The new frontier...mining asteroids?

"Tech billionaires bankroll gold rush to mine asteroids"

by

Irene Klotz

April 24th, 2012

Reuters

Google Inc executives Larry Page and Eric Schmidt and filmmaker James Cameron are among those bankrolling a venture to survey and eventually extract precious metals and rare minerals from asteroids that orbit near Earth, the company said on Tuesday.

Planetary Resources, based in Bellevue, Washington, initially will focus on developing and selling extremely low-cost robotic spacecraft for surveying missions.

A demonstration mission in orbit around Earth is expected to be launched within two years, said company co-founders Peter Diamandis and Eric Anderson.

Planetary Resources' aim is to open deep-space exploration to private industry, much like the $10 million Ansari X Prize competition, which Diamandis created.

The prize, which galvanized the emerging commercial human spaceflight industry, was awarded in 2004 to Scaled Composites' SpaceShipOne for the first flights beyond Earth's atmosphere by a privately developed, manned spaceship. Commercial suborbital spaceflights are expected to begin next year.

Planetary Resources' first customers are likely to be science agencies, such as NASA, as well as private research institutes.

Within five to 10 years, however, the company expects to progress from selling observation platforms in orbit around Earth to prospecting services. It plans to tap some of the thousands of asteroids that pass relatively close to Earth and extract their raw materials.

Not all missions would return precious metals and minerals to Earth. In addition to mining for platinum and other precious metals, the company plans to tap asteroids' water to supply orbiting fuel depots, which could be used by NASA and others for robotic and human space missions.

"We have a long view. We're not expecting this company to be an overnight financial home run. This is going to take time," Anderson said in an interview with Reuters.

The real payoff, which is decades away, will come from mining asteroids for platinum group metals and rare minerals.

"If you look back historically at what has caused humanity to make its largest investments in exploration and in transportation, it has been going after resources, whether it's the Europeans going after the spice routes or the American settlers looking toward the west for gold, oil, timber or land," Diamandis said.

"Those precious resources caused people to make huge investments in ships and railroads and pipelines. Looking to space, everything we hold of value on Earth - metals, minerals, energy, real estate, water - is in near-infinite quantities in space. The opportunity exists to create a company whose mission is to be able to go and basically identify and access some of those resources and ultimately figure out how to make them available where they are needed," he said.

Diamandis and Anderson declined to discuss how much money has been raised for their venture so far. In addition to Google billionaires Page and Schmidt and filmmaker Cameron, Planetary Resources investors include former Microsoft chief software architect Charles Simonyi, a two-time visitor to the International Space Station, Google founding director K. Ram Shriram and Ross Perot Jr.

Planetary Resources also declined to discuss specifics about how and when asteroid mining would begin. A 30-meter long (98-foot) asteroid can hold as much as $25 billion to $50 billion worth of platinum at today's prices, Diamandis said.

The company's first step is to develop technologies to cut the cost of deep-space robotic probes to one-tenth to one-hundredth the cost of current space missions, which run hundreds of millions of dollars, Diamandis said.

Among the targeted technologies is optical laser communications, which would eliminate the need for large radio antennas aboard spacecraft.

"We're taking new approaches at design," Diamandis said. "Part of the philosophy we're taking is building very low cost, very small spacecraft. You put up six or 10 or dozens and you get reliability."

Planetary Resources, which currently employs about 20 people, is overseen by former NASA Mars mission manager Chris Lewicki. It was founded about three years ago, but has been operating quietly behind the scenes until now.

"Can James Cameron — Or Anyone — Really Mine Asteroids?"

by

Jeffrey Kluger

April 25th, 2012

Time

Time was, incredibly rich guys bought sports teams. It was fun, it was affordable (by incredibly rich guy standards, at least) and it kept them off the streets. But going to the Super Bowl isn't enough anymore. For today's uber-rich, it's going to space that counts.

Space has been the goal of choice for the .001% for a while now. Amazon's Jeff Bezos; SpaceX's Elon Musk; Microsoft's Paul Allen; Virgin Airlines' Richard Branson and others have all jumped into the cosmic pool, looking for adventure and fortune either by sending tourists aloft or by building rockets to launch payloads for NASA, the Pentagon or private groups.

