright how he had pinpointed the target, he told me that he and a colleague, Paul Brannan, “did a lot of hard work”—culling press reports and poring over DigitalGlobe imagery—“before coming up with the site.” Albright then shared his findings with Robin Wright and other journalists at the Post, who, after checking with Administration officials, told him that the building was, indeed, the one targeted by the Israelis. “We did not release the information until we got direct confirmation from the Washington Post,” he told me. The Post’s sources in the Administration, he understood, had access to far more detailed images obtained by U.S. intelligence satellites. The Post ran a story, without printing the imagery, on October 19th, reporting that “U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the aftermath of the attack” had concluded that the site had the “signature,” or characteristics, of a reactor “similar in structure to North Korea’s facilities”—a conclusion with which Albright then agreed. In other words, the Albright and the Post reports, which appeared to independently reinforce each other, stemmed in part from the same sources.

Albright told me that before going public he had met privately with Israeli officials. “I wanted to be sure in my own mind that the Israelis thought http://louis2j2sheehan.us/Blog/Blogger.aspx

it was a reactor, and I was,” he said. “They never explicitly said it was nuclear, but they ruled out the possibility that it was a missile, chemical-warfare, or radar site. By a process of elimination, I was left with nuclear.”

Two days after his first report, Albright released a satellite image of the bombed site, taken by DigitalGlobe on October 24th, seven weeks after the bombing. The new image showed that the target area had been levelled and the ground scraped. Albright said that it hinted of a coverup—cleansing the bombing site could make it difficult for weapons inspectors to determine its precise nature. “It looks like Syria is trying to hide something and destroy the evidence of some activity,” he told the Times. “But it won’t work. Syria has got to answer questions about what it was doing.” This assessment was widely shared in the press. (In mid-January, the Times reported that recent imagery from DigitalGlobe showed that a storage facility, or something similar, had been constructed, in an obvious rush, at the bombing site.)

Proliferation experts at the International Atomic Energy Agency and others in the arms-control community disputed Albright’s interpretation of the images. “People here were baffled by this, and thought that Albright had stuck his neck out,” a diplomat in Vienna, where the I.A.E.A. is headquartered, told me. “The I.A.E.A. has been consistently telling journalists that it is skeptical about the Syrian nuclear story, but the reporters are so convinced.”

A second diplomat in Vienna acidly commented on the images: “A square building is a square building.”
http://louis1j1sheehan.us/The diplomat, who is familiar with the use of satellite imagery for nuclear verification, added that the I.A.E.A. “does not have enough information to conclude anything about the exact nature of the facility. They see a building with some geometry near a river that could be identified as nuclear-related. But they cannot credibly conclude that is so. As far as information coming from open sources beyond imagery, it’s a struggle to extract information from all of the noise that comes from political agendas.”

Much of what one would expect to see around a secret nuclear site was lacking at the target, a former State Department intelligence expert who now deals with proliferation issues for the Congress said. “There is no security around the building,” he said. “No barracks for the Army or the workers. No associated complex.” Jeffrey Lewis, who heads the non-proliferation program at the New America Foundation, a think tank in Washington, told me that, even if the width and the length of the building were similar to the Korean site, its height was simply not sufficient to contain a Yongbyon-size reactor and also have enough room to extract the control rods, an essential step in the operation of the reactor; nor was there evidence in the published imagery of major underground construction. “All you could see was a box,” Lewis said. “You couldn’t see enough to know how big it will be or what it will do. It’s just a box.”

A former senior U.S. intelligence official, who has access to current intelligence, http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page.aspx
http://louis2j2sheehan.us/page1.aspx said, “We don’t have any proof of a reactor—no signals intelligence, no human intelligence, no satellite intelligence.” Some well-informed defense consultants and former intelligence officials asked why, if there was compelling evidence of nuclear cheating involving North Korea, a member of the President’s axis of evil, and Syria, which the U.S. considers a state sponsor of terrorism, the Bush Administration would not insist on making it public.

When I went to Israel in late December, the government was still maintaining secrecy about the raid, but some current and former officials and military officers were willing to speak without attribution. Most were adamant that Israel’s intelligence had been accurate. “Don’t you write that there was nothing there!” a senior Israeli official, who is in a position to know the details of the raid on Syria, said, shaking a finger at me. “The thing in Syria was real.”

Retired Brigadier General Shlomo Brom, who served as deputy national-security adviser under Prime Minister Ehud Barak, told me that Israel wouldn’t have acted if it hadn’t been convinced that there was a threat. “It may have been a perception of a conviction, but there was something there,” Brom said. “It was the beginning of a nuclear project.”
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However, by the date of our talk, Brom told me, “The question of whether it was there or not is not that relevant anymore.”

Albright, when I spoke to him in December, was far more circumspect than he had been in October. “We never said ‘we know’ it was a reactor, based on the image,” Albright said. “We wanted to make sure that the image was consistent with a reactor, and, from my point of view, it was. But that doesn’t confirm it’s a reactor.”

The journey of the Al Hamed, a small coastal trader, became a centerpiece in accounts of the September 6th bombing. On September 15th, the Washington Post reported that “a prominent U.S. expert on the Middle East” said that the attack “appears to have been linked to the arrival . . . of a ship carrying material from North Korea labeled as cement.” The article went on to cite the expert’s belief that “the emerging consensus in Israel was that it delivered nuclear equipment.” Other press reports identified the Al Hamed as a “suspicious North Korean” ship.

But there is evidence that the Al Hamed could not have been carrying sensitive cargo—or any cargo—from North Korea. International shipping is carefully monitored by Lloyd’s Marine Intelligence Unit, which relies on a network of agents as well as on port logs and other records. In addition, most merchant ships are now required to operate a transponder device called an A.I.S., for automatic identification system. This device, which was on board the Al Hamed, works in a manner similar to a transponder on a commercial aircraft—beaming a constant, very high-frequency position report. (The U.S. Navy monitors international sea traffic with the aid of dedicated satellites, at a secret facility in suburban Washington.)

According to Marine Intelligence Unit records, the Al Hamed, which was built in 1965, had been operating for years in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, with no indication of any recent visits to North Korea. The records show that the Al Hamed arrived at Tartus on September 3rd—the ship’s fifth visit to Syria in five months. http://louis-j-sheehan.net/page1.aspx
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(It was one of eight ships that arrived that day; although it is possible that one of the others was carrying illicit materials, only the Al Hamed has been named in the media.) The ship’s registry was constantly changing. The Al Hamed flew the South Korean flag before switching to North Korea in November of 2005, and then to Comoros. (Ships often fly flags of convenience, registering with different countries, in many cases to avoid taxes or onerous regulations.) At the time of the bombing, according to Lloyd’s, it was flying a Comoran flag and was owned by four Syrian nationals. In earlier years, under other owners, the ship seems to have operated under Russian, Estonian, Turkish, and Honduran flags. Lloyd’s records show that the ship had apparently not passed through the Suez Canal—the main route from the Mediterranean to the Far East—since at least 1998.

Among the groups that keep track of international shipping is Greenpeace. Martini Gotjé, who monitors illegal fishing for the organization and was among the first to raise questions about the Al Hamed, told me, “I’ve been at sea for forty-one years, and I can tell you, as a captain, that the Al Hamed was nothing—in rotten shape. You wouldn’t be able to load heavy cargo on it, as the floorboards wouldn’t be that strong.”

If the Israelis’ target in Syria was not a nuclear site, why didn’t the Syrians respond more forcefully? Syria complained at the United Nations but did little to press the issue. And, if the site wasn’t a partially built reactor, what was it?

During two trips to Damascus after the Israeli raid, I interviewed many senior government and intelligence officials. None of President Assad’s close advisers told me the same story, though some of the stories were more revealing—and more plausible—than others. In general, Syrian officials seemed more eager to analyze Israel’s motives than to discuss what had been attacked. “I hesitate to answer any journalist’s questions about it,” Faruq al-Shara, the Syrian Vice-President, told me. “Israel bombed to restore its credibility, and their objective is for us to keep talking about it. And by answering your questions I serve their objective. Why should I volunteer to do that?” Shara denied that his nation has a nuclear-weapons program. “The volume of articles about the bombing is incredible, and it’s not important that it’s a lie,” he said.

One top foreign-ministry official in Damascus told me that the target “was an old military building that had been abandoned by the Syrian military” years ago. But a senior Syrian intelligence general gave me a different account. “What they targeted was a building used for fertilizer and water pumps,” he said—part of a government effort to revitalize farming. “There is a large city”— Dayr az Zawr—“fifty kilometres away. Why would Syria put nuclear material near a city?” I interviewed the intelligence general again on my second visit to Damascus, and he reiterated that the targeted building was “at no time a military facility.” As to why Syria had not had a more aggressive response, if the target was so benign, the general said, “It was not fear—that’s all I’ll say.” As I left, I asked the general why Syria had not invited representatives of the International Atomic Energy Agency to visit the bombing site and declare that no nuclear activity was taking place there. “They did not ask to come,” he said, and “Syria had no reason to ask them to come.”
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An I.A.E.A. official dismissed that assertion when we spoke in Vienna a few days later. “The I.A.E.A. asked the Syrians to allow the agency to visit the site to verify its nature,” the I.A.E.A. official said. “Syria’s reply was that it was a military, not a nuclear, installation, and there would be no reason for the I.A.E.A. to go there. It would be in their and everyone’s interest to have the I.A.E.A. visit the site. If it was nuclear, it would leave fingerprints.”
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In a subsequent interview, Imad Moustapha, the Syrian Ambassador to Washington, defended Syria’s decision not to invite the I.A.E.A. inspectors. “We will not get into the game of inviting foreign experts to visit every site that Israel claims is a nuclear facility,” Moustapha told me. “If we bring them in and they say there is nothing there, then Israel will say it made a mistake and bomb another site two weeks later. And if we then don’t let the I.A.E.A. in, Israel will say, ‘You see?’ This is nonsense. Why should we have to do this?”

Even if the site was not a nuclear installation, it is possible that the Syrians feared that an I.A.E.A. inquiry would uncover the presence of North Koreans there. In Syria, I was able to get some confirmation that North Koreans were at the target. A senior officer in Damascus with firsthand knowledge of the incident agreed to see me alone, at his home; my other interviews in Damascus took place in government offices. According to his account, North Koreans were present at the site, but only as paid construction workers. The senior officer said that the targeted building, when completed, would most likely have been used as a chemical-warfare facility. (Syria is not a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention and has been believed, for decades, to have a substantial chemical-weapons arsenal.)

The building contract with North Korea was a routine business deal, the senior officer said—from design to construction. (North Korea may, of course, have sent skilled technicians capable of doing less routine work.) Syria and North Korea have a long-standing partnership on military matters. “The contract between Syria and North Korea was old, from 2002, and it was running late,” the senior officer told me. “It was initially to be finished in 2005, and the Israelis might have expected it was further along.”

The North Korean laborers had been coming and going for “maybe six months” before the September bombing, the senior officer said, and his government concluded that the Israelis had picked up North Korean telephone chatter at the site. (This fit the timeline that Israeli officials had given me.) “The Israelis may have their own spies and watched the laborers being driven to the area,” the senior officer said. “The Koreans were not there at night, but slept in their quarters and were driven to the site in the morning. The building was in an isolated area, and the Israelis may have concluded that even if there was a slight chance”—of it being a nuclear facility—“we’ll take that risk.”

On the days before the bombing, the Koreans had been working on the second floor, and were using a tarp on top of the building to shield the site from rain and sun. “It was just the North Korean way of working,” the Syrian senior officer said, adding that the possibility that the Israelis could not see what was underneath the tarp might have added to their determination.

The attack was especially dramatic, the Syrian senior officer said, because the Israelis used bright magnesium illumination flares to light up the target before the bombing. Night suddenly turned into day, he told me. “When the people in the area saw the lights and the bombing, they thought there would be a commando raid,” the senior officer said. The building was destroyed, and his government eventually concluded that there were no Israeli ground forces in the area. But if Israelis had been on the ground seeking contaminated soil samples, the senior officer said, “they found only cement.”

A senior Syrian official confirmed that a group of North Koreans had been at work at the site, but he denied that the structure was related to chemical warfare. Syria had concluded, he said, that chemical warfare had little deterrent value against Israel, given its nuclear capability. The facility that was attacked, the official said, was to be one of a string of missile-manufacturing plants scattered throughout Syria—“all low tech. Not strategic.” (North Korea has been a major exporter of missile technology and expertise to Syria for decades.) He added, “We’ve gone asymmetrical, and have been improving our capability to build low-tech missiles that will enable us to inflict as much damage as possible without confronting the Israeli Army. We now can hit all of Israel, and not just the north.”

Whatever was under construction, with North Korean help, it apparently had little to do with agriculture—or with nuclear reactors—but much to do with Syria’s defense posture, and its military relationship with North Korea. And that, perhaps, was enough to silence the Syrian government after the September 6th bombing.

It is unclear to what extent the Bush Administration was involved in the Israeli attack. The most detailed report of coöperation was made in mid-October by ABC News. Citing a senior U.S. official, the network reported that Israel had shared intelligence with the United States and received satellite help and targeting information in response. http://louis-j-sheehan-esquire.us/

At one point, it was reported, the Bush Administration considered attacking Syria itself, but rejected that option. The implication was that the Israeli intelligence about the nuclear threat had been vetted by the U.S., and had been found to be convincing.

Yet officials I spoke to in Israel heatedly denied the notion that they had extensive help from Washington in planning the attack. When I told the senior Israeli official that I found little support in Washington for Israel’s claim that it had bombed a nuclear facility in Syria, he responded with an expletive, and then said, angrily, “Nobody helped us. We did it on our own.” He added, “What I’m saying is that nobody discovered it for us.” (The White House declined to comment on this story.) http://louis-j-sheehan.org/

There is evidence to support this view. The satellite operated by DigitalGlobe, the Colorado firm that supplied Albright’s images, is for hire; anyone can order the satellite to photograph specific coördinates, a process that can cost anywhere from several hundred to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The company displays the results of these requests on its Web page, but not the identity of the customer. On five occasions between August 5th and August 27th of last year—before the Israeli bombing—DigitalGlobe was paid to take a tight image of the targeted building in Syria.

Clearly, whoever ordered the images likely had some involvement in plans for the attack. DigitalGlobe does about sixty per cent of its business with the U.S. government, but those contracts are for unclassified work, such as mapping. The government’s own military and intelligence satellite system, with an unmatched ability to achieve what analysts call “highly granular images,” could have supplied superior versions of the target sites. Israel has at least two military satellite systems, but, according to Allen Thomson, a former C.I.A. analyst, DigitalGlobe’s satellite has advantages for reconnaissance, making Israel a logical customer. (“Customer anonymity is crucial to us,” Chuck Herring, a spokesman for DigitalGlobe, said. “I don’t know who placed the order and couldn’t disclose it if I did.”) It is also possible that Israel or the United States ordered the imagery in order to have something unclassified to pass to the press if needed. If the Bush Administration had been aggressively coöperating with Israel before the attack, why would Israel have to turn to a commercial firm?
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Last fall, aerospace industry and military sources told Aviation Week & Space Technology, an authoritative trade journal, that the United States had provided Israel with advice about “potential target vulnerabilities” before the September 6th attack, and monitored the radar as the mission took place. The magazine reported that the Israeli fighters, prior to bombing the target on the Euphrates, struck a Syrian radar facility near the Turkish border, knocking the radar out of commission and permitting them to complete their mission without interference.

