+
 Put your faith in engineering 

Replace tether for astronauts in space

80lb pack w/ 3lb of N2 propellant can be
fired through any combination of 24 1" thrusters.






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Double bubble, soil and trouble 

Roy, environmental engineer
designed micro 0.0001" bubble soap
w/ 1 bubble in another , to clean
topix waste sites.






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Cosmology - Footsteps of the WIMP 

Looking for dark matter.

Daniel Ifft of U of C,
"examines mineral w/ regular atomic structure.
Mica crystals are like orderly arrangement of billiard balls."
we're looking for one which moved for no apparent reason.

Cleave mica, acid of exposed face,a WIMP induced fault w/ AFM probe look for pits.




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A More useful mouse

Mouse cells w/ human DNA being injected into a mouse embryo.

Mice used as miniature biological factories, breeding
to make antibodies.  Molecules which attack foreign substances in our bloodstream.
But mouse-made antibodies rejected.

Aya Jakobovits, make a mouse that makes fully human antibodies.

Put human genes for making antibodies, put in yeast cells
, get yeast cells to fuse w/ and xfer to embryo cells of mouse

Implant embryo into female mouse, bred offspring.

Expose mice to bacterium,virus.  Mice make antibodies, researchers collect.








+
Into the Fire

In 2001 NASA will launch spacecraft to fly wi/ less than
2 million miles of the sun wo/ melting.

Why do small flares produce huge magnetic storms on earth, but big flares
sometimes barely cause 



+
Lone Wave (Soliton)


--JERRY BONA 
At the heart of new research into proteins, dark matter. and particle physics is a peculiar
sort of ripple that defies all expectations-  a wave that doesn't wave.

For a mathematician Jerry Bona spends a lot of time perfecting a purely physical skill. To demonstrate his prowess, he grabs a plastic plate and purposefully swishes it through the 4" of water that sits in the singlular
glass canal dominating his lab.  The canal has the height and depth of a large home aquarium but it runs the entire length of the 60' wall.  Bone swish produces a single swell of water 2' long and few inches high.  It sails down the enclosure
60' to the other end, crashes into the glass wall, the bounces back to begin the return trip, looking none the worse for wear.

"Not bad, huh?" the wave continues to rebound through the odd water tank, back and forth , again and again, keeping its shape and most of its size.  It takes several minutes before the water is fairly still again.  

The $100,000 water tank is the pride and joy of Bona's Penn State lab.  The tank is small by public aquarium standards - What it lacks in volume it makes up for in precision : adjustable support straighten the walls of the tank to a tolerance of .0001" to avoid energy-robbing and shape-deforming bends, and the water is distilled, filtered and skimmed to remove dust, which can also interfere with the waves.
The computer-controlled wave generator is still being perfected, So bona uses a plate for now.

	It's not just any wave that Bona has sweated to perfect. The wave that bounces off walls with impunity and refuses to fade is known as a soliton.  Bona studies the behavior of solitons so that he can come up with better mathematical tools for analyzing these strange waves- tools of great interest to physicist, biologists and other scientists.  Why would wave that bounces off walls with impunity and refuses to fade is known as a soliton.  Bona studies the behavior of solitons so that he can come up with better mathematical tools for analyzing these strange waves- tools of great interest to physicist, biologists and other scientists.  Why would wave that bounces off walls with impunity and refuses to fade is known as a soliton.  Bona studies the behavior of solitons so that he can come up with better mathematical tools for analyzing these strange waves- tools of great interest to physicist, biologists and other scientists.  Why would
scientists want to analyze solitons?  Because the immortal wave has turned up almost everywhere researchers have looked for it, from the behavior of complex biological molecules to gigantic, bizarre conglomerations of matter that might be lurking in or
between galaxies.  "Solitons haven't turned up in theology or sociology yet" says Alan Newell, U of A physicist specializing in the durable lone wave, "but they're just abouve everywhere else"

--RUSSELLs CANAL SOLITON
	The ubiquitous solitons seem to be so important that an obvious question :"Why didn't anyone notice them before?"