Today, Planetary Resources Inc., a start-up backed by director and ocean explorer James Cameron and Google billionaires Peter Diamandis and Eric Anderson, joined the space club, convening an event at the Seattle Museum of Flight to announce that they were going into the improbable business of space mining — harvesting asteroids for iron, nickel, platinum, zinc, aluminum, gold, water and more. What's scarce on Earth is plentiful in space, and if you can get your hands on what's out there, you could add trillions of dollars to the global economy, according to Planetary Resources' own estimates. Better still, when your quarry is located millions of miles from Earth, you can do as much blasting and digging as you want without environmental regulations or noise ordinances cramping your style.

"Scarcity is contextual and technology is an abundance-liberating force," said Anderson at the Seattle event. "We're going to bring the solar system within our economic sphere of influence." Nice sentiment, but can they do it?

Mining asteroids is not a new idea. It was legendary Russian rocketeer Konstantin Tsiokolvsky who first articulated the concept in 1903, and it always made a natural kind of sense. It's not just that asteroids are so full of valuable stuff, it's that there are so many of them out there — millions in the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, some as large as small moons. There are perhaps a million more so-called near-Earth asteroids that have drifted from the belt and assumed stable solar orbits much closer to us. Already, says Anderson, there are 8,931 such nearby objects that have been documented and mapped.

That makes them very tempting targets, especially because approaching and leaving an asteroid is a comparatively easy thing to do. Land on a body like the moon or Mars and you sink deep into a gravity well that requires powerful engines to escape. An asteroid's grip is a much lighter thing, meaning you need barely a breath of propellant to settle onto it or climb away. Better still, a load of freshly mined rocks and ore will weigh just a fraction of what they would on Earth; you can thus lift a hundred pounds of cargo with just a pound or so of propulsive muscle. And it's not as if visiting asteroids is something we've never done before. NASA's Dawn spacecraft is currently orbiting the asteroid Vesta in the main belt and will light out for the asteroid Ceres later this year.

Planetary Resources is well-positioned to take advantage of all this. Its deep-pocketed investors — who also include Google co-founder Larry Page and Ross Perot Jr. — have kicked in about $50 billion. The company headquarters in Bellevue, Wash. already employs a team of 25 engineers, some of them NASA veterans like Christopher Lewicki, who worked at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on NASA's Mars missions. And while the plan they have laid out is an ambitious one, it's also a patient one, with three generations of spacecraft planned: the first will be a series of orbiting telescopes to look for particularly mineral-rich asteroids; the second will be prospecting robots to sample the targets; and the third will be actual extractors. Diamandis envisions launching the first of the telescopes within 24 months.

That initial step may be a realistic one, especially with private companies like Musk's SpaceX driving down the cost of launches and boosters. But everything that comes after that can be tricky. The biggest challenge in any mining mission comes at the end, when you're trying to get your cargo safely home.

Spacecraft have brought extraterrestrial samples back to Earth before — but only in tiny quantities. The Soviet Union sent three robotic sample-return missions to the moon in the 1970s and hauled back just 326 g (.72 lbs) of material. NASA's Stardust probe brought comet samples back to Earth in 2006 — but the entire load consisted of about 1 million microscopic specks, too small even to be weighed in any meaningful way. And yes, the Apollo missions brought back 838 lbs (380 kg) of moon rocks, but that was the result of multiple landings over the course of multiple years at a cost of $24 billion in 1960s money. Part of the reason it's so difficult to import raw material from space is that while things weigh little or nothing in a low- or zero-g environments, approaching Earth with a full cargo bay means slamming into the upper atmosphere at a speed of 25,000 mph (40,000 k/h) carrying a load of rocks that all at once have a 1-g weight.

"If you're involved in an operation of that sort you're going to have to figure out a new and reliable way of maneuvering and manipulating large objects," says Henry Hertzfeld, professor of space policy at George Washington University.