The former U.S. senior intelligence official told me that, as he understood it, America’s involvement in the Israeli raid dated back months earlier, and was linked to the Administration’s planning for a possible air war against Iran. Last summer, the Defense Intelligence Agency came to believe that Syria was installing a new Russian-supplied radar-and-air-defense system that was similar to the radar complexes in Iran. Entering Syrian airspace would trigger those defenses and expose them to Israeli and American exploitation, yielding valuable information about their capabilities. Vice-President Dick Cheney supported the idea of overflights, the former senior intelligence official said, because “it would stick it to Syria and show that we’re serious about Iran.” (The Vice-President’s office declined to comment.) The former senior intelligence official said that Israeli military jets have flown over Syria repeatedly, without retaliation from Syria. http://louis1j1sheehan1esquire.us/
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At the time, the former senior intelligence official said, the focus was on radar and air defenses, and not on any real or suspected nuclear facility. Israel’s claims about the target, which emerged later, caught many in the military and intelligence community—if not in the White House—by surprise.

On the days before the bombing, the Koreans had been working on the second floor, and were using a tarp on top of the building to shield the site from rain and sun. “It was just the North Korean way of working,” the Syrian senior officer said, adding that the possibility that the Israelis could not see what was underneath the tarp might have added to their determination.

The strain would prove to be genetically identical to isolates found in three clusters of adenovirus 14 disease over the following 18 months, the CDC said, but different in some respects from the reference strain, first isolated in 1955.

The finding suggests "the emergence and spread of a new [adenovirus 14] variant" in the U.S., the agency said in the Nov. 15 issue of Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

The later clusters were reported in 2007 in Oregon, Washington state, and Texas, the CDC said.

The largest outbreak took place from Feb. 3 to June 23 at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas, where 27 patients were sent to the hospital with pneumonia, including five who were admitted to the intensive care unit.

One of the five required extracorporeal membrane oxygenation for about three weeks and ultimately died. Medical personnel collected throat swabs from 16 of the 27 -- including the intensive care patients -- and all tested positive for the virus.

Also, during that period, medical personnel collected and tested 423 specimens associated with an outbreak of febrile respiratory infection, of which, 268 tested positive for adenovirus. A little less than half of the specimens (44%) were also serotyped and 90% were adenovirus 14.

The deadliest outbreak, identified retrospectively, occurred in Oregon, after a local clinician reported multiple patients admitted to a single hospital for pneumonia over a five-week period in March and April.

Of the 17 specimens obtained, 15 were positive for adenovirus 14, the CDC said, leading Oregon public health authorities to review records from virology labs and find 68 people who tested positive between Nov. 1, 2006, and April 30, 2007.

Of those, 50 isolates could be serotyped and 31 were adenovirus 14, the CDC reported, while 15 were another serotype and four were not actually adenovirus.

Review of medical records for 30 of the 31 with adenovirus 14 showed that 22 patients required hospital care, 16 required intensive care, and seven died, all from severe pneumonia. Most of the dead were adults, but one infant also died.

In contrast, only two of the 13 non-type 14 patients whose charts were available needed hospital care, none needed intensive care, and none died. (See: IDSA: Outbreak of Severe Pneumonia Traced to Adenovirus 14)

In Washington, officials reported four patients -- one with AIDS and three with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease -- with cough, fever, or shortness of breath between April 22 and May 8, 2007.

Three required intensive care and mechanical ventilation for severe pneumonia, and after eight days of hospital care, the AIDS patient died, while the other patients recovered.

All four tested positive for adenovirus and the three with isolates available for serotyping were shown to have adenovirus 14.

The CDC urged clinicians to follow its 2003 guidelines for pneumonia care. Among other things, the guidelines suggested changes in ventilation practices:

* Orotracheal rather than nasotracheal tubes should be used in patients who need mechanically assisted ventilation.
* Noninvasive ventilation should be used to reduce the need for and duration of endotracheal intubation.

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http://forums.about.com/n/pfx/forum.aspx?tsn=1&nav=messages&webtag=ab-usgovinfo&tid=2153
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* The breathing circuits of ventilators should be changed when they malfunction or are visibly contaminated.
* When feasible, an endotracheal tube with a dorsal lumen should be used to allow drainage of respiratory secretions.

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Board gaming is a hobby that has always been dear to me. My interest in the field is wide, ranging from simple and straightforward “social” games such as the relatively recent “Carcassonne” to far more complex rule monstrosities like the 1990 Avalon Hill game “Republic of Rome”.

Therefore, when I recently learnt about the existence of a samurai warfare game called “Ran”, which borrows its name from the Kurosawa movie (even acknowledging its source) and comes in a box whose cover is clearly inspired by Kagemusha, I knew that I had to get the game. And get it I did.

In fact, to be completely fair to the reader, I must mention that when I contacted the manufacturer of the game, they kindly offered to send me a review copy. You may judge yourself the impact that this may or may not have had on what follows.

In any case, I have now had the opportunity to sit down for a couple of games of “Ran”, and I think that my early impressions of the game are enough to warrant writing a review. For those who are either too busy or too lazy to read the whole piece, let me give you the opportunity to skip the details by saying that I really like the game. The rest of you, read on.

A note: While playing, I took a series of pictures with which to illustrate this article, but it seems that I have lost the cable with which to transfer those pictures from my camera to the computer. As for now, I will publish this without the illustrations, and anyone interested in checking how the game actually looks like can check Board Game Geek’s Ran picture gallery.

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On the surface of things, the board game “Ran” has very little in common with the movie “Ran”, or indeed with any of Kurosawa’s movies. This is of course understandable, considering that the game is about military strategy, whereas none of Kurosawa’s movies really centrally deal with warfare, but rather, when it is present, use it as a backdrop and a metaphoric device. “Ran”, therefore, is not “based on” or even “inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Ran”, and neither does it claim that.

Furthermore, to the best of my knowledge the battles available in “Ran” the strategy game in no way correspond with the ones in Kurosawa’s “Ran” or “Kagemusha”. ( “Samurai”, an earlier game by the same maker, includes the Battle of Nagashino, which is the final battle in “Kagemusha”.) The connection is therefore in some ways very superficial, indeed almost accidental.

Yet, while playing “Ran”, you will probably sooner or later catch yourself humming the theme of either “Ran” or “Kagemusha”. Even without any actual one-to-one correspondence between the game and the movies, each can help to better understand the other. The movie helps you visualize the game, while by playing the game you come to understand the mechanics behind Japanese warfare depicted in the films. There is also something quite epic, or as the box text puts it “Homeric” about the board game, on a level similar to Kurosawa’s endeavors.

Consequently, while “Ran” the board game is not exactly a “Kurosawa item”, it is certainly something that I would imagine might interest a number of devoted Kurosawa fans.

Introduction

“Ran”, published in 2007, is the 12th volume in the “Great Battles of History” series by the well-known game publisher GMT Games. The company is perhaps best known for its war games that strive for historical accuracy, often with the result of added complexity in the rules. “Ran” is in fact the second samurai warfare game in the series, following the 1996 game that was simply titled “Samurai”.

The battles included in the box range in printed playing time from roughly two to “more than five” hours. My impression is that these figures are fairly realistic for someone already familiar with the rules. Your first battle, however, will most probably take about a double the estimated time. As for the complexity of the game, I have seen both more complex, as well as far simpler games. I would say that as board games go, “Ran” is somewhere towards the lower end of the “high” complexity games.

I have previously not played “Samurai”, or any of the other “Great Battles of History” games, so I had to approach “Ran” with only my previous experience as a gamer to fall on.
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The game

“Ran” comes with seven scenarios, each representing a battle from the late 16th and early 17th century feudal Japan, which was part of the so-called “Warring States” period. Because of it being the second samurai war game in the GMT series, the battles on offer are somewhat lesser known than are the ones in its predecessor “Samurai”. This, of course, in no way makes the scenarios themselves less interesting to play, and in any case I wonder how many people actually are more familiar with, say, the Battle of Sekigahara (not included) than for example the Battle of Mimigawa (included).

Based on the scenarios that I have tried alone and with a friend, the rule system in “Ran” seems well balanced and certainly faithful enough to the historical reality that was feudal Japanese warfare. In fact, since I cannot claim to be an expert in this particular field, I enlisted for the testing purposes a board gaming friend who is a trained historian working in a library of military science, and thus capable of bringing some relevant knowledge and authority to the table. The game clearly received his seal of approval, for as I am typing this review, he keeps harassing me with messages about when the next session is to take place. Which, by the way, will probably be quite soon, as I am just as eager to try the game again – not least to attempt to have my revenge after being so miserably crushed in Nagakute!

“Ran”, as the name suggests (“ran” is Japanese for “chaos”), employs a turn system that does away with strict linearity. Rather than each player moving all of his units and then passing the turn to the next player, the system allows for frequent changes of initiative, and a single game turn may easily see both players moving different parts of their army at very different times.
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How this work is that, without going into unnecessary details, the more skilled your commanders, the better hold of the flow of the battle you will have. In gaming terms, this means that capable and lucky generals (who each command individual parts of your army) may be able to move up to three times in a single turn, giving them a clear edge in the battle. In fact, in our early test games this sometimes felt like too much of an edge, although this may only be me complaining against my friend’s amazingly good luck with the so-called Momentum dice-rolls.
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While the above is a slight variation of a relatively standard war gaming practice, “Ran” is somewhat different from your typical tactical war game in that it incorporates individual combat into a system otherwise concentrating on units comprised of a few hundred men. The way the game does this is fairly interesting, and something that I still need to experiment with to make a full tactical use of. On the basic level, however, what happens is that individual samurai or busho (generals) can enter into head-to-head fights with each other in the midst of the chaos around them. With a little luck, these individual feats may then change the direction of the whole battle, if they happen to take place at the right moment.

My only real complaint about the individual combat system is that while the idea itself is very intriguing, the rules behind its execution are somewhat less so. You basically compare the fighting characters’ abilities and throw dice, the one with the lower total suffering a wound. If a character’s stamina runs to zero, he dies, although you can withdraw before that. This, I feel, could have been made more tactical and interesting by extending the rules somewhat, allowing for different types of attacks (perhaps ranging from all-out defense to all-out attack) and maybe even mapping the hits to different body parts to make the fight more visual. But maybe I come here too strongly from my background as someone who has practiced kendo (“Japanese fencing”) and plays role playing games with systems similar to the above – perhaps it might, in fact, be taking the individual combat too far in a game that is, after all, a tactical war game.

Individual feats are important also outside of the immediate head-to-head combat. As mentioned before, each part of your army has its own commander, and the commander’s personal skills reflect how well he will be able to maneuver his troops. Similarly, your whole army – including the commanders – sit under your main commander, whose stats again have an influence over the proceedings.

These commanders also take personal responsibility over their (your) decisions in a way that the game designers have tried to tie with the bushido (warrior’s “code of conduct”) culture that is at the centre of medieval Japanese warfare. For example, when ordering a withdrawal of his troops, a commander may in some cases have to, as a result of losing face, commit seppuku (ritual suicide). This is, in fact, how our Battle of Nagakute ended, with my commander-in-chief Ieyasu Tokugawa being forced to take his own life after ordering a tactical withdrawal with the idea to save and rest his troops. His death then caused panic within the lines, and large parts of the army left the battle field, handing the victory to my opponent.

All in all, “Ran” is a very interesting mixture of troop and individual level warfare that is in some ways very traditional (which is good), but also unique (which is also good). As a result, it seems like a safe bet for anyone enjoying tactical war games, while a determined newcomer may also find the game a good introduction to the genre. I am certainly hooked, myself.

If, however, the most tactical war game that you have ever played and ever want to play is Risk, read into the rules before you fork out the money to buy “Ran”, as it may not quite be your cup of tea. Then again, it may also turn out to be the beginning of a beautiful new hobby, for which “Ran” can in fact serve as a relatively good and quite straightforward introduction.

The components

If you have never played board war games before, you may on your first impression of “Ran” be overwhelmed by the number of components that the box contains: seven maps printed on two large sheets of paper, over a thousand counters marking your units and their various states, a rule book and a scenario book, plus a number of charts and table cards littered with information. GMT also provides you with Ziploc bags to hold the counters in, which is extremely nice of them, considering that one will need those bags anyway, yet always forgets to buy any for a new game.

The maps in “Ran” predictably serve as the gaming board, and are of relatively good quality paper. Card board maps would, of course, be superior, but including seven cardboard maps the size of these babies would obviously raise the manufacturing and printing costs considerably.

One of the biggest problems that hex based games which work with a large variety of counters have is that the hexagons provided on the map are too small to actually comfortably hold all the counters. The problem is present also in “Ran”. For, even if a single hex in the game can only have one unit in it, it will ultimately also have to house a number of non-unit counters along with it, thus creating stacks (or in our case piles) of chits on the map. Furthermore, since the facing of the units is important, moving the counters around without accidentally changing the facings of surrounding units is difficult. Especially so, if you have fingers the size of Southern Europe, as I do.

One possible solution to this could be to keep the non-unit markers out of the actual map, referencing them on a separate sheet. Since the units, however, have no individual IDs, this is impossible without actually drawing something on the unit counters, which again is something that I am not going to do purely for aesthetic reasons.

The 24-page rule book starts by noting that the rule system in “Ran” is less complex than in the games that have preceded it in the series. It even goes as far as to suggest that a total newcomer to the genre of historically accurate war games will in 20-30 minutes be able to learn the rules to the point where “you’ll be just as good at this sort of thing as we are”.

Now, either this latter statement is a downright lie, I am a poor learner, or the guys over at GMT actually have no idea how their rule system works. For, at least in my case, it took almost two hours of flipping through the rule book until I reached the point where I was comfortable setting up the first scenario to test the game. In the end, it wasn’t until about four hours into active gaming that I started to feel like I mastered the basic rules in a way where I wasn’t making all that many mistakes.

Sadly, in fact, it is the rule book that is the weakest link in the “Ran” package. By this I do not mean the rules themselves, but the way that they are explained. The rule book lacks a real index, and the order in which the rules are presented seems fairly illogical to me. Add to this the high number of typos, grammatical errors and a few completely missing words here and there, and your initial enthusiasm towards the system is somewhat lessened as you try to make head or tale of it.

What I personally felt was most importantly missing from the rule book was a stronger historical background to many of the rules. Quick, short notes about why things work as they do would have helped at least me to remember the rules faster. Similarly, I often found myself wishing for more examples for rules that felt unclear for a long time. Perhaps GMT could even have considered adding to the package a book in which the reader is taken through a sample battle move by move, thus explaining the rules with real examples.

All this being said, once you actually get to the point where the system starts to make sense to you, you discover that the effort has easily been worth it.

Longevity

One big question that always hangs in the air in the case of board games that depict individual battles concerns longevity. After all, if what you get is a set number of historically accurate battles, how many times can you play through them without the act becoming repetitive? Similarly, since many of the battles included in “Ran” are quite lob-sided in that one side is heavily favored to win from the outset, how interesting can such games be for the players?

Since I have only had a couple of weeks with “Ran”, I am obviously not entirely qualified to answer this question. However, since one battle will take you an evening to play – especially if you count in the time that you will spend afterwards discussing the battle and showing your friend relevant scenes from “Kagemusha” and “Ran” – you have at least seven evenings worth of brand new material in “Ran”. Fourteen, if you play once on both sides.