	160 years ago someone did.  A heavily loaded barge pulled by horses down the Union Canal near Edinburgh, Scotland
was suddenly halted by a broken rope.  As the barge settled into the water, it released a large, single lump of a wave that headed down the canal at about 9mph and as it traveled,
showed no signed of weakening.  Watching at the canal's edge John Scott Russell, young engineer hired by the barge company determined the practicality of switching from horse power to steam power.  Russell knew enough about water waves 
to realize that there wasn't supposed to be any such thing as a lone, massive wave that kept its size and shape.  Waves were supposed to break up, flatten out, crash; they were supposed to well, wave.  So he jumped on his horse and follwed the wave 
for nearly two miles before losing it around a bend.  Russell's encounter left him obsessed w/ the lone wave.  He soon figured out how to generate a similar waves purposely with the canal barge, and he tried to convince the world that these waves were unlike any others ever studied.  Scientists scoffed.  English Royal Astronomer George biddel airy loudly proclaimed that the lone wave was nothing more than the top half of an ordinary wave.  The 
celebrated lord stokes produced a mathematical proof that russell's wave was a physical impossibility.

--SHORT/LONG WAVELENGTHS and SPEED
	It's easy to see why solitons were considered unlikely.  A wave occurs when a medium is somehow disturbed at a particular location - a stiff wind causes water to pile up into a hump; a vibrating drumhead pushes together the air molecules directly above it.
That disturbance then moves off through the medium as the displaced particles pull or push on their neighbors and cause them to be displaced in turn.  Thus the win-driven hump in the water heads off as a water wave, and the jam-up in the air molecules speeds along as a sound wave.

	The speed at which waves travel can be affected by their shape and wavelength, or the distances between one crest of the wave and the next.  In most familiar media, such as air or water, long-wavelength (low-frequency) waves travel faster than short-wavelength (high frequency) waves.  This makes intuitive sense : a long wave has to "wave" fewer times to cover a given distance than does a short wave.

--DISPERSION
	In nature, waves are rarely generated by a single, simple, isolated disturbance.  As a consequence, waves tend to include a mixture of short and long wavelengths.  Because the longer wavelengths tend to race ahead of the shorter ones,
the wave spreads out in much the way that a tight pack of runners spreads out as faster runners pull in front of the slower runners behind them.  This spreading effect, which eventually causes a wave to peter out to 
nothingness, is called dispersion.  It is dispersion that causes the small wave generated by splashing your hand on the surface of a 
swimming pool to fade out before it gets very far.

--COMPRESSION
	Often another effect takes its toll on the integrity of the wave, distorting it not by dispersion but by compression : instead of the different wavelengths separating themselves out by speed, the tallest part of a single hump moves up front and overtakes the leading edge.  As a result, the hump steepens and narrows.  This compressions effect
is especially prevalent in situations such as that presented by the sloping shoreline of an ocean.  The shallow bottom provides a frictionlike resistance that causes the wave to narrow, much as a loose pack of runners
bunches up if the front-runners suddenly encounter rough terrain.  That's why an ocean wave approaching the shore rises and steepens so much that it often breaks.

caption	In most media, short-wavelength waves (A) travel more slowly than long-wavelength waves (B), but most naturally occurring waves are mixtures of both (C).
Since the long waves travel fastest, they get out ahead of the pack, and the wave train disperses (D).  Waves can also be distorted when the top of the wave gets out in front (E).  A combination of these two distorting effects produces a soliton (F)

--DISPERSION BALANCES COMPRESSION
	For centuries physicist rejected the idea of a persistent, unchanging wave because it seemed that between the distorting effects of dispersion and compression, a wave had little opportunity to keep its shape.  It had never occurred to anyone that the two effects might, under the right conditions, exactly balance out.  **That is , the tendency of the wave to spread might be exactly canceled by the tendency of the wave to narrow.**  The result would be the energizer bunny
of the wave world: it would just keep on going and going and going.   That's exactly what happened with Russell's canal wave.  It maintained itself because the sides and bottom of the canal provided just enough of a compressing force to counter the normal dispersion of a wave.