Even getting to that point assumes that you've invented the prospectors and extracting robots to do the mining in the first place and that you've achieved the economies of scale that will allow you to build the "swarms" of them that Anderson concedes would be necessary for the work he envisions. That — not to put too fine a point on things — can get pricey. Individual robot probes to Mars go for a few hundred million dollars each. The Dawn mission will top out at about $450 million when it's finally done with its work. At that rate you can burn through $50 billion in seed money awfully fast.

Then, of course, there are the legal issues. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 has a thing or two to say about claiming ownership of space assets and using them to your tactical or economic advantage — none of it very good. Even if you get around those hurdles, it's not even certain space mining would be as lucrative as the Planetary Resources folks imagine. We can always make use of practical, work-a-day metals like iron and nickel, but precious metals like gold and platinum are valuable mostly because they're rare.

"From a simple business perspective this may not work," says Hertzfeld. "Have they analyzed what they would do to market prices if they brought back an asteroid full of platinum?"

None of these problems mean that mining asteroids isn't ultimately a good idea. And none of them mean that a group like Planetary Resources isn't smart to get the thinking — and the industry — moving in the right direction. But it's a mistake to believe that that industry will move fast — press conferences and bold face names notwithstanding. Founding Google and making movies are very hard things to do. Traveling in space is much, much harder; if the folks at Planetary Resources don't fully appreciate that yet, they will soon.

Deceased--George Cowan

George Cowan
February 15th, 1920 to April 20th, 2012

"Manhattan Project chemist George Cowan dies at 92"

April 20th, 2012

USA TODAY

Devoted to finding a way for science to help society, not much escaped the influence of chemist George Cowan. From the Manhattan Project and the hunt for evidence of the Soviet Union's first nuclear tests, to the Santa Fe Institute and the iconic Santa Fe Opera, friends recalled the fruits of his visionary ways.

Cowan died Friday at his home in Los Alamos. He was 92.

Friends confirmed his death to the Associated Press, saying it was the result of a fall at his home. Cowan was in good health and was planning to travel and continue working with the nonprofit science institute that he helped found in 1984.

"It's very sudden, very unexpected. An enormous loss," said close friend and institute co-founder David Pines. "The world is diminished for all of us who knew him."

Cowan worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory for nearly 40 years. He started in 1949 as a scientist and went on to serve as a director of chemistry and as associate lab director of research.

After doing graduate studies at Princeton, Cowan continued his nuclear research as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb. According to the Santa Fe Institute, Cowan was a troubleshooter for the effort at various research sites around the country and was among the few people who had knowledge of the bomb's separate components.

Cowan arrived at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1949 and within weeks began directing efforts to turn up radioactive fallout in samples that were collected near the Soviet border. What Cowan and his team detected indicated the Soviets were in possession of a nuclear bomb.

Cowan was considered one of the world's experts on nuclear weapons diagnostics by 1956, according to a biography from the lab.

"We can truly say that our country lost a true hero today," former U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., said in a statement. "He cannot be replaced, but let's hope he left footprints for us to follow."

Cowan was appointed to the White House Science Council during the Reagan administration.

It was during one of his meetings with the council that he looked around the room and thought about the need to educate the next generation of scientists to ensure the government would continue to have a valuable cadre of advisers.

Conversations about the formation of the Santa Fe Institute followed, some of them being held in the director's conference room on the fourth floor at Los Alamos Lab.

"He was a superb judge of people," said Pines. "He had a real instinct for who was a promising scientist and who was not and this was invaluable to him as he became a manager at Los Alamos."

Bill Enloe, chief executive of Los Alamos National Bank, which was founded by Cowan, said the chemist had a unique ability to lead people.

"It was not by intimidation or by position. It was because what he said made so much sense," Enloe said. "He accomplished a great deal because people were anxious to help and work with him."

Enloe ticked off a list of Cowan's accomplishments that ranged from his scientific accolades and the start of the scientific think tank to the early childhood development programs in New Mexico that he helped influence.

Then there was Cowan's love of travel, food, wine and music. He sat on the board of the Santa Fe Opera and was the first treasurer of the opera's foundation.

Pines recalled the story Cowan had told him about his role in helping preserve the opera, a venue that today draws thousands of visitors from around the world to its unique outdoor stage.

"He managed to get a loan for them from the bank that tied them over," Pines said. "Otherwise the Santa Fe Opera would have gone under many, many years ago."