I also doubt that the battles will get repetitive already after two plays. After all, both the “chaotic” (this in a good sense) turn system used in the game and the individual combat system should guarantee that weird and wonderful events will unfold in the midst of the battle when you least expect them to. I would, in fact, even be ready to suggest that the game has a lifespan somewhat longer than your average game that depicts historical battles.

“Ran” is also surprisingly well suited for solitaire use, if you (like me) enjoy simply watching a battle unfold before your eyes. It is therefore one of those games that you can safely purchase to get your war gaming fix even if you have no friends to play with.

Closing remarks

I admit that my experience with “Ran” has been quite brief, as I have not yet had the opportunity to try all of the battles included. What I have played, however, I have really liked, and can certainly recommend the game to war game aficionados, as well as those interested in the hobby.

As a Kurosawa item, “Ran” is more of a namesake of a distant cousin than anything else. Yet, as I mentioned before, while a direct connection between the director and the game is totally lacking, people liking one may very well find the other worth checking out. You never know, maybe you will discover something that will stay with you for the rest of your life.

Availability and more information

Ran is available directly from GMT Games, as well as from or through your local board game shop.

As always with board games, if you are interested to learn more, check out the relevant Board Game Geek page.

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Population growth in several of the fastest-growing states is slowing -- in Arizona, Florida and Nevada, in particular -- in a trend both reflecting and fueling the housing-market malaise in those areas.

"This is our first chance to see what has been the migration impact of the housing-market slowdown, and it's showing up in these highflying states," says William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.


• The Census Shows: Growth in several of the fastest-growing states has slowed.
• What It Reveals: Malaise in the housing market is changing the way Americans relocate.
• Bottom Line: The West and South continue to gain residents from the Midwest and Northeast.
• Home-Price Declines Accelerate1

The Census Bureau's annual estimate of state population changes covers the 12 months that ended July 1. It shows that people continue to flee the Midwest -- especially Michigan, one of two states to lose people -- and that the Mountain states in the West continue to post large population gains as people arrive from California and elsewhere.

Arizona, Florida and Nevada are still among the fastest-growing states in the country, by percentage. Nevada saw an increase of 2.9%, or 72,955 people, tallying births, deaths and migration from inside and outside the U.S.

That was less than the previous year's 3.5% increase and lower than the 3%-plus growth rate for the six previous years. Arizona, the second-fastest-growing state, saw its population increase 2.8% in the most recent period, compared with a 3.6% rise in the previous year.

Florida, which has suffered heavily in the housing bust, saw the sharpest falloff in population growth. Florida grew 1.07%, slightly faster than the U.S. growth rate of 0.96%. During the year, 35,301 people moved to Florida from another state, 134,798 fewer than in the previous year. That is the slowest rate of domestic migration into Florida since at least 1990, the year the Census Bureau began publishing annual estimates of migration between states.

Pain in the manufacturing sector, especially auto manufacturing, continued to purge residents from the Midwest. Michigan lost 30,500 residents, a 0.3% decline. Ohio was essentially flat, gaining 3,404. Besides Michigan, the only state to lose population was Rhode Island.

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Broadly, people in the Northeast and Midwest continue to leave for the West and South. Utah and Idaho were the third- and fourth-fastest-growing states, respectively. Colorado and Wyoming were eighth and ninth, respectively. Both states saw their rate of growth increase.

Residents of California, on the other hand, continue to leave: In the most recent period, 263,035 people left California for another state. The state's 0.8% population growth was mostly because of births.

In the South, states including Georgia and North Carolina have taken the fast-growing mantle away from Florida, while Texas continues to suck up new residents. Georgia and North Carolina grew 2.17% and 2.16%, respectively. Texas grew 2.12%. Those states also are among the biggest gainers in absolute terms. Texas gained 496,751 residents, more than any other state. Georgia had the third-largest increase, with 202,670, and North Carolina was fifth, with 191,590.

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Following the exodus of residents after Hurricane Katrina, Louisiana added about 50,000 people in the year to July 1. There is still a ways to go, though: From July 2005 to July 2006, the state lost about 220,000 residents.

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TEHRAN, Iran -- Russia is preparing to equip Iran with a powerful new air defense system that would dramatically increase its ability to repel an attack, Iran's defense minister said Wednesday.

The S-300 anti-aircraft missile defense system is capable of shooting down aircraft, cruise missiles and ballistic missile warheads at ranges of over 90 miles and at altitudes of about 90,000 feet. Russian military officials boast that its capabilities outstrip the U.S. Patriot missile system.

The S-300 is an improvement over the Tor-M1 air defense missile system. Russia delivered 29 Tor-M1s to Iran this year under a $700 million contract signed in December 2005.

"The S-300 air defense system will be delivered to Iran on the basis of a contract signed with Russia in the past," Iranian Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar said, according to state television.

Mr. Najjar didn't say when or how many of the S-300 anti-aircraft missile defense systems would be shipped to Iran, and Russian officials declined to comment.

The Tor-M1 is capable of hitting aerial targets flying at up to 20,000 feet.

"While Tor-M1 missiles can hit targets at low altitude, S-300 missile have an extraordinary performance against targets at high altitude," Mr. Najjar said.

Russian officials wouldn't comment on the Iranian statement. Russian officials have consistently denied they were selling the S-300 to Iran. Iranian media reports have claimed the S-300 missile systems could inflict significant damage to the U.S. or Israeli forces, were they to attack Iran.

The U.S. had said in the past that it would not rule out military action as a way to halt Iran's nuclear enrichment, claiming it was using it as cover for weapons development. But earlier this month, Washington reversed course, concluding in an intelligence assessment that Iran stopped direct work on creating nuclear arms in 2003 and that the program remained frozen through at least the middle of this year.

Israel says Iran remains a strong threat, but most analysts think any Israeli military operation is unlikely at this point.

Teams led by Mikhail Dmitriyev, head of the Russian Federal Service for Military and Technical Cooperation, and Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi, regarded as the father of Iran's missile program, held talks in Tehran this week on ways to step up defense cooperation.
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A military expert speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject said that the Russian team included experts who had installed the Tor-M1 in Iran.

Dmitriyev told the Russian Itar-Tass news agency Wednesday said air defense and radar systems were priorities in Russian-Iranian defense discussions.

Russia has provided Iran with Kilo-Class submarines, MIG and Sukhoi military planes and bombers in recent decades.

Iran-Russia ties increased after a visit here by Russian President Vladimir Putin in October.

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In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway recalled sitting at the Café Lilas with the poet Evan Shipman and discussing the Constance Garnett translation of War and Peace. "They say it can be improved on.... I'm sure it can although I don't know Russian," Shipman said. "But we both know translations. But it comes out as a hell of a novel, the greatest I suppose, and you can read it over and over." Shipman was right, and most people who have read the novel in English would have agreed with him: despite the flaws in the translation, which may be numerous, War and Peace comes out as one of the great novels in any language.

Reading certain books in translation brings to mind Dante's encounter with Adam, the first man and the originator of language, who, enveloped in light, appeared like an animal moving inside a sack: you get a sense that something is trying to break out, something amazing, but it is all so muffled and tangled that it is impossible to make out what. In the case of War and Peace, the cat has always been out of the bag: Tolstoy's immense story of Napoleon's invasion of Russia has never awaited the final, saving translation that would at last reveal its previously inaccessible and infinite-hearted humanity. It was one of the greatest books from the start.

The new English version by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky is wonderful, a milestone of translation--but it should be taken more like a newly restored 35mm print of a film, with brighter colors and sharper sound. The sights and sounds are meant to be spectacular in this version: the rustle of a white gauze dress during a waltz, the unnatural thud of a cannonball digging into the ground at Borodino, a troika race through the midnight snow at Christmas, the scar left on a soldier's face by a Turkish bayonet.

The novel is famously, almost impossibly, enormous. It feels like a cosmos unto itself, a complete ecosystem. The book is an entire library: within this volume is a dictionary of received Russian ideas of the nineteenth century, a study in psychosomatics (particularly as manifested in the human face), a pamphlet on historiography (with a supplemental treatise on the philosophy of history), an encyclopedia of Russian military regalia, and several albums of pictures, most notably showing the Russian landscape in all the seasons, and a series of portraits of the Russian aristocracy frontally and in profile.

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The action of War and Peace (action in this instance meaning almost the entirety of human life) centers on the fates of two families loosely based on Tolstoy's own ancestors--the impractical, soulful Rostovs, associated with Moscow, and the dignified, elegant Bolkonskys, associated with St. Petersburg (and both families with the countryside)--and depicts something like the transition from the generation of Tolstoy's grandparents to that of his parents, who are children at the start of the novel and adults in the midst of family life at its end. Borne on by the grand currents of the Napoleonic wars, the protagonists witness the Russian defeat at Austerlitz, the victory at Borodino, and the burning of Moscow; they catch glimpses of the adored Aleksandr I and of the reviled and admired Napoleon. At the same time they pursue ill-fated and later beautiful love affairs, lose money, dream of the future, act and react without thinking, and face death. They live in history but not by it, laughing off its minor catastrophes and trying to evade its major ones.

Unsatisfied by the distant accounts of historians and the imperfect reminiscences of individuals, Tolstoy chose to write the story of his origins himself, and War and Peace is in a sense a reconstruction of his family's world before his arrival in it. His grandfathers Ilya Andreivich Tolstoy and Nikolai Andrei-vich Volkonsky, whose portraits hung on the wall of his study, lent their features and qualities to Count Rostov (the lax charm, the generosity with money) and the elder Prince Bolkonsky (the severity, the discipline); and the figures of Nikolai Rostov and Princess Marya are based on the writer's own parents. The two remaining male protagonists, Prince Andrei and Pierre Bezukhov, appear to have been modeled on a single historical personage, but of a later generation: Leo Tolstoy himself.



According to his own account, Tolstoy "spent five years of ceaseless and exclusive labor, under the best conditions of life" writing War and Peace, from about 1863 to 1869, when the book was published in its entirety in six volumes. In September 1862, when he was thirty-four, Tolstoy had married the eighteen- year-old Sonya Behrs. She was the second of the three daughters of Lyubov Behrs, a childhood sweetheart of the writer, whom he had once pushed over a balcony in a jealous fit. By the time of their courtship, Tolstoy was already a literary celebrity, having published his autobiographical trilogy Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth, as well as his Sevastopol Sketches, based on his experiences during the campaign against the French in the Crimea, which appeared in the prestigious journal The Contemporary, founded by Pushkin. The young Sonya, who remembered meeting Tolstoy in his military uniform at the age of ten, knew entire passages from his books by heart and had copied out several lines from Childhood, which she hid as a charm under the waistband of her skirt.

Much of Natasha Rostov was perhaps modeled on Tanya Behrs, Sonya's youngest sister: her ability to dance in the Russian style, as Natasha does at Uncle's house in the forest; her singing voice; her dazzled reactions to a ball (Leo accompanied her to one). During one of her visits with the Tolstoys when Leo was writing War and Peace, Tanya suggested that her presence had become a nuisance, to which the writer reportedly replied: "Surely you don't suppose you are not paying for your keep? Why, you are posing for your portrait, my dear."

Before his marriage, Tolstoy had lived an alternately wild and secluded life, swinging between fits of physical desire and impassioned attempts at selfcontrol. Night after night he went out carousing with gypsies and--like Pierre early in War and Peace, in the company of the troublemakers Anatol Kuragin and Dolokhov--making trips to "***," the unnameable three-star establishment of nineteenth-century Russian prose. Following one of these visits, Tolstoy wrote in his diary: "Girls, silly music, girls, mechanical nightingale, girls, heat, cigarette smoke, girls, vodka, cheese, screams and shouts, girls, girls, girls!" After a series of evenings like this one, he would return to his estate and castigate himself, and plan countless projects for self-improvement--music composition, gymnastics, a school for peasant children, religious devotion, literature.

Tolstoy's decision to travel with his brother Nicholas to the Caucasus, his first experience of military life, was in part an attempt to avoid the temptations of the city, particularly the thrill of gambling. He was a compulsive gambler, frequently signing promissory notes for his losses and writing in desperation to his brothers for assistance. At one point, fearing he would not have the money to pay off his debts, he was forced to dismantle and sell the central building of his ancestral home, which was reassembled twelve miles away and later completely demolished for firewood. He experienced firsthand the panicked sensation felt by Nikolai Rostov, during the game with Dolokhov, at the sudden and inexplicable loss of money he did not have.

After they were married, Tolstoy and Sonya settled into family life on his estate at Yasnaya Polyana (the model for Otradnoe, the Rostov estate, in the novel), where Tolstoy had spent the first years of his life, and which he had inherited at the age of nineteen when the family property was divided between the five Tolstoy children, four brothers and a sister. Thanks to his marriage, Tolstoy experienced a dream of family life of a kind that he had never known as a child. He was only twenty-three months old when his mother died, and only nine at the death of his father, and by the time he began War and Peace he had lived through the death of his paternal grandmother, who cared for him after his parents, and of two of his brothers. Settled peacefully at home with Sonya, Tolstoy was able to work without interruptions for the first time in his life. This was in no small part owed to Sonya's abilities at managing the estate, running back and forth with a giant ring of keys, overseeing all the tasks, keeping distractions away from her husband.

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As early as 1856, Tolstoy had begun to contemplate a novel that would depict the return from Siberian exile of one of the Decembrists, a group of young idealistic noblemen, mostly army officers, who, having pursued Napoleon back to Paris after the campaign of 1812, returned to Russia to find its social inequality, and especially its institution of serfdom, unworthy in their eyes of the country's newly won military glory. The movement came to a head in 1825, on the eve of Czar Nicholas I's coronation, when its members revolted on the Palace Square in St. Petersburg. The revolt was suppressed, its leaders were hanged, and the remaining participants were sent into exile. Tolstoy originally planned a trilogy composed of three stand-alone but related novels: the first set in 1812, the year of the decisive Russian defeat of Napoleon; the second in 1825, the year of the Decembrist revolt; and the last in 1856, the year of the exile's return after the pardon announced by the new czar, Alexander II.

Vestiges of Tolstoy's original plan for the trilogy can be seen in War and Peace in Pierre's philosophical argument with Nikolai at the end of the novel, in which he employs what would have been recognized as Decembrist rhetoric. The reader's recognition of the political disaster awaiting Pierre, and most likely Prince Andrei's son Nikolenka, lends War and Peace a sense of dramatic irony somewhat like that of The Republic, in which the discussion is electrified by the reader's awareness that not long afterward Socrates will be imprisoned and executed.



After writing the first few chapters of the final volume, set in 1856, Tolstoy put the book aside and began to contemplate the earlier history of his character. He then jumped back in time, first to 1825, then to 1812, then to 1805--finding, like one of his hated historians, that the events were comprehensible only when they were related to what came before. But he could not go back indefinitely: in fixing upon this period, Tolstoy selected an age to which he was, through his parents and his grandparents, connected. Later, after completing War and Peace, he tried to write another historical novel, about the period of Peter the Great, but found himself unable to penetrate the heads of his protagonists, settling in the end on the theme of contemporary married life, out of which Anna Karenina took shape.