--SOLITONS
	Airy and Stokes - and Russell himself - had all failed to grasp that enduring waves could emerge from this balance.  In 1895 Dutch mathematicians Diederik Johannes Korteweg and Hendrik de Vries recognized that such a balance of disperson and compression could in fact produce a lone, durable lump of a wave,
but they believed it could stem only from a highly unusual set of circumstances that would rarely occur in the real world.  It wasn't until 1965 Martin Kruskal and Normal Zabusky of Bell labs realized that rather than being freaks of nature, these solitons (as they dubbed it ) appeared to be the rule.
In fact, these seemed to be no way to avoid them, as scientists discovered more and more kinds of wave-carrying methdia - from air to water to electromagnetic fields - that under certain conditions had the right balance of dispersing and compressing effects.  Solitons, would keep turning up in nature.

--PROTEIN SOLITONS
	One place no on had ever thought to look for solitons was in proteins, the complex molecules of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen and oxygen that perform virtually all the key functions of cells.  Proteins grab molecules and assemble them into cellular structures, tear molecules apart to get at energy, and transport 
oxygen and other needed elements from one cell to another.  They carry out these functions much as complex marionettes would :
jerking, stretching, flipping and twisting into whatever shapes are required for the job.  But the details of these transformations are almost a complete mystery to molecular biologists. "Biologist' understanding of how proteins function is a lot like your and my understanding of how a car works, " says alwyn scott , a Uni of A mathematician w/ interest in molecular biology.  "We know you put in gas, and the gas is burned to make things turn, but the details 
are pretty vague."

	Take muscle movement, one of the most basic and important functions in all animals.  Muscle is composed of thick bundles of fibrous protein called myosin that are interwoven, much like interlocking fingers, with thinner bundles of the protein actin.
To make a muscle contrac, the myosin bundles somehow pull the actin bundles toward them.  Biologists' picture of this action has always gone : the heads of the myosin bundles stretch outward, somehow grab the actin bundles, lean back, release the actin and then stretch outward again to get a new grip farther down on the actin bundles, repeating this motion over and over until the actin bundles are pulled far forward.  
"It's been called the rowboat theory, and that's not meant in a complimentary way"  The problem is that the theory doesn't explain what enables the myosin to lean and grab so effectively.

caption "According to the "rowboat" theory, muscles move when bundles of myosin stretch out grab bundles of actin, lean back , release the actin, and start again.  The theory doesn't explain how the myosin leans and grabs so effectively."

	Russian physicist Alexandr Davydov first suggested in the early 1970's that solitons could provide a better explanation.  
Imagine that a nearby molecule releases a small packet of energy, in some form not yet understood.  The jolt might cause a momentary distortion at that end of the protein, perhaps taking the form of a lump, like a swell of water in a canal.  According to conventional molecular biology, such a distortion
would break up and scatter through the protein in a trillionth of a second because of dispersion, just as throwing a rock into a puddle would create a mishmash of rapidly fading turbulence rather than a single, neat , persistent hump.  But Davydov noted that myosin, like many proteins has long sections consisting primarily of a chain of pairs of carbon and oxygen atoms - like long rows of dumbells - and a wave 
traveling along a chain of such pairs, would experience a compressing effect.