Officials at the Santa Fe Opera downplayed the suggestion that the organization was ever on the financial ropes, but they said Cowan was a terrific asset to the opera while he served on the board.

Friends used words such as intelligent and practical to describe Cowan, who lived in the same modest home on Los Alamos' 42nd Street since first moving there with his wife decades ago. His wife, Helen "Satch" Dunham, was also a chemist. She died last year and the couple had no children.

Cowan was a philanthropist, having given most of his wealth to charitable causes that he was passionate about, Enloe said.

"He had a large impact on a lot of people," he said.
George Cowan [Wikipedia]

Contamination beyond microscopic

Contamination of other worlds is not limited to microbes...think of mankind himself.

"NASA Needs New Plan to Avoid Contaminating Other Worlds"

by

Ars Technica
 
April 19th, 2012

Wired

Over the past several decades, there’s been a stunning revolution in how we view the prospect of life on other planets. Starting with the Voyager missions in the 1970s, it became clear that the Solar System had a number of bodies that were geologically active. Evidence for oceans of liquid water and hints of Mars’ watery past soon followed. Meanwhile, back on Earth, we began to discover that life could survive in some extremely harsh conditions: high radioactivity, near-boiling water, even under blood red ice in Antarctica.

These findings raised two prospects, one exciting, one worrisome. The Solar System could be much more hospitable to life than we ever thought, but if we sent probes looking for it, there was the chance we could transfer an Earth-origin extremophile to the new world, ruining everything. To that end, NASA established some rough guidelines for how to treat the risk of contamination on its deep space probes. Recently, the National Academies of Science was tasked with evaluating the protocols. The organization found them a bit lacking, based on a risk target that is “apparently arbitrary.”

The existing standard for NASA missions to other worlds focuses on places like Mars and Jupiter’s moon Europa, where the evidence of liquid water is extensive. The new report would add Saturn’s Enceladus, which expels liquid water through visible geysers, and also Triton, the largest satellite of Neptune. This last body appears to be a Kuiper belt object captured by the planet (it orbits counter to Neptune’s rotation). The Voyager flyby identified extensive surface remodeling and possible surface eruptions, suggesting the presence of liquids. Although this may be liquid nitrogen, we don’t currently know enough about the moon to rule out the possibility of water.

If any of these worlds harbor either interesting prebiotic chemistry or even life, we’d obviously want to study it. And the surest possible way to eliminate that prospect is to introduce organisms from Earth as part of the process of accessing these environments. NASA has been considering how to avoid this since as far back as the Viking landers sent to Mars in the 1970s (which were baked at 111°C for a day and a half to kill anything off).

NASA’s current policy dates back a bit over a decade, to another report by the National Research Council (the arm of the Academies responsible for this one). That was based on an earlier standard suggested by the Committee on Space Research (COSPAR) of the International Council for Science. COSPAR had suggested creating a list of the probabilities that Earth-based life would survive various events associated with a space probe, such as radiation exposure, extreme cold and heat, etc. If the probabilities were multiplied and came out to less than a one-in-10,000 chance of contamination, the risk was considered acceptable.

That one-in-10,000 chance, the new report finds, doesn’t seem to have any solid basis. “Unfortunately, the historical literature does not record the rationale for COSPAR’s adoption of the 10-4 standard,” the authors report. “Nor, in, fact has the committee been able to come up with its own quantitative rationale for this number.” If the standard, as they say, is arbitrary, the process for evaluating the probability is seriously flawed. The process of multiplying probabilities together only works if those probabilities are independent, and there is no evidence that some of them are. For example, if cold resistant bacteria are more likely to be radiation resistant, it would throw the whole calculation off.

Given their dissatisfaction with the existing standards, the committee behind the new report has come up with a new one. They call for the use of a binary decision tree, in which a series of yes or no questions are considered: is there liquid water at the destination, is there some form of chemical energy to support life, etc. Strict attempts to control for contamination should only take place if the answers to most of these questions indicate there’s a risk that it will happen.