The decision to set the novel fifty years before the present also defied the literary fashion of the time, championed by Turgenev and Nekrasov, the editor of The Contemporary, which sought to fashion literature into a medium of social change addressing the injustices of its own day. By 1861, the serfs had been liberated by the decree of Alexander I, marking the end of an aristocratic lifestyle that had lasted for more than a century, and so Tolstoy's depiction in 1869 of the relationship between landowner and serf, particularly in the account of Nikolai Rostov at the end of the novel, was self-consciously anachronistic. For readers in our own time, the social world of War and Peace sometimes seems, especially in the terrible context of the revolutionary twentieth century, irreversibly remote, a distant pastoral dream of a life long ago lost; but it is worth remembering that even for Tolstoy the world portrayed in his novel was already gone, and almost mythical. In this sense, both the writing of this book and his life at Yasnaya Polyana were efforts to persist in a tradition that was showing clear and insistent signs of obsolescence.

Between 1863 and 1866, Tolstoy wrote and published the first few chapters in The Russian Herald, under the title "The Year 1805." Along the way the vast scope of the final version began to take shape, and Tolstoy's colossal ambition for the work is evident in an entry in his diary on September 30, 1865, written while composing the novel (Braddon is the English novelist Mrs. Braddon, and The Hunting Ground is an early work by Tolstoy):

A novelist's poetry is contained (1) in the interest of the combination of events--Braddon, my Cossacks, my future work; (2) in the picture of manners and customs based on a historic event--The Odyssey, The Iliad, 1805; (3) in the beauty and cheerfulness of the situations--Pickwick, The Hunting Ground, and (4) in the characters of the people--Hamlet, my future works....

After the publication of the first several sections, Tolstoy continued his work on the novel, drafting the final chapters and planning at first to serialize the entire book. In a letter to the poet Afanasy Fet, Tolstoy wrote that he hoped to complete the whole book by 1867 (he actually finished two years later) and that the final version would be titled All's Well That End's Well. On Sonya's advice, Tolstoy decided not to serialize the final chapters, and so these sections did not appear until the complete book was published in 1869. For three years, Tolstoy wrote the last chapters of the final version of the novel and substantially revised the earlier chapters, most notably altering the plot to include the deaths of two of the central characters and adding the numerous discourses on the philosophy of history.

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War and Peace: Original Version is a translation of what is purportedly Tolstoy's first complete draft, beginning with the sections published in the Russian Herald, before the three-year period of revisions. In the 1980s the Russian scholar Evelina Zaidenshnur reconstructed the later chapters of this "original" draft from Tolstoy's notoriously indecipherable drafts, and published the version in an academic journal, including the variations on single lines and an elaborate apparatus of explanatory notes. In 2000, Igor Zakharov, an ex-philologist turned publisher, pruned the scholarly version of its notes and its variations, and "massaged" the text with elements of several different existing versions of the book, and published it as Tolstoy's original manuscript, purportedly unknown for decades: "half as long and twice as interesting," and without any of the intrusive philosophical meditations or incomprehensible French. The book was harshly criticized in the Russian press for its misleading presentation and its editorial methods. Upon hearing that his version would be translated into English, Zakharov reportedly declared that he "felt like Napoleon."

Although the "original version" is a far cry from the final version of the novel, Andrew Bromfield's translation is extremely good and has many beautiful moments, particularly in the descriptions of landscape. But the circumstances and the presentation of the book in its American incarnation are dubious. For a start, there are the three quotations on the back jacket from Woolf, Flaubert, and Mann, praising Tolstoy. But not one of them ever read the so-called original version, because Tolstoy never published it. Turgenev, on the other hand, who did read the first sections in the Russian Herald, called the book "positively bad, boring, and unsuccessful"; it was only later, after the publication of the complete novel, that he judged Tolstoy to be the greatest writer in Russia. The introduction to the "original version," by Bromfield and Jenefer Coates (who edited the volume), provides no clear account of how the book came into being, hinting only vaguely at the backstory of the Russian edition, and presenting itself more like a newly discovered director's cut than a scholarly supplement to a different and more significant text.

A family drama of love and renunciation interspersed with several impressive military set pieces, Tolstoy's first draft ends after the battle of Borodino, rather like a problem play, with a double wedding at the Rostovs' estate attended by, among others, Prince Andrei and Petya Rostov. At the end of the final version, however, neither character has survived the battle. The writer's decision to depict their deaths was, along with the addition of numerous digressions on the philosophy of history, the central development of Tolstoy's three-year period of revisions, and enabled the transition to the sprawling meditation on happiness and causality in the final version of the novel.

Episodes and characters from the final version flash by in a few lines in the early draft, appearing suddenly and then dissolving into the crowd. In the old soldier who, marched to his execution outside of Moscow, remarks that "it's all the same in the end," we glimpse the beginnings of Platon Karataev, the peasant soldier who re-ignites Pierre's soul during his imprisonment by the French. Many of the elaborations seem to grow out of the increasing complexity of Tolstoy's philosophical positions. The transformation of Kutuzov into the massive, cautious, bear-like representative of the Russian military soul; the disquisition on the fluidity of partisan warfare; the pragmatic Platon Karataev--each echoes Tolstoy's growing sense of the inability to know anything fully, the impossibility of making reliable predictions or identifying true causes.


In an early scene depicting a strangely calm moment between the two overwhelming situations of war and peace, Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, having reported to Prince Bagration just before the battle of Schongraben, passes a camp in which a sergeant is pouring vodka into the soldiers' canteen caps:

The soldiers, with pious faces, brought the caps to their mouths, upended them, and, rinsing their mouths and wiping them on their greatcoat sleeves, walked away from the sergeant major with cheered faces. All the faces were as calm as though everything was happening not in view of the enemy, prior to an action in which at least half the division would be left on the field, but somewhere in their home country, in expectation of a peaceful stay.

Less than half a page later, Prince Andrei witnesses a man being whipped "crying out unnaturally" and sees

a young officer, with an expression of perplexity and suffering on his face, walk[ing] away from the punished man, looking questioningly at the passing adjutant.

Finally, he rides along the frontline:

Our line and the enemy's stood far from each other on the left and right flanks, but in the center, where the envoys had passed that morning, the lines came so close that the men could see each other's faces and talk to each other.

Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation is the only one in which the word "face" is used to denote all the visages in this sequence, all five times, exactly as in the Russian text. Their version is especially admirable for its attention to such a feature of Tolstoy's style. The example may seem prosaic, but in fact it demonstrates a regular method of Tolstoy's novelistic composition. Such repetition heightens the effects of Tolstoy's battle scenes: conditions of hunger or unease over uncertain terrain, tides of morale and enthusiasm, and experiences of danger are all depicted by means of expressions on the faces of individuals. Soldiers are frequently sketched in this way--registered almost like an assemblage of colored diodes, which light up in different hues depending on their state: terror, triumph, piety, confusion, fervor.

In a typical reversal of the senses, Tolstoy describes Rostov's attempt to cross the field during the battle of Austerlitz: "Having drawn even with the infantry guards, he noticed that cannonballs were flying over and around them, not so much because he heard the sound of the cannon, but because he saw the uneasiness on the soldiers' faces, and on the officers' an unnatural military solemnity." This sort of observation, obliquely empirical and not reported directly by the senses, jars the reader into a fresh recollection of the humanity of the soldiers. For Tolstoy, humanity is contagious, and it is most readily transmitted through the face. At the end of the scene with Prince Andrei, laughter erupts when one of the Russians, considered an expert in French, speaks a few garbled phrases. With the soldiers close enough to see one another's faces, ironically at the very point of greatest tension, the battle seems ridiculous: "Peals of such healthy and merry guffawing came from among the soldiers that it crossed the line and involuntarily infected the French, after which it seemed they ought quickly to unload their guns, blow up their munitions, and all quickly go back home."

In their introduction to War and Peace: Original Version, Bromfield and Coates announce their decision to vary Tolstoy's repetitions "in the name of stylistic euphony," explaining that while the "hammering" effect works in Russian, English "abhors repetition of this kind." This seems to have been the view of many translators of the novel, and Pevear is right to note his predecessors' tendency in his own introduction. But such "euphony" is in fact a misrepresentation of Tolstoy's style. Tolstoy's device of repeating one word many times in a single passage, or repeatedly employing an entire phrase word for word, is striking and jarring in the original Russian. The effect is deliberate: it is not that Tolstoy could not think of another word, but that he wanted us to be unable to think of another one.

Tolstoy's contemporaries criticized him for the repetitions, and implored him to clean up and harmonize his sentences. The writer Konstantin Leontiev suggested that Tolstoy "throw out of [War and Peace]" all the repetitions: "strange, strange, hands, hands, hastily, hastily, sob, sob, rich lip, rich lip." The repetitions in the novel's philosophical sections, as the Russian formalist Boris Eikhenbaum pointed out, play a role similar to the repetitive digressions that mark new chapters of the Iliad, reinforcing the novel's epic quality. Tolstoy's repetitions have the ironic effect of linking him to both the highest and the lowest forms of literary language--to the Homeric and the homely. The repetitions additionally imbue the novel with a sense of what it may have been like to listen to Tolstoy speak, as in Gorky's observation that "one must have heard him speak in order to understand the extraordinary, indefinable beauty of his speech; it was, in a sense, incorrect, abounding in repetitions of the same word, saturated with village simplicity."

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Repetition is also a means of defamiliarization, the technique by which objects and situations are "made strange" and depicted with an unusual clarity, quite contrary to the way we habitually see (and thus do not genuinely see) them. "The very fact of repeating an item, repeating a word takes it out of line already and renders it strange," observed Viktor Shklovsky, the great Russian formalist critic who pioneered the concept of "estrangement" as an essential technique of literature, and who acknowledged Tolstoy as one of the masters of the device. War and Peace contains scene after scene in which the descriptions seem first counterintuitive and then revelatory: Natasha's trip to the opera, where the stage is shown as "painted pieces of cardboard on the sides representing trees, and canvas stretched over the boards at the back"; Pierre, dazed and intrigued, wandering through the crucial battle of Borodino in a white hat and green tailcoat, looking for the battle; Nikolai's fixation on Dolokhov's "broad-boned, reddish hands, with hair showing from under the cuffs," which appear to grow so large and monstrous that they completely dominate his impressions. Senses are shifted or apparently misattributed. War is rendered with images of peace, peace with images of war. Laughter erupts in moments of solemnity. Bullets whiz by "merrily." Prince Andrei waits outside the room where his son is being born and, hearing the baby crying, thinks to himself, "Why did they bring a baby there?" Again and again the world is seen, very suddenly, with the startling and unclouded truthfulness of Tolstoy's alien but earthly eye.



Much of War and Peace is devoted to clearing away received ideas--the legacy of Napoleon, the excuse of war for moral atrocities, the elevating quality of Western ideals; and Tolstoy's style is designed to reduce a complex of sentiments rife with preconceptions to a powerful, moving, and finally rather raw feeling. This broaches another virtue of the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation: the decision to keep all the French in Tolstoy's text. In Russian upper-class circles, especially in the early nineteenth century, French was entrenched as the language of culture and sophistication, following Catherine the Great's program of Westernization. Pushkin wrote his first poems in French, and an aristocrat would have been expected to be able to converse freely in the language. (Tolstoy's children were instructed to speak French at the dinner table.)

In War and Peace, French--the language in which, as Tolstoy observes, "our grandparents not only spoke but thought"--seems alternately like the Trojan Horse and the perfect symbol of liberalization and progress, a repository of both culture and illusion. The emblematic depiction of the unnatural influence of French comes when Pierre Bezukhov, feeling himself "occupying someone else's place," declares his bewildered, engineered love for the duplicitous Helene Kuragin of St. Petersburg. With the words "Je vous aime," he binds himself to a vast network of social falsehoods, and then spends most of the novel trying to extricate himself from them. The use of French also makes a significant socio-linguistic point, by marking the gap between the classes: as Napoleon's army advances on Moscow, the noble elite in Petersburg start to take private Russian lessons and charge each other forfeits for every French word spoken, and it becomes dangerous for the upper classes to greet each other in the street in Moscow, as they might be mistaken by the crowd for French spies. The supreme embodiment of French and all that it suggests is, of course, Napoleon himself, who is characterized by "the absence of the best and highest human qualities-- love, poetry, tenderness, a searching philosophical doubt." Self-serving, scornful of tradition, amoral, blinkered by ambition, Napoleon represents in Tolstoy's novel a moral and spiritual challenge to the novel's heroes--and, in a typical, ahistorical Tolstoyan put-down, the invading emperor speaks a bizarre mix of French and Russian.



Tolstoy's temperament evidently bristled at the existence of great men other than himself. He gradually quarreled with much of the Russian artistic world, nearly fought a duel with Turgenev over a minor disagreement, and flabbergasted Tchaikovsky by dismissing Beethoven as a minor artist. Years after War and Peace, Tolstoy wrote an article attempting even to annihilate the literary reputation of Shakespeare. When he was advanced in years, Tolstoy was held by many Russians to be one of Russia's "two czars," the first being the crowned sovereign Alexander II. And he was too large even for the infinite: as Gorky wrote in his memoir of Tolstoy, "With God he has very suspicious relations; they sometimes remind me of the relation of 'two bears in one den.'"

War and Peace is in part a demolition of the very idea of the "great man." History is so overwhelming, according to Tolstoy, because momentous events are the result of many factors--of so many factors that no single animating force behind them can ever be identified. The leviathan of history has causes for scales, and no one can count them all. The individual is inevitably swept up by a tide of causes beyond his or her abilities to comprehend, let alone to influence. And no single human being could possibly be the cause of something as vast as the Napoleonic campaigns, including Napoleon himself. In one sense, the deepest drama of War and Peace lies in the meeting between the self-contained universe of a single individual and the senseless and immense tide of historical events. This meeting, meaningless for history, leaves the individual shivering. As Mary McCarthy observed, "It could be said that the real plot of War and Peace is the struggle of the characters not to be immersed, engulfed, swallowed up by the landscape of fact and 'history' in which they, like all human beings, have been placed: freedom (the subjective) is in the fiction, and necessity is in the fact."

The purest evocation of an individual come face to face with history is in the battle of Schongraben, when Nikolai Rostov sees the French army advancing and thinks: "Who are they? Why are they running? Can it be they're running to me? Can it be? And why? To kill me? Me, whom everybody loves so?" Tolstoy's development of the problem of historical causation, in the later philosophical interludes produced during the three-year period of revision, could even be seen as an attempt at the novel's end to find answers for the questions that Nikolai asked at its beginning. But he did not find these answers; and there is a chilling and momentous echo of Rostov's baffled voice, many decades later, in Solzhenitsyn, who at the start of The Gulag Archipelago describes a man's incomprehension about his arrest by the secret police: "The darkened mind is incapable of embracing these displacements in our universe, and both the most sophisticated and the veriest simpleton among us, drawing on all life's experience can gasp out only: 'Me? What for?'"

Yet the insignificance of the human, cosmically considered, is not all of the novel's wisdom. Alongside the book's illustrations of the blinkered perspectives of its people, War and Peace revels in the depiction of individual experience, internally coherent and inexhaustible, in the face of that same tide of history. The interior worlds of love and its dreams, of hunger, disappointment, spiritual unity, and the fear of death: Tolstoy reveals all of this, and the immediate impressions of his characters, however self-contained, often expand in significance to fill completely their perceptions. If there is a skeptical and abstract strain to Tolstoy's picture of human life in the novel, there is also a personal and ecstatic one. Each character stands at the center of his or her own universe, and much of the lifelike quality of Tolstoy's narrative stems from its sensitivity to the force of local sensations and desires. Amid the terrifying chaos of battle, a military doctor comes out of a tent carrying in his bloody hand a cigar "between the thumb and the little finger (so as not to stain it)."