	Davydov concluded that thanks to the tendency of this effect to narrow any wave passing through the chain, in opposition to the protein's tendency to disperse any waves, a myosin
bundle was a perfect medium for a soliton.  An initial lump created at one end of a bundle would propagate down, pig-in-a-python-style, without shrinking or losing its shape.  When the lump encountered the actin fibers surrounding the
myosin bundles, it would push them down, just as a pig-size lump in a python might bend the blades of grass alongside the stationary snake as the lump made its way toward the tail.  "Its hard to imagine that some process like this isn't taking place"
"Its very efficient way to concentrade energy and get it to the right place."

caption A soliton created by a disturbance in a myosin bundle could propagate through the actin fibers pig-in-a-python-style pushing the actin bundles backward and the myosin bundles forward, all without shrinking or losing its shape.

	Scott believes solitons solve other protein mysteries as well.  Brain cells, for example, can pass on signals to neighboring brain cells when proteins snag sodium atoms floating inside the cell and pump them outside the cell.  But no one had a workable model for this pumping
action until scott and other researcher proposed that the charged particles could be "surfing" on solitons moving through the protein - again pig-in-a-python-style excpet
with the pig moving on top of the python.  Related research is exploring a possible role for solitons in DNA, which contains the blueprints for constructing proteins.  
Since DNA normally exists as a tightly bound double helix, before other molecules can read the blueprint, the two molecular stands have to be temporarily pried apart, or "unzipped." The mechanism for this splitting have long been a puzzle, but scott notes
that a soliton could travel down the DNA, swelling the molecule to the point of unzipping as it passes by, and then letting the DNA rezip itself after it has moved on.  "It would be like a pig in a python, were the python's skin comes apart." he says.

	If molecular biologists were surprised to hear that submicroscopic solitons 
might explain some of the most basic mysteriesin their field, imagine how startled astrophysicist and cosmologists were to find that solitons might answer two of the questions that have long haunted them :" Are giant blackholes the only possible source of the phenomenally
huge levels of energy streaming out of the center of some galaxies? and what is the nature of the mysterious "dark matter" that seems to be tugging on galaxies throughout the universe?

	The link to solitons was suggested in the late 1970's when physicists Richard Friedberg and Tsung-Dao lee wondered if the waves could play a role in particle physics.  They had an diea for the source of the compressive force:
the vacuum of space.  To a physicist, empty space is never really empty;  it always contains a certain minimum amount of energy, which takes the form of a teeming sea of "virtual" particles - particles that spring into existence out of nothingness and then instantaneously disappear.  
Calculations suggest that pockets of space could at times arise with even more than this minimal amount of energy.  But even if such a higher-energy pocket of empty space were somehow to springup, it would instantly shrink like
a leaking balloon as its extra energy dribbled out into the lower energy space around it, until it finally popped out of existence.

	However, friedberg and lee asked themselves what might happen if somehow real particles, instead of just virtual ones, appeared inside such a shrinking bubble of higher-energy space- suppose, for example you had a few real quarks, the particles that make up protons and neutrons.  The bubble would be shrinking, and the quarks trapped inside it would be squeezed closer and closer together. 
That would provide the compressing effect needed for a soliton.  When the quarks were squeezed as close together as they could get, they'd start repelling one another.  At this point the compressive effect of the bubble's shrinking would be exactly balanced by the spreading, dispersive push of the confined quarks.  The result would
be a soliton consisting of unbound quarks trapped inside the bubble.

	As Friedberg and Lee continued to explore their theoretical construct, they came across another surprise : there didn't seem to be any obvious limit on how many quarks could be trapped inside a high-energy space bubble, as long asthe bubble was big enough.  The two physicists, working w/ Yang Pang (brookhave nat'l lab) decided to push their strange new solitons to the limit. "We wanted to see 
how big we could make these things" They found that their odd soliton could be as large as several light-years across, or the size and mass of a million billion suns.
"We never got them quite as big as a galaxy."

	Strangest of all was that the 3 scientists had constructed this bizarre theoretical entity without relying on the one phenomenon that holds together all other celestial objects: gravity.  In fact, according to their calculations, the quarks in the space bubble wouldn't exert enough of a pull on one another to hold together.  But their supermassive "soliton star" didn't need gravity to keep its 
shape; the quarks could be held together solely by the compession of the higher-energy space bubble.