The report also points out that there are a number of areas that we can research right here on Earth that would help us understand the risks better. Any organism that could find a home in the environments on other worlds will be, by necessity, very cold tolerant. But we haven’t studied cold tolerant bacteria as well as we’ve looked at the ones that grow in hot environments. In particular, the report suggests that we look into whether the spores of cold tolerant organisms could survive some of the heat associated with decontamination and launch procedures, and whether they can form biofilms that aid their survival.

The authors also call for NASA to develop imaging technology that will actually let them scan spacecraft for microorganisms during assembly. This would help the launch team to make informed choices about decontamination, rather than relying on estimates or indirect measures.

Right now, it doesn’t look like NASA will have the budget to go anywhere near most of the locations considered to be at risk of the contamination for many years. But the ESA is considering a Europa mission, and the report might help inform the decisions made by that agency. And, eventually, NASA will undoubtedly find a way to send probes out to look for new life.

Deceased--Dick Clark

Dick Clark
November 30th, 1929 to April 18th, 2012



"TV Host and Icon of New Year’s Eve Dies at 82"

by

Bruce Weber

April 18th, 2012

The New York Times

Dick Clark, the perpetually youthful-looking television host whose long-running daytime song-and-dance fest, “American Bandstand,” did as much as anyone or anything to advance the influence of teenagers and rock ’n’ roll on American culture, died on Wednesday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 82.

A spokesman, Paul Shefrin, said Mr. Clark had a heart attack Wednesday morning at Saint John’s Health Center, where he had gone the day before for an outpatient procedure.

Mr. Clark had a well-publicized stroke in December 2004, shortly before he was to appear on the annual televised New Year’s Eve party he had produced and hosted every year since 1973. He returned a year later, and although he spoke haltingly, he continued to make brief appearances on the show, including the one this past New Year’s Eve.

With the boyish good looks of a bound-for-success junior executive and a ubiquitous on-camera presence, Mr. Clark was among the most recognizable faces in the world, even if what he was most famous for — spinning records and jabbering with teenagers — was on the insubstantial side. In addition to “American Bandstand” and “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve,” he hosted innumerable awards shows, comedy specials, series based on TV outtakes and the game show "$10,000 Pyramid” (which lasted long enough to see the stakes ratcheted up to $100,000). He also made guest appearances on dramatic and comedy series, usually playing himself.

But he was as much a businessman as a television personality — “I get enormous pleasure and excitement sitting in on conferences with accountants, tax experts and lawyers,” he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1961 — and he was especially deft at packaging entertainment products for the small screen.

Starting in the 1960s, Mr. Clark built an entertainment empire on the shoulders of “Bandstand,” producing other music shows like “Where the Action Is” and “It’s Happening” and eventually expanding into game shows, awards shows, comedy specials and series, talk shows, children’s programming, reality programming, and movies. His umbrella company, Dick Clark Productions, has produced thousands of hours of television; it also has a licensing arm and has owned or operated restaurants and theaters like the Dick Clark American Bandstand Theater in Branson, Mo.

Over half a century, Mr. Clark made millions as a producer or executive producer, shepherding projects onto the airwaves that even he acknowledged were more diverting than ennobling: awards shows like the Golden Globes, the Academy of Country Music Awards and the American Music Awards; “TV’s Bloopers & Practical Jokes” and other omnibus shows featuring collections of clips; and television-movie biographies and dramas, in either uplifting or lurid mode, that targeted devotees of camp, kitsch or B-list celebrities. He wasn’t high-minded about his work.

“I’ve always dealt with light, frivolous things that didn’t really count; I’m not ashamed of that,” he said during a 1999 interview for the Archive of American Television. “There’s no redeeming cultural value whatsoever to ‘Bloopers,’ but it’s been on for 20 years.” He added: “It’s a piece of fluff. I’ve been a fluffmeister for a long time.”

But none of it would have been possible without “American Bandstand,” a show that earned immediate popularity and had astonishing longevity. It was broadcast nationally (and for several years daily) from 1957 to 1989, and the list of well-known performers who were seen on it (many of them lip-synching their recently recorded hits) spanned generations: from Ritchie Valens to Luther Vandross; from the Monkees to Madonna; from Little Anthony and the Imperials to Los Lobos; from Dusty Springfield to Buffalo Springfield to Rick Springfield. Mr. Clark was around for it all.