And more, every personal universe appears limitless. In the famous scene on the battlefield of Austerlitz, the wounded Prince Andrei experiences his sweeping, almost mystical vision of the "infinite sky" all around him, and then sees Napoleon, the quintessential great man, and finds him inconsequential: "He knew that it was Napoleon--his hero--but at that moment, Napoleon seemed to him such a small, insignificant man compared with what was now happening between his soul and this lofty, infinite sky with clouds racing across it." Napoleon cannot conceive of a world of which he is not the center, but neither can anyone else: Pierre, Nikolai, Natasha, and Princess Marya each experience moments of transcendence, visions of the world in its totality, encompassed by the individual soul and encompassing it. These moments are rarely shared between the characters themselves, and Tolstoy shows us not only how his characters glimpse the infinite, but also the relativity of their universal glimpses: where one sees infinity, another sees just the sky.
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Dostoyevsky, Gorky, and many others have referred to Tolstoy as a godlike author. If his message is in fact divine, Tolstoy's War and Peace might be compared with God's final words to his prophet Jonah, who desired to see the city of Nineveh destroyed for sinfulness, but fell into a rage at the destruction of a gourd that gave him shade: "Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not labored, neither madest it grow; which came up in the night, and perished in a night: and should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle." War and Peace can be read as a similar meditation on scale. If one man can ascend to the heavens of experience, and love, and err, and repent, and glimpse for a second the meaning of his own life, imagine the spiritual attainments of entire families, cities, and nations! Again the philosophical problems of complexity and causation seem to arise out of the local character of the narrative--out of its local infinities--as though Tolstoy in his philosophical chapters was coming at the same questions raised by the story in a different way. Of what is life composed, and toward what should it be directed when set against the world's immensity? Out of these perplexities arises not only Tolstoy's philosophy, but also his fiction.

In his introduction, Pevear paraphrases Isaac Babel as saying that "if the world could write, it would write like Tolstoy." In fact, Babel actually said that "When you read Tolstoy, it is the world writing, the variety of the world. " The life that Tolstoy portrays is forever a teeming multiplicity, and his secret is to imply even more life than that. Since the spiritual heights experienced by the main characters are so vivid, and since these characters are decidedly not great historical actors, the reader ends up believing that after the hussar mentioned in only a single sentence has ridden out of view, behind the tree line, he may go on to get rich, or to fall in love, or to see God--but no matter what, his life will continue. The passing, anonymous hussar's life beyond his appearance in this book could even be the subject of another book. It is one of the feats of Tolstoy's art that it makes mortal lives seem so autonomous and so unfathomed. And as in the Book of Jonah, the same is true for plants and animals: when, during the hunting scene, a wolf emerges from the woods and Tolstoy describes how he shudders "at the sight of human eyes, which he had probably never seen before," the entire existence of the animal flashes into view for a second. At times human life recedes into its cherished minor place in the background, and Tolstoy lets us glimpse all of nature, its animated whole.

The artistic recreation of life was among the means by which Tolstoy sought to identify the meaning of his own existence, creating in War and Peace a kind of laboratory for examining its elements and the forces acting on it. Like Pierre Bezukhov, the writer was always being consumed by a new passion, to which he intended to devote himself fully: he would become a diplomat with a degree in Oriental languages; he would marry a Cossack girl and live in an aoul like Olenin in The Cossacks; he would race horses with the Bashkirs in Samara; he would write works rivaling Homer and Shakespeare; he would be the patriarch of a great family; he would become a holy sage and teach the world the meaning of the Gospels; he would become a pilgrim and walk the earth in search of the Truth. In each of these soul-scenarios, Tolstoy saw a vision of another life, a life in which his own could be consummated and made sensible.

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After completing Anna Karenina, Tolstoy experienced a religious crisis. Disillusioned with art and literature, he devoted himself to his study of the Gospels, out of which grew his once-notorious teachings of nonviolence and a churchless Christianity. At one point he intended to become a cobbler, taking private lessons from one of his tradesmen and making thick boots for his friends. (On receiving his pair, Tolstoy's friend Sukhotin put them on his bookshelf after the twelfth volume of Tolstoy's collected works, with a label that read "Volume XIII.") The vexation of his later work lies in part in Tolstoy's decision to trade complexity for simplicity and universal usefulness--in the feeling that he is attempting not to address the truth as he sees it, that he is somehow deliberately misplacing his powers. It is as though, regarding the question of what he actually believed, Tolstoy, in Isaiah Berlin's phrase, "did his best to falsify the answer," and to convince the world of the strength of his faith just as it wavered more and more wildly. It worked: the popular image of Tolstoy is the one that appears in the famous photograph in which he stands next to Gorky at Yasnaya Polyana. Dressed in a heavy, rough peasant shirt tied with a thick leather belt, he stares at the camera, weary and wise, even holy, his streaming biblical beard so white that he seems to be dissolving into the snow-covered Russian landscape.

When Tolstoy was in the Caucasus as a young man, he heard the story of Hadji Murat, a famously brave and violent Avar warrior from Dagestan who decamped to the Russians in opposition to the Muslim cleric Shamil, and then betrayed the Russians, and died fighting against troops of both sides. Very late in life, having disavowed his previously literary works and become himself a destination for spiritual pilgrims, Tolstoy wrote his own account of Hadji Murat's story. At first glance, the story seems to take its cue from Homer, and Hadji Murat comes off as a latter-day Greek hero dying honorably on the field of battle. But there is more to it. The story is also a reflection on switching paths in search of the right one. In a strange way Hadji Murat is a kindred spirit of Pierre Bezukhov, both of them drawn now to one solution, now to another, examining by means of experience all the possibilities, especially the antithetical ones, zigzagging in the hope of discovering the correct choice.

When, in Tolstoy's story, a Russian general speaking at a military banquet about Hadji Murat says, in English, "All's well that ends well," the phrase has taken on a tragic irony absent from its early use as the working title for War and Peace. Hadji Murat dies a warrior's death, but he also fails in his attempt to rescue his family, pinned by the two opposing sides that he has equally betrayed. The story could be taken as an illustration of the impossibility of things "ending well," or even ending at all in the sense of reaching completion. For Tolstoy, what meaning there is lies in the attempt, not in the arrival. The lives of Pierre Bezukhov and Hadji Murat are exemplary for the ceaselessness of their flawed conversions and impassioned recalculations, all of them undertaken at the edge of what may be an abyss.

In 1910 Tolstoy fled Yasnaya Polyana in spiritual despair, and died of pneumonia in transit, at the train station of a provincial town. In his last few days, he began dictating a letter to his English biographer and translator Aylmer Maude, but finished only the first half-sentence: "On my way to the place where I wished to be alone I was" The tragic irony that sounds over Pierre and Hadji Murat finally sounded over Tolstoy himself. Following the promptings of his soul toward an answer for the question that filled his world, he left thousands of pages in which we may recognize our own world, various, blossoming, and inconclusive.

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March 16, 2007 -- For adults who suddenly collapse, CPR is more effective if rescuers focus on chest compression over mouth-to-mouth ventilation.

CPR stands for cardiopulmonary resuscitation. It's used on people whose hearts suddenly stop beating. Using this emergency technique, you can keep a person alive until professional help arrives.

Currently, CPR includes two techniques. The first is mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, the so-called breath of life. The other is chest compression: pushing down hard on a victim's chest, more than once a second, pressing it down at least an inch and a half before releasing.

A major reason why bystanders don't give CPR to people who suddenly collapse is reluctance to put their mouths on the mouth of a stricken person. That reason no longer exists.

Now, for adults who suddenly collapse, there's powerful evidence that chest compression alone is far better than doing nothing. In fact, the new evidence suggests that by interrupting lifesaving chest compressions, mouth-to-mouth resuscitation may do more harm than good.
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The striking evidence comes from Ken Nagao, MD, of Surugadai Nihon University Hospital in Tokyo, and colleagues. The researchers took a careful look at what happened to 4,068 adults who had an out-of-hospital cardiac arrest witnessed by bystanders.

More than 70% of the time, the bystanders did nothing when a person suddenly collapsed. Those victims were less likely to survive, and more likely to have brain damage if they did survive, than when bystanders tried to do something.

Bystanders bravely gave traditional CPR to 18% of victims. And those patients did much better than those who got no bystander aid.

But victims were 2.2 times less likely to suffer brain damage if they were among the 11% of patients who got chest compressions only -- without mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.
Death of Mouth-to-Mouth Resuscitation?

"This study just confirms what has pretty much become common knowledge," CPR researcher Alfred Hallstrom, PhD, of the University of Washington in Seattle, tells WebMD. "We did a randomized trial of compressions vs. CPR, and the results indicated that the compression-only technique was better. Subsequently, labs have done animal studies suggesting the same thing."

"This does not surprise me one bit," CPR researcher Joseph W. Heidenreich, MD, of Texas A&M Health Science Center, tells WebMD. "This is what all of us who have done CPR research have suspected for years. This is amazing data. Primarily, what people who suffer cardiac arrest need are chest compressions."

But not everyone is willing to give up on teaching people to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. One of them is Lance Becker, MD, director of the center for resuscitation science at the University of Pennsylvania and past chair of the basic life support subcommittee of the American Heart Association (AHA).

"The real message from this study is that doing something is better for saving people's lives than doing nothing," Becker tells WebMD. "Good compressions are associated with good things. It does not mean that ventilation is not an excellent thing as well."

Becker says the AHA has always said that if people feel uncomfortable doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, they should simply focus on chest compression. And he says the new study validates this approach.

Charles Sea, MD, an emergency-room physician at Ochsner Medical Center in New Orleans, teaches CPR to doctors. He says that new CPR techniques emphasize chest compressions over mouth-to-mouth ventilation.

"We are implementing new standards for faster, stronger chest compressions -- 100 a minute, and only about six to eight breaths a minute," Sea tells WebMD. "Compared to the old CPR, just doing compressions would get better results. But I bet if they did the new CPR with the fast compression and minimal ventilation, they would get even higher survival rates than with compression alone."

But mouth-to-mouth resuscitation steals precious time from chest compression, argues Gordon A. Ewy, MD. Ewy is director of the Sarver Heart Center and professor and chief of cardiology at the University of Arizona College of Medicine in Tucson.
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"If you witness an adult collapse, it is most likely to be a cardiac arrest," Ewy says. "In cardiac arrest, the blood is fully oxygenated. What you need to do is press hard and fast on the chest to circulate the blood. This circulation you get from pushing on the chest is barely enough to keep the brain alive. If you stop for anything, like so-called 'rescue breathing,' which is an oxymoron, it is not good."
Reasons Remain for Mouth-to-Mouth

The main reason why the AHA teaches mouth-to-mouth resuscitation is that some people go into cardiac arrest because they have not been getting sufficient air. Such patients include drowning victims, for example, and victims of drug overdose. These patients do not have enough oxygen in their blood, and truly need mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

But the vast majority of people who collapse have been breathing normally before their hearts stopped. That means that they have enough oxygen in their blood to survive until medical help arrives -- if someone gives them continuous chest compressions, Heidenreich says.

Heidenreich notes that chest compression is not risk-free.

"With the type of force it takes to move the blood through the veins, if you do good CPR you probably are going to break someone's ribs," he says. "In this past week, I've done CPR several times in elderly patients in the ER, and probably every time I have cracked a rib. But if you talk to most people -- and I have surveyed many -- most are much more concerned about contracting a disease from giving mouth-to-mouth than about breaking a rib to save a life."

Regardless of what kind of CPR you give, the most important thing is to call for help right away. CPR is intended only to keep a patient alive until emergency help gets there.

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And the compression-only technique applies only to adult patients. Children are far more likely to have stopped breathing than to have suffered a sudden cardiac arrest. This means they far more often need mouth-to-mouth resuscitation than adults do.

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Hugh Capet (c. 940 – 24 October 996) was the first King of France of the eponymous Capetian dynasty from his election to succeed the Carolingian Louis V in 987 until his death.

The son of Hugh the Great, Duke of France, and Hedwige of Saxony, daughter of the German king Henry the Fowler, Hugh was born about 940. His paternal family, the Robertians, were powerful landowners in the Île-de-France. His grandfather had been King Robert I and his grandmother Beatrice was a Carolingian, a daughter of Herbert I of Vermandois. King Odo was his great uncle and King Rudolph Odo's son-in-law. Hugh was born into a well-connected and powerful family with many ties to the reigning nobility of Europe. But for all this, Hugh's father was never king. When Rudolph died in 936, Hugh the Great organized the return of Louis d'Outremer, son of Charles the Simple, from his exile at the court of Athelstan of England. Hugh's motives are unknown, but it is presumed that he acted to forestall Rudolph's brother and successor as Duke of Burgundy, Hugh the Black from taking the French throne, or to prevent it from falling into the grasping hands of Herbert II of Vermandois or William Longsword, Count of Rouen.

In 956, Hugh inherited his father's estates and became one of the most powerful nobles in the much-reduced West Frankish kingdom. However, as he was not yet an adult, his uncle Bruno, Archbishop of Cologne, acted as regent. Young Hugh's neighbours made the most of the opportunity. Theobald I of Blois, a former vassal of Hugh the Great, took the counties of Chartres and Châteaudun. Further south, on the border of the kingdom, Fulk II of Anjou, another former client of Hugh the Great, carved out a principality at Hugh's expense and that of the Bretons.
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The kingdom in which Hugh grew up, and of which he would one day be king, bore no resemblance to modern France. Hugh's predecessors did not call themselves rois de France ("Kings of France"), and that title was not used until the time of his distant descendant Philip the Fair (died 1314). Kings ruled as rex Francorum ("King of the Franks") and the lands over which they ruled comprised only a very small part of the former Carolingian Empire. The eastern Frankish lands, the Holy Roman Empire, were ruled by the Ottonian dynasty, represented by Hugh's first cousin Otto II and then by Otto's son, Otto III. The lands south of the river Loire had largely ceased to be part of the West Frankish kingdom in the years after Charles the Simple was deposed in 922. The Duchy of Normandy and the Duchy of Burgundy were largely independent, and Brittany entirely so, although from 956 Burgundy was ruled by Hugh's brothers Odo and Henry.