	It's an interesting model, but is there any reason to believe such an object could have arisen in our universe? Physicist Hong-Yee Chiu at the Goddard space flight center came up with a scheme for the star's creation.  It reaches back billions of years to shortly after 
the Big Bang, when energy was coursing through the hot young universe and particles hadn't yet formed.  As the universe slowly cooled, the energy levels in space dropped, but not smoothly: like steam condensing into water, the lower-energy space appeared as droplets.  Eventually, as the condensation continued, the lower-energy space
came to all but fill the universe, and the remaining higher-energy space was left in pockets much like steam buble in water.

	Around this time in the universe's evolution, quarks were forming.  If a high concentration of quarks happened to pop up n a collapsing pocket of high-energy space, the quarks could have been trapped and squeezed by the pocket and would have served to prop it up - creating a soliton star.
Once formed, the star's total mass would be so great that it could feed off surrounding matter, pulling it in and then swallowing the matter's protons and neutrons.  Inside the higher-energy space of the star, the protons and neutrons would be instantly converted to unbound quarks, and the star would grow.

	Though many astrophysicists believe the sources of the energy streaming out of the center of some galaxies - energy equal to that of millions of suns - must be giant black holes, Chiu and others think gigantic soliton stars provide an alternative explanation.  The energy would pour out, as protons and neutrons swallowed by the soliton star were converted into free quarks - a kind of
subatomic fission.  "According to most theories, black holes can't be bigger than 10x the mass of the sun, because they would expel any extra mass as they were collapsing.  But whatever is at the center of these galaxies seems to be on the order of 100million times the mass of the sun.  A soliton star seems to fit the picture."

	Different soliton stars might have different properties, and Friedberg did not try to pin down exactly what complete set of properties a given star might have. Inside the star, the laws of nature
could be radically different from what we're accustomed to: electrons might each weigh a pound, and light might travel at a tenth its normal speed.

	But since a soliton star can in principle be fantastically massive and yet utterly invisible, issuing neither heat nor light, it makes a perfect - if exceptionally exotic- candidate for dark matter, the stuff
that physicists' calculations tell them must be providing perhaps 90% of the universe's mass but which appears to be undetectable by normal means.  Though most physicists searching for dark matter
think their quarry is likely to turn out to be some sort of small particle, Friedberg notes that soliton tsars could fill the bill. "Dark matter is up for grabs right now..."

	As provocative and potentially significant as solitons have proved to the study of proteins and the missing matter inthe universe, the 
applications may turn out to be simply part of a flood of crucial insights.  Solitons have turned up in theories of how earthquakes
release destructive energy and how weather patterns form.  Planetary astronomers have proposed that Jupiter's red spot is a soliton amid the slow - moving turbulence of the planet's atmosphere.
Solitons of magnetism have been observed and may someday turn up on computer chips as a useful way to store a piece of information.  Laser scientists have developed devices that produce a soliton whose energy is released
at a distance from the laser; such a wave could be used to vaporize diseased tissue in the body without even having to break the skin above it.  Boojums, compactons, fluxons, antikinks, twists
- all are names for the types of solitons predicted in everything from supercold fuilds to empty space.

	Solitons even offer a simple, intuitive means for smoothing out the otherwise schizophrenic nature of quantum mechanical behavior , where matter sometimes acts like a wave and at other times acts like a particle.
;solitons , of course, offer features of both in one package.  No one has yet produced a field theory in which all particles can be seen as solitons, but neither are physicists ready to rule such a theory out.  "Solitons look a lot like what people have always thought a particle should look like in quantum mechanics" says alan newell.

	Even if solitons don't give physics a theory of everything, their ubiquity and influence suggest that there are hidden connections between different realms of nature.  This shows that no area of science stands alone" The soliton cuts across all of them."


-fin