The right man at the right time, Mr. Clark was a radio personality in Philadelphia in 1956 when he stepped into the role of host of what was then a local television show called “Bandstand” after the regular host was arrested for drunken driving and fired. By the following October, the show was being broadcast on ABC nationwide with a new name, “American Bandstand,” and for the next several years it was seen every weekday afternoon by as many as 20 million viewers, most of whom were undoubtedly not yet out of high school and tuned in to watch a few dozen of their peers dance chastely to the latest recordings of pop hits, showing off new steps like the twist, the pony and the Watusi, and rating the new records in brief interviews.

“It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it” became a catchphrase.

Handsome and glib, Dick Clark was their music-savvy older brother, and from that position of authority he presided, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, over a grass-roots revolution in American culture. Not only was “American Bandstand” the first show to make use of the new technology, television, to spread the gospel of rock ’n’ roll, in its early years introducing a national audience to teen idols like Fabian and Connie Francis, first-generation rockers like Bill Haley and Jerry Lee Lewis, and singing ensembles like the Everly Brothers, but it also helped persuade broadcasters and advertisers of the power of teenagers to steer popular taste.

“At that moment in time, the world realized that kids might rule the world,” Mr. Clark once said. “They had their own music, their own fashion, their own money.”

By early 1958, “American Bandstand” was a big enough hit that delighted network executives installed a new show in a concert format in its Saturday night lineup, “The Dick Clark Show,” and in June of that year sent it on the road, broadcasting from a number of cities. In October, when “the Dick Clark Show” originated from Atlanta, both black and white teenagers were in the audience — it amounted to one of the first racially integrated rock concerts — and, with National Guard troops present, it weathered threats from the Ku Klux Klan.

The nighttime “Dick Clark Show” lasted only until 1960, and “American Bandstand” reduced its schedule from every weekday to every Saturday afternoon in 1963, but Mr. Clark was nonetheless one of the biggest success stories in the early days of television.

In spite of his success, though, Mr. Clark, who never hid his desire for wealth, wasn’t getting rich as a network employee, and he had begun investing shrewdly and voluminously in the businesses that “American Bandstand” supported: talent management, music publishing, record distribution and merchandising, among others. But his bank account and his clean-cut image were damaged temporarily when Congress convened hearings into payola, the record company practice of bribing disc jockeys to play their records on the air.

In late 1959, with the hearings pending, ABC insisted that Mr. Clark divest himself of all his record-related businesses, which he did. He was called to testify before the House Special Subcommittee on Legislative Oversight in April 1960, and though he denied ever taking money to play records, he acknowledged a number of acts that exposed what many Congressmen deemed the cozier than ethical relationship that disc jockeys in general, and Mr. Clark in particular, had with the music industry.

For an investment of $125 in one record company, for example, Mr. Clark received, over two years, $31,700 in salary and stock profit. He admitted that some songs and records might have been given to his publishing and distribution companies because of his affiliation with “American Bandstand.” He also acknowledged accepting a ring and a fur stole from a record manufacturer.

Mr. Clark was never convicted of a crime, but he said that having to comply with the network’s divestiture request cost him millions.

“I never took any money to play records,” Mr. Clark said in his 1999 Archive of American Television interview. “I made money other ways. Horizontally, vertically, every which way you can think of, I made money from that show.”

Richard Wagstaff Clark was born on Nov. 30, 1929, in Bronxville, N.Y., and grew up in nearby Mount Vernon. His father, Richard Augustus Clark, was a salesman who commuted to New York City until he was hired to manage a radio station in Utica, N.Y. Young Richard’s older brother, Bradley, was killed in World War II.

As a boy he listened often to the radio, and at 13 he went to see a live radio broadcast starring Jimmy Durante and Garry Moore. From then on, he wanted to be in broadcasting. His first job, at 17, was in the mailroom of his father’s station. He often said he learned the most important lesson of his career from listening to Arthur Godfrey.

“I emulated him,” Mr. Clark said. “I loved him, I adored him, because he had the ability to communicate to one person who was listening or watching. Most people would say, in a stentorian voice, ‘Good evening, everyone.’ Everyone? Godfrey knew there was only one person listening at a time.”