Election and extent of power

From 978 to 986, Hugh Capet allied himself with the German emperors Otto II and Otto III and with Archbishop Adalberon of Reims to dominate the Carolingian king, Lothair. By 986, he was king in all but name. After Lothair and his son died in early 987, the archbishop of Reims and Gerbert of Aurillac convened an assembly of nobles to elect Hugh Capet as their king. In front of an electoral assembly at Senlis, Adalberon gave a stirring oration and pleaded to the nobles:

Crown the Duke. He is most illustrious by his exploits, his nobility, his forces. The throne is not acquired by hereditary right; no one should be raised to it unless distinguished not only for nobility of birth, but for the goodness of his soul.
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He was elected and crowned rex Francorum at Noyon in Picardy on 3 July 987, by the prelate of Reims, the first of the house that would later bear his name to rule France. Immediately after his coronation, Hugh began to push for the coronation of his son Robert. Hugh's own claimed reason was that he was planning an expedition against the Moorish armies harassing Borrel II of Barcelona, an invasion which never occurred, and that the stability of the country necessitated two kings should he die while on expedition. Ralph Glaber, however, attributes Hugh's request to his old age and inability to contol the nobility.Modern scholarship has largely imputed to Hugh the motive of establishing a dynasty against the pretension of electoral power on the part of the aristocracy, but this is not the typical view of contemporaries and even some modern scholars have been less sceptical of Hugh's "plan" to campaign in Spain. Robert was eventually crowned on 30 December that same year. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.us/

Hugh Capet possessed minor properties near Chartres and Angers. Between Paris and Orléans he possessed towns and estates amounting to approximately 400 square miles (1,000 km²). His authority ended there, and if he dared travel outside his small area, he risked being captured and held for ransom, though, as God's anointed, his life was largely safe. Indeed, there was a plot in 993, masterminded by the Bishop of Laon and Odo I of Blois, to deliver Hugh Capet into the custody of Otto III. The plot failed, but the fact that no one was punished illustrates how tenuous his hold on power was. Beyond his power base, in the rest of France, there were still as many codes of law as there were fiefdoms. The "country" operated with 150 different forms of currency and at least a dozen languages.[citation needed] Uniting all this into one cohesive unit was a formidable task and a constant struggle between those who wore the crown of France and its feudal lords. As such, Hugh Capet's reign was marked by numerous power struggles with the vassals on the borders of the Seine and the Loire.
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While Hugh Capet's military power was limited and he had to seek military aid from Richard I of Normandy, his unanimous election as king gave him great moral authority and influence. Adémar de Chabannes records, probably apocryphally, that during an argument with the Count of Auvergne, Hugh demanded of him: "Who made you count?" The count riposted: "Who made you king?"

Dispute with the papacy

Hugh made Arnulf Archbishop of Reims in 988, even though Arnulf was the nephew of the his bitter rival, Charles of Lorraine. Charles thereupon succeeded in capturing Reims and took the archbishop prisoner. Hugh, however, considered Arnulf a turncoat and demanded his deposition by Pope John XV. The turn of events outran the messages, when Hugh captured both Charles and Arnulf and convoked a synod at Reims in June 991, which obediently deposed Arnulf and chose as his successor Gerbert of Aurillac. These proceedings were repudiated by Rome, although a second synod had ratified the decrees issued at Reims. John XV summoned the French bishops to hold an independent synod outside the King's realm, at Aachen, to reconsider the case. When they refused, he called them to Rome, but they protested that the unsettled conditions en route and in Rome made that impossible. The Pope then sent a legate with instructions to call a council of French and German bishops at Mousson, where only the German bishops appeared, the French being stopped on the way by Hugh and Robert.

Through the exertions of the legate, the deposition of Arnulf was finally pronounced illegal. After Hugh's death, Arnulf was released from his imprisonment and soon restored to all his dignities.
Hugh Capet died on 24 October 996 in Paris and was interred in the Saint Denis Basilica. His son Robert continued to reign.
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Most historians regard the beginnings of modern France with the coronation of Hugh Capet. This is because, as Count of Paris, he made the city his power center. The monarch began a long process of exerting control of the rest of the country from there.

He is regarded as the founder of the Capetian dynasty. The direct Capetians, or the House of Capet, ruled France from 987 to 1328; thereafter, the Kingdom was ruled by collateral branches of the dynasty. All French Kings down to Louis Philippe, and royal pretenders since then, have been members of the dynasty (the Bonapartes styled themselves emperors rather than kings). As of 2007, the Capetian dynasty is still the head of state in the kingdom of Spain (in the person of the Bourbon Juan Carlos) and the duchy of Luxembourg, being the oldest continuously reigning dynasty in Europe. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/Blog/blog.aspx

Ancestors
Hugh Capet's ancestors in three generations

Father: Hugh the Great
Paternal Grandfather: Robert I of France
Paternal Great-grandfather: Robert the Strong
Paternal Great-grandmother: Adelaide
Paternal Grandmother: Béatrice of Vermandois
Paternal Great-grandfather: Herbert I, Count of Vermandois
Paternal Great-grandmother: Bertha de Morvois
Mother: Hedwige of Saxony
Maternal Grandfather: Henry I of Germany
Maternal Great-grandfather: Otto I, Duke of Saxony
Maternal Great-grandmother: Hedwiga of Franconia
Maternal Grandmother: Matilda of Ringelheim
Maternal Great-grandfather: Dietrich of Westfalia
Maternal Great-grandmother: Reinhild

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The matter that makes up everything we can see or touch, either on Earth or beyond, is exceedingly rare, cosmically speaking. Most of the material in the universe is something called dark matter, mysterious stuff that doesn’t emit or reflect light and doesn’t interact with what we think of as ordinary matter. It reveals its presence only by its gravitational effects, guiding the evolution of the early universe and still affecting the motion of galaxies. Earth-based experiments have attempted to detect dark matter particles, but so far they have drawn a blank.

Astronomers, however, have had a better year, continuing to find evidence of the crucial role dark matter plays in shaping the visible cosmos. Thanks to about a thousand hours of observation by the Hubble Space Telescope, scientists have compiled a dark matter map of a tiny slice of the sky, about two square degrees of the entire sky’s 40,000-square-degree span. The map, which was published in the journal Nature last January, confirmed a central prediction of modern astrophysics: Galaxies formed in, and remain bound to, enormous clouds of dark matter.

In the early universe, astronomers believe, dark matter provided the gravitational scaffolding on which ordinary matter coalesced and grew into galaxies. According to these dark matter theories, as the visible galaxies formed, some of the matter surrounding them should have clumped together into hundreds of small satellite galaxies, most of which should survive today. But the observed number of satellite galaxies is only a fraction of what the theory predicts. “We should see about a hundred to a thousand, but up to 2005, there were only 12,” says Marla Geha, an astrophysicist at Yale University. Astronomers call it the missing satellite problem.

Astronomers had speculated that the existence of small, dark matter–dominated satellite galaxies might solve the problem, but there was no evidence that any such galaxies existed.

Last spring, Geha and Josh Simon, a colleague at Caltech, used the 10-meter Keck II telescope on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea to study the mass of eight newly discovered satellite galaxies, detected over the last two years by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, an ongoing effort to make a detailed map of a million galaxies and quasars. Geha and Simon found that these satellite galaxies were much fainter and smaller in mass than the other known satellites—and 99 percent of their mass was in the form of dark matter. Given that the galaxies found by Geha and Simon have such high concentrations of dark matter, it’s likely that many other satellite galaxies could be 100 percent dark matter.

“We expect some to be undetectable, with no stars or gas,” says Geha. “There are indirect ways of finding the dark matter satellites, but it will take more work.”

Some astrophysicists believe that dark matter particles may occasionally annihilate each other, producing bursts of high-energy gamma rays. If the Milky Way has dark matter satellites, and if they do emit gamma rays, the Gamma-Ray Large Area Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in February, might detect them.

Dark matter may also be responsible for creating the most awesome objects in the universe: the enormous black holes believed to lurk in the center of nearly every large galaxy. Tom Theuns and Liang Gao, astronomers at Durham University in England, used a computer model last year to study how two types of dark matter, known as warm and cold, may have influenced the formation of the very first stars in the universe—and the first giant black holes.

In their simulations, Gao and Theuns found that within clumps of cold dark matter, single massive stars formed, but warm dark matter formed filaments about a quarter the width of the Milky Way, attracting enough ordinary matter to create some 10 million stars—and some of these very first stars could still be around. “You could potentially form low-mass stars,” says Theuns. “And they live very much longer. They could live for 13 billion years and could be in the Milky Way today. Maybe we’ve seen them already. Who knows?”

But the most unexpected result of the model was that the filaments could catastrophically collapse, warping space-time to form a huge black hole.

The model suggested that collapsing dark matter could warp space-time to form a huge black hole.

“Even if only 1 percent of the mass in a filament takes part in the collapse, that’s already 100,000 times the mass of the sun, a very good start to making one of these supermassive black holes,” Theuns says. “We know that the formation of these supermassive black holes has to be very rapid because we can see very bright quasars very soon after the Big Bang, not much later than the epoch of the first star formation.” http://louis-j-sheehan.net/
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Is there any chance that astronomers could detect an echo of the primordial cataclysms that birthed these black holes?

“You would think it’s such a violent process that something would be left over from that,” Theuns says. “I don’t have any predictions, but you would think there would be something.”

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Jellyfish are marine invertebrates belonging to the class Scyphozoa of the phylum Cnidaria. They can be found in every ocean in the world and in some fresh waters. The use of the term "jellyfish" is actually a misnomer since scyphozoans are not fish, which are vertebrates. Although incorrect, the term is also commonly-applied to some close relatives of true scyphozoans, such as the Hydrozoa and the Cubozoa.

The body of an adult jellyfish consists of a bell shape producing jelly and enclosing its internal structure, from which tentacles are suspended. Each tentacle is covered with cells called cnidocytes, that can sting or kill other animals. Most jellyfish use these cells to secure prey or for defense. Others, such as the Rhizostomae, do not have tentacles at all.

Jellyfish lack basic sensory organs and a brain, but their nervous systems and rhopalia allow them to perceive stimuli, such as light and odor, and respond quickly. They feed on small fish and zooplankton that become caught in their tentacles. Most jellyfish are passive drifters and slow swimmers, as their shape is not hydrodynamic. Instead, they move so as to create a current forcing the prey within reach of their tentacles. They do this by rhythmically opening and closing their bell-like body. Their digestive system is incomplete: the same orifice is used to take in food and expel waste. The body of an adult is made up of 94–98% water. The bell consists of a layer of epidermis, gastrodermis, and a thick, intervening layer called mesoglea that produces most of the jelly.

Most jellyfish have tendrils or oral arms coated with thousands of microscopic nematocysts. Generally, each nematocyst has a "trigger" (cnidocil) paired with a capsule containing a coiled stinging filament armed with exterior barbs. Upon contact, the filament rapidly unwinds, launches into the target, and injects toxins. The animal can then pull its prey into its mouth, if appropriate.

Although most jellyfish are not perniciously dangerous to humans, a few are highly toxic, such as Cyanea capillata. Contrary to popular belief, the menacingly infamous Portuguese Man o' War (Physalia) is not a jellyfish but a colony of hydrozoans. Similarly, the box jellies, notorious along the coast of Australia, are cubozoans, not true scyphozoan jellyfish. Irrespective of the sting's toxicity, many people stung by them find them very painful and some people may suffer anaphylaxis or other severe allergic reactions, similar to allergies to bee stings.

A jellyfish detects the touch of other animals using a nervous system called a "nerve net", located in its epidermis. Touch stimuli are conducted by nerve rings, through the rhopalial lappet, located around the animal's body, to the nerve cells. Jellyfish also have ocelli: light-sensitive organs that do not form images but are used to determine up from down, responding to sunlight shining on the water's surface.

Jellyfish do not have a specialized digestive, osmoregulatory, central nervous, respiratory, or circulatory systems. They digest using the gastrodermal lining of the gastrovascular cavity, where nutrients are absorbed. They do not need a respiratory system since their skin is thin enough that the body is oxygenated by diffusion. They have limited control over movement and mostly free-float, but can use the hydrostatic skeleton of the water pouch to accomplish vertical movement through pulsations of the disc-like body.

The outer side of a jellyfish is lined with a jelly-like material called ectoplasm (ecto meaning outer and plasma meaning cytoplasm). The ectoplasm typically contains a smaller amount of protein granules and other organic compounds than inner cytoplasm, also referred to as endoplasm (endo meaning inner).

Many species of jellyfish are capable of congregating into large swarms or "blooms", consisting of hundreds of individuals. The formation of these blooms is a complex process that depends on ocean currents, nutrients, temperature and ambient oxygen concentrations. Jellyfish sometimes mass breed during blooms. During such times of rapid population expansion, some people will raise ecological concerns about the potential noxious effects of a jellyfish "outbreak".

According to Claudia Mills of the University of Washington, the frequency of jellyfish blooms may be attributed to man's impact on marine systems. She says that the breeding jellyfish may merely be filling ecological niches formerly occupied by overfished creatures. Jellyfish researcher Marsh Youngbluth further clarifies that "jellyfish feed on the same kinds of prey as adult and young fishes, so if fish are removed from the equation, jellyfish are likely to move in."

Increased nutrients in the water, ascribed to agricultural runoff, have also been cited as an antecedent to the proliferation of jellyfish. Monty Graham, of the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama, says that "ecosystems in which there are high levels of nutrients ... provide nourishment for the small organisms on which jellyfish feed. In waters where there is eutrophication, low oxygen levels often result, favoring jellyfish as they thrive in less oxygen-rich water than fish can tolerate. The fact that jellyfish are increasing is a symptom of something happening in the ecosystem."

By sampling sea life in a heavily fished region off the coast of Namibia, researchers found that jellyfish have overtaken fish in terms of biomass. The findings represent a careful, quantitative analysis of what has been called a "jellyfish explosion" following intense fishing in the area in the last few decades. The findings were reported by Andrew Brierley of the University of St. Andrews and his colleagues in the July 12, 2006 issue of the journal Current Biology. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/page1.aspx

Areas which have been seriously affected by jellyfish blooms include the northern Gulf of Mexico. In that case, Graham states, "Moon jellies have formed a kind of gelatinous net that stretches from end to end across the gulf."

Most jellyfish pass through two distinct life history phases (body forms) during their life cycle. The first is the polypoid stage, when the jellyfish takes the form of either a sessile stalk which catches passing food, or a similar free-floating configuration. The polyp's mouth and tentacles face upwards, reminiscent of the hydroid stage of the somewhat closely related anthozoan polyps, also of the phylum Cnidaria.

In the second stage, the jellyfish is known as a medusa. Medusae have a radially symmetric, umbrella-shaped body called a bell. The medusa's tentacles are fringe-like protrusions from the border of the bell. (Medusa is also the Hebrew, Spanish, Italian, Russian and Bulgarian word for jellyfish.)

Jellyfish are dioecious; that is, they are either male or female. In most cases, to reproduce, a male releases his sperm into the surrounding water. The sperm then swims into the mouth of the female, allowing the fertilization of the ova. However, moon jellies use a different process. The eggs become lodged in pits on the oral arms, which form a temporary brood chamber to accommodate fertilization.

After fertilization and initial growth, a larval form, called the planula, develops from the egg. The planula is a small larva covered with cilia. It settles onto a firm surface and develops into a polyp. The polyp is cup-shaped with tentacles surrounding a single orifice, resembling a tiny sea anemone. After an interval of growth, the polyp begins reproducing asexually by budding and is called a segmenting polyp, or a scyphistome. New scyphistomae may be produced by budding or new, immature jellies called ephyra may be formed. Many jellyfish species are capable of producing new medusae by budding directly from the medusan stage.

Most jellyfish have a lifespan of two and a half months; few live longer than six months but one species can live as long as 30 years.
Since jellyfish are not fish, some people consider the term "jellyfish" a misnomer, and instead use the term "jellies" or "sea jellies". The word "jellyfish" is also often used to denote either hydrozoans or the box jellyfish, the cubozoans. The class name, Scyphozoa, comes from the Greek word skyphos, denoting a kind of drinking cup and alluding to the cup shape of the organism.

A group of jellyfish is often called a "smack".

Jellyfish are an important source of food to the Chinese community and in many Asian countries. Only jellyfish belonging to the order Rhizostomeae are harvested for food. Rhizostomes are favoured because they are typically larger and have more rigid bodies than other scyphozoans. Traditional processing methods involve a multi-phase procedure using a mixture of table salt and alum, and then desalting. Processing makes the jellyfish drier and more acidic, producing a "crunchy and crispy texture." Nutritionally, jellyfish prepared this way are roughly 95% water and 4-5% protein, making it a relatively low calorie food.

In 1961, green fluorescent protein was discovered in the jellyfish Aequorea victoria by scientists studying bioluminescence. This protein has since become a quite useful tool in biology. Jellyfish are also harvested for their collagen, which can be used for a variety of scientific applications including the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. http://louis-j-sheehan.us/page1.aspx

Jellyfish are commonly displayed in aquaria in many countries; among them the Monterey Bay Aquarium, Long Beach Aquarium of the Pacific, Vancouver Aquarium, Seattle Aquarium, Newport Aquarium, National Aquarium in Baltimore, Georgia Aquarium and Maui Ocean Center. Often the tank's background is blue and the animals are illuminated by side light to produce a high contrast effect. In natural conditions, many jellies are so transparent that they are almost impossible to see.

Holding jellyfish in captivity presents other problems. For one, they are not adapted to closed spaces. They depend on currents to transport them from place to place. To compensate for this, professional exhibits feature precise water flows, typically in circular tanks to prevent specimens from becoming trapped in corners. The Monterey Bay Aquarium uses a modified version of the kreisel (German for "spinning top") for this purpose.
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When stung by a jellyfish, first aid may be in order. Though most stings are not deadly, some stings, such as those of the box jellyfish (Chironex fleckeri), may be fatal. Serious stings may cause anaphylaxis and may result in death. Hence, people stung by jellyfish must get out of the water to avoid drowning. In serious cases, advanced professional care must be sought. This care may include administration of an antivenin and other supportive care such as required to treat the symptoms of anaphylactic shock. The most serious threat that humans face from jellyfish is the sting of the Irukandji, which has the most potent and deadly venom of any known species.
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There are three goals of first aid for uncomplicated jellyfish stings: prevent injury to rescuers, inactivate the nematocysts, and remove any tentacles stuck on the patient. To prevent injury to rescuers, barrier clothing should be worn. This protection may include anything from panty hose to wet suits to full-body sting-proof suits. Inactivating the nematocysts, or stinging cells, prevents further injection of venom into the patient.

Vinegar (3 to 10% aqueous acetic acid) should be applied for box jellyfish stings.Vinegar, however, is not recommended for Portuguese Man o' War stings. In the case of stings on or around the eyes, vinegar may be placed on a towel and dabbed around the eyes, but not in them. Salt water may also be used in case vinegar is not readily available.Fresh water should not be used if the sting occurred in salt water, as a change in pH can cause the release of additional venom. Rubbing the wound, or using alcohol, spirits, ammonia, or urine will encourage the release of venom and should be avoided.

Once deactivated, the stinging cells must be removed. This can be accomplished by picking off tentacles left on the body.[9] First aid providers should be careful to use gloves or another readily available barrier device to prevent personal injury, and to follow standard universal precautions. After large pieces of the jellyfish are removed, shaving cream may be applied to the area and a knife edge, safety razor, or credit card may be used to take away any remaining nematocysts.

Beyond initial first aid, antihistamines such as diphenhydramine (Benadryl) may be used to control skin irritation (pruritus). To remove the venom in the skin, apply a paste of baking soda and water and apply a cloth covering on the sting. If possible, reapply paste every 15-20 minutes. Ice can be applied to stop the spread of venom until either of these is available.
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Mormons and Money

Mitt Romney, his church, and the culture of prosperity.

Alan Wolfe, The New Republic Published: Monday, December 31, 2007

Mitt Romney is a Mormon. He is also rich. According to data released by his campaign in August, Romney's net worth is between $190 and $250 million. He earned much of this money at Bain Capital, the private equity firm he started with two partners in 1984. Under Romney's leadership, Bain took advantage of the leveraged buyout craze of the 1980s and '90s to become a wildly profitable corporation.

Romney's business success is not unusual among Mormons. When he left Bain to run the Salt Lake City Olympics of 2002, Romney worked with such accomplished Mormon businessmen as Fraser Bullock (now of Sorenson Capital) and Kem Gardner (a prominent Utah developer). Wealthy Mormons have also played key roles in Romney's presidential campaign. One is Jon Huntsman Sr., founder of the Huntsman Corporation, a $13 billion Salt Lake City enterprise specializing in petrochemicals and plastics, and father of Utah's current governor, Jon Huntsman Jr. Although he does not use it in public, Mitt Romney's first name is Willard; he was named after J. Willard Marriott, founder of the hotel chain, to this day another successful business enterprise run by Mormons--and one that is also active in the Romney camp.

Pick up a book on how to succeed in business, and there's a decent chance that it will have been written by a Mormon. The best known are the many volumes of Stephen Covey, whose books-beginning with The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People in 1989-are "a secular version of Mormonism," according to historian Jan Shipps, our leading interpreter of the LDS faith. This tradition has recently been carried forward in Jeff Benedict's The Mormon Way of Doing Business, only here, seven habits are turned into eight people, including the CEO of JetBlue Airlines (David Neeleman) and the former CEOs of Dell Computers (Kevin Rollins), Madison Square Garden (Dave Checketts), Life Re Corporation (Rod Hawes), and Deloitte and Touche (Jim Quigley), as well as the former CFO of American Express(Gary Crittenden)--all members of the LDS Church. The general theme of Benedict's book is that you don't have to go to Harvard Business School to know how to run a successful company. If you are a devoted family member, volunteer, and good churchgoer, as so many Mormons are, that should be enough.

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Had you, nonetheless, gone to Harvard Business School between 1995 and 2005, your dean would have been another successful Mormon profiled by Benedict--Kim Clark, who left this prestigious job to become president of the Idaho campus of Brigham Young University. He may be gone, but, if you go to Harvard now, you will likely run into Clayton Christensen, the eighth of Benedict's subjects and a member of the Business School faculty. (Disclosure: Christensen and I have met on a few occasions, and I pester him from time to time with questions about the Mormon religion and Romney's political prospects.) Christensen, a BYU graduate and former Rhodes Scholar, founded three companies and has written his share of business advice books, including The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution. Christensen, by the way, cannot be described as a "cafeteria Mormon," someone who celebrates some aspects of his tradition while ignoring others. He believes that Joseph Smith was a prophet and that the Book of Mormon "is in fact true."

Most Mormons, of course, do not follow the path of Romney and Christensen and move to Massachusetts. For those who stay behind in Utah, there is Brigham Young University and its Marriott School of Management--which won first place among regional institutions in The Wall Street Journal's recent business-school rankings. Asked which business schools produce the most ethical graduates, the recruiters contacted by the Journal ranked BYU second behind Dartmouth's Tuck School and just ahead of Yale. Apparently, the Mormon missionary experience is a major part of Marriott's attraction to recruiters: Employers cannot resist the idea of recent graduates who are a bit older, have lived outside the United States, or have learned foreign languages. (Christensen speaks Korean because of his missionary work.)

Obviously, not all Mormons are successful in business--or, for that matter, life. In their forthcoming book American Grace, two political scientists, Harvard's Robert Putnam and Notre Dame's David Campbell, find that Mormons are slightly wealthier than the average American, but not by much: The average income of both Mormon households and non-Mormon house holds hovers around $50,000 a year. Thirteen percent of Mormon households in their sample earn more than $100,000 a year, higher than 4 percent of Catholic ones but, then again, lower than 27 percent of Jewish ones. Yet, while Mormons are neither far richer nor far poorer than other Americans, a significant number have shown remarkable entrepreneurial ability. It is worth asking why, and particularly now: The answer sheds light not only on Mitt Romney's exceptional business success but also on his presidential prospects.
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All inquiries dealing with the relationship between economics and religion take place in the shadow of Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, first published in 1904. Weber's insight was to link theological ideas with real-world human behavior: Once salvation was not dispensed through priestly authority, the accumulation of wealth was taken as a sign that you belonged among those elected by God for heavenly reward--in theory, making Protestants better suited to capitalism than Catholics. Ever since Weber, sociologists of religion have been inclined to examine the ideas of religious thinkers to understand the world in which we live.

It is not clear whether such an examination of LDS theology would yield any particular insights into Mormon business success. This is not because Mormon beliefs are less credible than those of other religions: Secular people may laugh at the idea of Joseph Smith coming across a holy book in western New York or discovering that Adam and Eve had lived in western Missouri, but these revelations are neither more nor less believable than Jesus walking on water or Moses parting the sea. It is, however, true that, in comparison to Christianity and Judaism, Mormonism is a very young religion and, consequently, has not had nearly as much time as its counterparts to develop theological justifications for its miracles. If we are to compare Mormonism to other religions theologically, the relevant markers ought to be Christianity in the year 150 or Judaism in the era of Isaac. Christianity before the Nicene Creed and Augustine left adherents with many unanswered questions--and so does Mormonism today. There is no direct line from the Angel Moroni to the Marriott hotel chain.

But theology is not the only way to understand the links between religion and economics. At the same time as he was publishing The Protestant Ethic, Weber came to the United States to visit the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair. "On a long railroad journey through what was then Indian territory," he wrote about his visit, "the author, sitting next to a traveling salesman of 'undertaker's hardware' (iron letters for tombstones), casually mentioned the still impressively churchmindedness" of the United States. His interlocutor offered him an explanation: "Sir, for my part everybody may believe or not believe as he pleases; but if I saw a farmer or a businessman not belonging to any church at all, I wouldn't trust him with fifty cents." From that conversation stemmed one of Weber's most insightful concepts. Especially in a newly formed society, Weber concluded, religion serves as a kind of moral credit agency. Businessmen need a way to determine whose credit will be worthy and whose will not. Admission to a congregation is a method of establishing that creditworthiness. And religions with mechanisms for deciding who will belong to them will flourish in a commercial society in a way that religions emphasizing hand-me-down criteria of membership will not.

Weber does not tell his readers through which Indian territory he was passing, but chances are that, half a century before his journey, Mormons had also passed that way on their trek to Utah. In those early days, membership in the LDS Church, by definition, was not inherited from one's parents. Although that is no longer true--Romney belongs to the sixth generation of his family to affiliate with the church, and all of the executives featured in Benedict's book are from long-term Mormon families--Mormonism remains a missionary faith, constantly bringing in new members. (Senator Harry Reid, the highest ranking Mormon in U.S. politics, is a convert.) The frontier may be gone, but capitalism is still a place of risk and reward. If you are a businessman, say a venture capitalist, you want to know something about the people you are dealing with; and, if the people with whom you cooperate are Mormons, you do.
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"It is not the ethical doctrine of a religion, but that form of ethical conduct upon which premiums are placed that matters," Weber wrote after his visit to the United States, as if repudiating the emphasis on theology characteristic of The Protestant Ethic. It is too bad he did not reflect on Mormons, for no other religion better fits his thesis that practice counts for more than doctrine. The data collected by Putnam and Campbell offer fascinating insight into this aspect of Mormonism. Much is made of the religious engagement of American evangelicals, who attend church in far greater numbers than mainline Protestants or Jews. But Mormons top evangelicals in all categories of religious activity: Seventy-seven percent attend church weekly compared to 55 percent of evangelicals; 74 percent pray daily compared to 62 percent; and 46 percent read scripture daily compared to 35 percent. When it comes to activities like serving as an officer in a congregation or giving money to one's church, Mormonism's rates far exceed those of every other religion. Even more interesting is the fact that Mormons volunteer in non-religious activities more than any other faith in the United States; the only groups that come close are mainline Protestants and Jews. In other words, the general practices of Mormon life--a high bar for church membership, an expectation that Mormons will take an active role in practicing their faith, an ethic of civic involvement--demonstrate moral creditworthiness in a way that no other American religion can match.

Weber's work contains another insight into the business success of Mormons: his emphasis on the tension within so many religious communities between this--worldly and otherworldly conduct. His best example of an otherworldly consciousness was that of an "ascetic monk" who "has fled from the world by denying himself individual property" and whose"needs have been correspondingly restricted to what was absolutely indispensable." Had Weber needed an "ideal type"to illustrate his ideas about this-worldly religious conduct, Mormons, once again, would have served his purposes. There is, to be sure, an otherworldly dimension to Mormonism, which, to cite just one example, proposes the existence of three levels of heaven rather than the more conventional one. But, if any church is this-worldly, it is the LDS Church. Mormonism does not go in for monks and mystics, especially the latter; mystics tend to go off in directions of their own, which is not something Mormon leaders encourage. Mormons, of course, have a prophet, but prophets are not mystics; God talks to both, but, as Shipps tells me, only prophets pass on what God has to say to the people assembled around them. As important as the prophet Joseph Smith is to Mormons, moreover, there would be no LDS Church without the organizational and entrepreneurial talents of Brigham Young, who had more in common with Robert Moses than the original Moses. Mormons receive revelations, but, Shipps notes, most of them are "pretty practical," usually addressing the question of "What should I do?" It adds up to a form of spirituality that is compatible with worldly success. "Living your faith," Kim Clark informed Jeff Benedict, "means engaging the world. It is not being apart from the world."

A related explanation for Mormons' business success may lie in the religion's organizational structure. Unlike most faiths, the LDS Church does not have a paid clergy. Instead, Mormons rely for leadership on lay people who are "called" to assume the role of bishop in local wards, the LDS term for congregations. The idea of a calling, a Weberian term, does not mean quite the same thing to Mormons that it did to the Lutherans from whom Weber borrowed it. Mormon bishops are not so much called because of an inner light that convinces them to pursue God's path but because the church is always on the lookout for potential leaders. And, of course, these people might learn a thing or two about how to organize others in the business world if they first have success organizing them in spiritual life. Asked about the possible reasons for Mormon entrepreneurship, Philip Barlow, a theologian at Utah State, emphasized "a lay-oriented ecclesiastical organization that rejects a professional ministry and thus promotes hands-on organizational and leadership experience among an entire populace, which yields a disproportionate number of high-level executives." Of course, organizing a ward or a stake--usually between five and ten wards--does not guarantee that you will become a CEO, but it doesn't hurt your chances either.

Mormonism's this-worldly characteristics throw a monkey wrench of confusion into the way Americans think about religion and politics. Why, in contrast to Europeans, do we spend so much time asking candidates about their faith in the first place? The answer, presumably, is that we want our politicians to tell us that they are guided by convictions rooted in a powerful moral sensibility taught by a God whose existence transcends this world. But, if politicians invoke religion to claim connection to the transcendental, what is a candidate to do if his religion is not very far apart from this world? Mormonism's this-worldly character gives it a great advantage in the world of business but places it at a great disadvantage in the world of politics--so long, that is, as politicians have to pass a religious litmus test. If the United States were ever to return to a period in which competence counted more than confession, membership in the LDS Church would become an asset. That, however, is not the case in 2008. It almost makes one feel sorry for Mitt Romney, an odd thing to say about a man worth as much as $250 million.