Mr. Clark studied business administration at Syracuse University, where he was a disc jockey on the student radio station, and after graduating worked briefly as an announcer for his father’s station before getting his first job in television, at WKTV in Utica, as a news announcer.

In 1952 he was given his own radio show on WFIL in Philadelphia, “Dick Clark’s Caravan of Music,” an easy-listening afternoon program. A few months later, the station’s television affiliate began an afternoon music show called “Bandstand,” with Bob Horn and Lee Stewart as hosts, which at first showed films of musical performances for young studio audiences but evolved into a dance show, as Mr. Clark recalled, when audience members got bored with the films and started dancing to the music. As the show grew in popularity, the station changed the name of Mr. Clark’s radio show to “Bandstand” as well, even though his playlist remained uncontroversial and palliating fare for a relatively small audience of middle-aged housewives.

It was in the summer of 1956 that Mr. Horn, by then the sole host of the show, was arrested and subsequently dismissed, and the station turned to young Dick Clark.

“I was 26 years old, looked the part, knew the music, was very comfortable on television,” Mr. Clark recalled. “‘They said, ‘Do you want it?’ And I said, ‘Oh, man, do I want it!’ ”

Mr. Clark’s first two marriages ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife, Kari Wigton, and ; three children, Richard, Duane and Cindy.

“American Bandstand,” a cultural touchstone for the baby-boomer generation, gave rise to the Top 40 radio format and helped make rock ’n’ roll a palatable product for visual media — not just television but also the movies. It was influential enough that ABC broadcast a 40th-anniversary special in 1992, three years after the show went off the air, and a 50th-anniversary special 10 years later. Of course, Mr. Clark, who had long since been popularly known as “the world’s oldest teenager,” was the host of both.

The show’s influence waned somewhat after it changed to a weekly format and the next year moved its base of operations to Los Angeles. And as the psychedelic era took hold in the late 1960s and rock ’n’ roll fragmented into subgenres, the show could no longer command a central role on the pop music scene.

Indeed, the show was criticized for sanitizing rock ’n’ roll, taking the edge off a sexualized and rebellious music. But it was also, in important ways, on the leading edge of the culture. Mr. Clark and his producer, Tony Mammarella, began integrating the dance floor on “American Bandstand” shortly after he took over as host; much of the music, after all, was being made by black performers.

“I can remember, a vivid recollection, the first time ever in my life I talked to a black teenager on national television; it was in what we called the rate-a-record portion of ‘Bandstand,’ ” Mr. Clark recalled. “It was the first time in a hundred years I got sweaty palms.”

He was fearful, he said, of a backlash from Southern television affiliates, but that didn’t happen. From that day on, he said, more blacks began appearing on the show. And as time went on, the show’s willingness to bridge a racial divide that went almost entirely unacknowledged by network programming was starkly apparent, “providing American television broadcasting with the most visible ongoing image of ethnic diversity until the 1970s,” according to an essay about the program on the Web site of the Chicago-based Museum of Broadcast Communications.

“We didn’t do it because we were do-gooders, or liberals,” Mr. Clark said. “It was just a thing we thought we ought to do. It was naïve.”

Mr. Clark won five Emmy Awards, including a Daytime Emmy lifetime achievement award in 1994, and in 1993 was inducted into both the Television Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. He owed his success, he said, to knowing the mind of the broad audience.

“My greatest asset in life,” he said, “was I never lost touch with hot dogs, hamburgers, going to the fair and hanging out at the mall.”

Dick Clark [Wikipedia]

This is your Life Dick Clark

Doing science...Giovanni Battista Riccioli does it right

The Italian astronomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli is commonly credited with performing the first precise experiments to determine the acceleration of a freely falling body. Riccioli has been discussed by historians of science, sometimes positively but often not, but translations of his work into modern languages are not readily available. Presented here is a translation of his experiments regarding the nature of the motion of a falling body. Riccioli provides a thorough description of his experiments, and his data are quite good. He appears to have a model approach to science: He attacks the question of free fall with the expectation of disproving Galileo’s ideas, yet he is convinced by his data that Galileo is indeed correct, and he promptly informs a former protégée of Galileo’s of the results.