Americans elect millionaires to high office, but they want their millionaires to be just folks. George W. Bush understood this in his two presidential campaigns. He was, to be sure, the scion of a prominent American family, but so was his opponent in 2000. And, when his 2004 opponent combined liberal politics with a taste for windsurfing, Bush's reelection was all but assured. Political success in the United States goes to those who have enough money so that voters will admire and respect them while conveying the impression that money doesn't matter much to them at all.
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True of Americans in general, this ambivalence toward money is especially true of American evangelicals. Evangelicals are no longer the kind of downtrodden believers who responded so positively to the vigorous populism of William Jennings Bryan. Yet evangelicalism nonetheless retains a populist sensibility. You don't need to allow yourself to be informed by a priest, as Catholics do--or, I should say, did. Unlike potential converts to Judaism, you don't have to learn much about the language, culture, and theology of the religion you hope to join. All you need to do is look at the life you are leading, find it unfulfilling, and turn to Christ as your personal savior, a process that is available to anyone, however much money they make. Evangelicalism's appeal, as much in our day as during the time of Bryan, is based on this conviction that so long as you are God-fearing, it matters not a whit how outwardly successful you are. This is not, let me hasten to add, true of various forms of prosperity gospel, which judge your spiritual success by your worldly success. But, then again, even the prosperity gospel appeals to the downtrodden more than to those occupying the executive suites.

None of this much helps Mitt Romney. It is true that there are theological reasons why evangelicals distrust Mormons--for one thing, Mormons do not believe in original sin--but evangelicals do not need theology to conclude that there is something suspicious about Romney. He has an intact and perfect family; many Southern Baptists, for all their talk of family values, do not. He ran a company; most Southern Baptists work for one. He does not drink--by now, the picture should be clear. Mormons are what Southern Baptists want to be but never quite become; I will resist the temptation to call them "perfected evangelicals." The fact that Romney's life is so completely without sin ought to make him attractive to them, but it does the reverse. If you lead an unblemished life, you have no need to come to Christ for your salvation. Romney's business success--his worldly achievement--is self-evident. For the evangelicals whose votes he needs in order to win the presidency, that is cause for concern.

As if this did not create enough problems for Romney, he faces an additional obstacle in persuading evangelicals that he is with them in spirit. In an interview with The New Yorker's Ryan Lizza, Jan Shipps pointed out that Mormonism is an ethnicity as much as a religion. "Romney is not Mormon in the way, say, Ted Kennedy is Catholic," she said. "Romney is Mormon the way Ted Kennedy is Irish." Shipps was calling attention to the fact that Mormonism, once a cult, has now become a culture. But her comment also reinforces the widespread idea that Mormons tend to prefer their own. And this turns out to be true. Mormons, Putnam and Campbell found in their survey, are more likely to make friends with coreligionists than any other group in the United States, including African American Protestants.

All religions tend to prefer their own. But evangelicals are less likely to do so than Mormons or even, for that matter, Catholics. There once was an ethnic or clannish dimension to American evangelicalism when so many of its supporters, especially in the South, came from similar Scotch-Irish roots. But the key to Mitt Romney understanding American evangelicalism is that you are not born into an evangelical world; you are born "again" into one. The ranks of evangelicals contain large numbers of former Catholics and former Jews. If anything, the further away you are from conservative Protestantism when you convert, the more valuable to the evangelical cause you become. Mormonism, as just about everyone who has ever opened their front door to a stranger knows, is fiercely missionary in its approach; indeed, evangelicals and Mormons compete for converts. But, once people join the LDS Church, they enter a world that is closed to outsiders. Both the local evangelical mega-church and the local Mormon temple may be imposing, but one opens its doors to all who seek to enter and the other does not.

It may not be particularly fair, but, in the eyes of evangelicals, Mormonism's distinct culture transforms the business success of its prominent members--relying as it does partly on the creditworthiness that membership in a fenced-off club confers--into something questionable rather than something admirable. American evangelicals were once fiercely anti-Catholic and inexorably anti-Semitic. Fortunately for the cause of religious tolerance, if not so fortunately for the fate of American liberalism, they now make common cause with Catholics over abortion and consider themselves the best friends of the state of Israel. Today, Mormons have replaced Catholics and Jews in the more diabolical regions of the evangelical mind. And the sense among evangelicals that Romney's wealth has something to do with his relatively closed culture only stands to raise their suspicions.

Will evangelicals vote for Romney anyway? When David Dinkins ran against Rudy Giuliani in the 1989 New York mayoral race, polls showed that more people said they would vote for Dinkins than actually did, leading pollsters to believe that respondents were unwilling to acknowledge possibly prejudiced views. The same thing might happen with respect to evangelicals in the Republican Party; and, if it does, we will never know whether it was because they distrusted Romney's religion, his business success, his culture--or a combination of the three. Chances are that someone who is different may well become our next president. But of the candidates who are most conspicuously different, the Mormon just may have a harder time getting elected than the woman or the African American.

Mitt Romney was my governor for four years. Since 1960, the Democratic Party has shown an unseemly tendency to nominate a disproportionate number of presidential candidates from Massachusetts, and, of the three so chosen, only John Kennedy managed to win. The losses sustained by Michael Dukakis and John Kerry left most Americans with one clear impression: Massachusetts simply is not like the rest of the United States.

Observing Mitt Romney's problems in the 2008 presidential election, I have to conclude that this cliché is correct. For many of us in Massachusetts, the fact that Romney had been a successful entrepreneur was taken as a reason to vote for him. He was not, moreover, all that bad a governor, in part because he knew what he wanted--whether medical insurance for all or a new road to speed Cape Cod dwellers to their homes--and possessed the administrative talents to make it happen. When he ran for the Senate in 1994, his opponent, Ted Kennedy of all people, raised the red flag of Romney's religion. But, since then, his Mormonism has been a non-factor. We all knew that he went to that huge temple out in Belmont, just as we knew that the rest of us were not welcome there; but it did not matter. It just seemed to make sense to us, practical people that we are, to vote for a guy with an impressive resumé.

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Americans in the rest of the country evidently think differently. For Massachusetts residents, Romney's business acumen was a plus and his religion inconsequential. Elsewhere, his religion seems to be a minus and his business experience irrelevant--or worse. It used to be the case that, if Massachusetts were more like the rest of the country, we would have elected more liberal Democrats to the presidency. But, because it is not, we are likely to be deprived of a competent conservative Republican. This does not disturb me deeply; I can think of no circumstances under which I would vote for Romney over any of the Democrats. But 2008 may well be remembered as the election in which the Republicans, the party of big business, shunned the biggest businessman in their party. For them, it is perfectly OK to succeed in business, but not, it would seem, if you are a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.

Alan Wolfe is a contributing editor at The New Republic.

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Several reports released in 2007 bolstered the case of those claiming the Bush administration stifles scientists and attempts to alter their research findings.

Perhaps most galling, though, according to Bush critics and many scientists, was an internal order by the Department of Commerce in April requiring scientists in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to obtain permission before speaking about scientific matters of “official importance.” The order makes “all employee utterance subject to official review,” says Jeff Ruch, executive director for Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, “and the impact will be chilly cubicles.” Critics fear the order will hamper a hallmark of the scientific process, the free flow of ideas. “Science works by building on research results and discussion of what’s working or not working,” says Francesca Grifo, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Scientific Integrity Program. “It’s part of this administration’s reluctance to base decisions on information.”

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In November 2003, an American socialite living in Hong Kong served her millionaire banker husband a drugged milkshake, bludgeoned him to death, wrapped him in a carpet, dumped him in a storage closet and then rang up a moving company.

Most commentators turn it into a parable about the evils of wealth.

The Kissels certainly had a lot of it. As a fresh New York University business school grad, he started off with a small investment house but soon jumped to Lazard Frères, where he made his name in "distressed debt," the business of buying up bankrupt companies, revamping them and reselling them. Later he landed a job at Goldman Sachs in Hong Kong. His timing was perfect. The Kissels moved to Asia just as a massive financial crisis hit and Rob's talents were most needed. He made a small mint.

Rob became "an investment banker, not a mere man," whose wealth was "never enough" -- hence the book's title. Rob enjoyed luxuries like single-malt scotches and fancy cigars. He took long business trips that kept him away from home which may have pushed Nancy away.

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Still, Rob was a loving father (the Kissels had three children) and apparently devoted to his marriage despite its increasingly dysfunctional character. Perhaps Rob was simply blinded by his passions -- hardly the first time that's happened to an overachiever. He met his wife on a nude beach at Club Med in the Turks and Caicos Islands and quipped: "I bet you'd look great with your clothes on." Nancy wa a "knock-out" blonde, a "full-breasted five foot four" woman with "shapely legs" and a "provocatively dirty mouth" who had dropped out of two colleges and ended up working at a Tex-Mex restaurant in Manhattan. They married in 1989.

In Hong Kong, Nancy let her Filipina maid do most of the parenting while she spent her days shopping at glitzy malls. When Rob asked her to stay in Hong Kong for another three years, she threatened to divorce him and badgered him into buying her a $2 million vacation home in Vermont. There she started an affair with a local television repairman, Michael Del Priore.

When Rob's marriage started to disintegrate and he found out about her affair, he bought spyware, hired a private detective, consulted friends and wrote poems. It was only just before his murder that he started to contemplate divorce seriously. Nancy, by contrast, didn't seem to enjoy any productive passions. Devoid of a steady career and uninterested in her children, she seems to have been corroded less by her wealth than by a chronic lack of purpose. Murdering Rob may have finally given her a project of sorts.

She carefully stockpiled milkshake-enhancing depressants such as Stilnox (also known as Ambien) and Rohypnol (the date-rape drug) from various doctors. And she ordered up the objects she would need once the job was done -- bleach powder to clean up; packing cartons, rope, packing tape, and polyethylene sheeting to wrap the body; and peppermint oil to cover the smell of domestic carnage.

Even after her arrest, Nancy remained obsessed with Mr. Del Priore and wrote to him regularly. For example: "Just got back from court . . . wow . . . what a day . . . [prosecutor Peter] Chapman's closing took only 3 hours . . . pretty pathetic . . . 75% of his closing was about you! . . . he based his entire closing on you and I premeditating to do . . . well . . . you know . . . I can't even write it it's so absurd." She has continued to write him from her jail cell at Hong Kong's Tai Lam Center for Women, where she is serving a life sentence.
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In an interview after the murder, Mr. Del Priore was described as "a not terribly bright, not terribly appealing human being." Sounds like a good description of Nancy, as rich as she was -- or as poor as she is now, and alone.

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There may be another good reason to eat fish, a food containing a fatty acid called omega-3. Researchers have found that a diet enriched with omega-3 helps repair and prevent retinal damage in mice, a discovery with potential for preventing blindness in premature infants and adults suffering from age-related macular degeneration. http://Louis-J-Sheehan.us

Nature Medicine published the omega-3 study, written by a team that included Harvard University ophthalmology researcher Kip Connor, in June. “With just a 2 percent change in dietary omega-3, there was a 40 to 50 percent decrease in the disease pathology,” Connor says.

The researchers fed almost identical diets to two groups of female mice nursing litters. One diet was enriched with 2 percent omega-3 fatty acid, mirroring a Japanese diet, the other with 2 percent omega-6 fatty acid, similar to a typical American diet.

The litters were also exposed to high levels of oxygen, which causes a loss of blood vessels in retinal tissue. When oxygen levels are restored to normal, the eye senses it as a lack of oxygen and responds by growing new blood vessels, which often leads to excessive growth and damage to vision. This happened to the offspring of the mothers receiving omega-6, but the pups receiving omega-3 through their mothers’ milk grew new vessels at a healthy rate.

In humans, abnormal and excessive blood vessel growth related to decreased oxygen supply is the most common cause of blindness in premature babies, diabetics, and the elderly. It affects some 4 million people in the United States alone. Connor and other researchers are studying the impact of omega-3 –and -6 on human eyesight and will release the results later in 2008.

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Human-generated carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is slowly acidifying the ocean, threatening a catastrophic impact on marine life. And just as scientists are starting to grasp the magnitude of the problem, researchers have delivered more bad news: Acid rain is making things worse.

Scientists estimate that one-third of the world’s acid rain falls near the coasts, carrying some 100 million tons of nitrogen oxide, ammonia, and sulfur dioxide into the ocean each year. Using direct measurements and computer models, oceanographer Scott Doney of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and his colleagues calculated that acid rain causes as much as 50 percent of the acidification of coastal waters, where the pH can be as low as 7.6. (The open ocean’s pH is 8.1.)
The findings increase the urgency of confronting the crisis of ocean acidity, says Richard Feely, a collaborator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In the laboratory, researchers have seen some effect on just about every ocean creature that forms a calcium carbonate shell, says Feely, including algae—the tiny creatures at the crucial bottom of the deepwater food chain—and coral, whose skeletons grow more slowly in water with a pH even slightly lower than normal. Soon-to-be-released field experiment findings “seem to be showing the same kind of thing,” Feely says. That’s bad news, he adds, since a third of the world’s fish species depend in part on coral reefs for their ecosystems.

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WASHINGTON — A review of classified documents by former members of the Sept. 11 commission shows that the panel made repeated and detailed requests to the Central Intelligence Agency in 2003 and 2004 for documents and other information about the interrogation of operatives of Al Qaeda, and were told by a top C.I.A. official that the agency had “produced or made available for review” everything that had been requested.

The review was conducted earlier this month after the disclosure that in November 2005, the C.I.A. destroyed videotapes documenting the interrogations of two Qaeda operatives.

A seven-page memorandum prepared by Philip D. Zelikow, the panel’s former executive director, concluded that “further investigation is needed” to determine whether the C.I.A.’s withholding of the tapes from the commission violated federal law.
http://louis-j-sheehan.us/page1.aspx

In interviews this week, the two chairmen of the commission, Lee H. Hamilton and Thomas H. Kean, said their reading of the report had convinced them that the agency had made a conscious decision to impede the Sept. 11 commission’s inquiry.

Mr. Kean said the panel would provide the memorandum to the federal prosecutors and congressional investigators who are trying to determine whether the destruction of the tapes or withholding them from the courts and the commission was improper.
http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/member.php?u=18969

A C.I.A. spokesman said that the agency had been prepared to give the Sept. 11 commission the interrogation videotapes, but that commission staff members never specifically asked for interrogation videos.

The review by Mr. Zelikow does not assert that the commission specifically asked for videotapes, but it quotes from formal requests by the commission to the C.I.A. that sought “documents,” “reports” and “information” related to the interrogations.

Mr. Kean, a Republican and a former governor of New Jersey, said of the agency’s decision not to disclose the existence of the videotapes, “I don’t know whether that’s illegal or not, but it’s certainly wrong.” Mr. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, said that the C.I.A. “clearly obstructed” the commission’s investigation.

A copy of the memorandum, dated Dec. 13, was obtained by The New York Times.

Among the statements that the memorandum suggests were misleading was an assertion made on June 29, 2004, by John E. McLaughlin, the deputy director of central intelligence, that the C.I.A. “has taken and completed all reasonable steps necessary to find the documents in its possession, custody or control responsive” to formal requests by the commission and “has produced or made available for review” all such documents.

Both Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton expressed anger after it was revealed this month that the tapes had been destroyed. However, the report by Mr. Zelikow gives them new evidence to buttress their views about the C.I.A.’s actions and is likely to put new pressure on the Bush administration over its handling of the matter. Mr. Zelikow served as counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from 2005 to the end of 2006.

In an interview on Friday, Mr. McLaughlin said that agency officials had always been candid with the commission, and that information from the C.I.A. proved central to their work.

“We weren’t playing games with them, and we weren’t holding anything back,” he said. The memorandum recounts a December 2003 meeting between Mr. Kean, Mr. Hamilton and George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence. At the meeting, it says, Mr. Hamilton told Mr. Tenet that the C.I.A. should provide all relevant documents “even if the commission had not specifically asked for them.”

According to the memorandum, Mr. Tenet responded by alluding to several do