"Doubting, Testing, and Confirming Galileo: A translation of Giovanni Battista Riccioli’s experiments regarding the motion of a falling body, as reported in his 1651 Almagestum Novum" by Christopher M. Graney

Did Mileva Marić assist Einstein?

This debate has been around for a long time. Here is a paper by Galina Weinstein who claims that the evidence supports the belief that Mileva Marić didn't.

"Did Mileva Marić assist Einstein in writing his 1905 path breaking papers?" by Galina Weinstein

Drug-Resistant Bacteria...pathway to man's demise?

The Lachuguilla cave system, where scientists discovered antibiotic-resistant bacteria, is part of Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico. Above, an explorer admires the the Selenite Chandelier display in Carlsbad Caverns.

"Drug-Resistant Bacteria Discovered in 4-Million-Year-Old Cave"

In pristine and ancient samples of bacteria, uncontaminated by human activity, researchers find resistance to several antibiotic treatments, both natural and man-made.

by

Alexandra Sifferlin

April 12th, 2012

Time

More than 400 meters below the Earth’s surface, in a virtually untouched 4-million-year-old cave, scientists have discovered antibiotic-resistant bacteria, whose existence could explain why the modern drugs we use to treat infections are failing.

Our overzealous use of antibiotics, largely in hospitals and on animal farms, has long been blamed for fostering the emergence of drug-resistant “superbugs.” But the bacteria samples from the isolated Lechuguilla cave system in New Mexico suggests that drug resistance is actually an ancient trait. It’s possible that bacteria’s drug-resistance genes evolved millions of years ago in organisms like those on Lechuguilla’s cave walls, and are showing up in superbugs now through bacteria’s natural process of gene swapping.

The pristine samples of bacteria taken from the cave revealed that the bugs are not infectious to humans but can fend off several types of antibiotics, including newer synthetic drugs

“Clinical microbiologists have been perplexed for the longest time. When you bring a new antibiotic into the hospital, resistance inevitably appears shortly thereafter, within months to years,” study leader Gerry Wright, a chemical biologist at McMaster University in Ontario, told National Geographic. “It’s still a big question: Where is this coming from. Almost no one thought to look at other bacteria, the ones that don’t necessarily cause disease.”

Since the discovery of the Lechuguilla cave in 1986, very few have been allowed to explore it, which makes it ideal for studying life that have been uncontaminated by human activity. Wright and his team looked at 93 types of bacteria procured from the cave, testing the strains against 26 different antibiotics. About 70% of the bacteria were resistant to three or four classes of antibiotics, and three of the strains — distant relatives of anthrax — resisted 14 of the 26 antibiotics.

“Our study shows that antibiotic resistance is hard-wired into bacteria,” Wright told Scientific American. “It could be billions of years old.”

Many questions still remain. The findings add to the evidence that antibiotic resistance is ancient, but it doesn’t explain how that resistance gets into hospitals or farms today. It’s also not clear how the cave bacteria’s seeming antibiotic resistance evolved, or whether it’s really resistance or something else. Stuart Levy, a physician and microbiologist at Tufts Medical School, told National Geographic:

“It’s an issue of which came first, the chicken or the egg? Did microbes generate the antibiotics down there, then resistance developed, or is it the other way around?” The cave bacteria, the thinking goes, may generate natural antibiotics during “chemical warfare” with their microbial competition.

But even if bacteria’s ability to evade drugs is entrenched in its evolutionary history, it doesn’t mean the health-care or livestock farming industries are off the hook. Indeed, Wright’s study comes on the heels of a U.S. Food and Drug Administration proposal asking drug manufacturers and veterinarians to drastically reduce their use of antibiotics in agriculture to prevent resistance.

The researchers said they also discovered novel mechanisms of drug resistance in the bacteria they studied, another reason antibiotics must be used carefully. The authors write:

This fact further underlines the importance of the judicious use of antibiotics to avoid selection of existing resistance elements and their subsequent mobilization through microbial communities thereby limiting the effectiveness of these drugs to treat infectious diseases.