Reported and Edited by Linda Moulton Howe
April 11, 2001 College Station, Texas - The number of outbreaks in the UK has now reached 921 with three new cases confirmed this week. More than 955,000 animals have been earmarked for slaughter to contain and eradicate the highly contagious virus, with 345, 000 waiting to be killed and 178,000 carcasses awaiting disposal. Computer experts project that the virus won't reach its peak until June 2001. By then, England might reach 4,000 cases of foot-and-mouth disease.
April 8, 2001 Washington, D. C. - NASA successfully launched its Odyssey probe to Mars on Saturday, April 7. The spacecraft is expected to reach the red planet on October 24th after a 286 million mile trip. After aerobraking to get into a lower orbit, instruments aboard will be able to analyze surface rock chemistry and take images in both color and infra red. One place that would be very interesting to visit again is the South Pole where the Mars Orbital Camera (MOC) took the 1999 photograph above that provoked writer Arthur C. Clarke (2001 and 2010) to question if the images were biological and not geological.
April 1, 2001 Washington, D. C. - Representative James C. Greenwood (R., Pa.) called a hearing to order on March 28, 2001 to consider human cloning and whether it should be banned in the United States. Rep. Greenwood is Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee's Oversight and Investigation Subcommittee. "Although publicly funded human cloning research is prohibited," Rep. Greenwood said, "privately funded human cloning research is not."
March 18, 2001 Houston, Texas - This past week I was in Houston at the Johnson Space Center to attend the 32nd Lunar and Planetary Space Institute meeting held since the first Apollo days. This was the largest conference so far. More than a thousand planetary scientists from around the world presented their latest research data on Mercury, Venus, Earth's Moon, the Asteroid Eros, Jupiter's moons, Europa, Callisto and Io. But probably the most exciting sessions were about Mars. There were more than a hundred papers presented about the red planet. Hundreds of high resolution photographs from the Mars Global Surveyor showed valleys and rippled features that on Earth would mean only one thing: water.
March 11, 2001 - Planetary scientists, geophysicists and astrogeologists will be gathering in Houston this week to discuss our solar system. It's the 32nd Lunar and Planetary Institute meeting at the Johnson Space Center. One of the most puzzling planets is Mars and recently I talked with two scientists who will be presenting papers about their work on the red planet. Dr. Maria Zuber is Professor of Geophysics and Planetary Science at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She is also Deputy Investigator of the Global Topography Map Mission now underway on Mars. Dr. Bob Craddock is a geologist at the Smithsonian Institution Center for Earth and Planetary Studies in Washington, D. C.
February 27, 2001 Cambridge, Massachusetts - A revolutionary step in physics was reported around the world on January 18, 2001 when The New York Times headlined "Scientists Bring Light to Full Stop, Hold It,Then Send It on Its Way." The scientists are actually two independent teams of physicists who both managed to slow photons down. One group is led by Lene Vestergaard Hau, Ph.D. of Harvard University and the Rowland Institute for Science in Cambridge, Mass. The second group was lead by Ronald L. Walsworth, Ph.D., and Mikhail D. Lukin, Ph.D. of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, also in Cambridge, with colleagues Dr. David Phillips, Annet Fleischhauer and Dr. Alois Mair.
"It's puzzling. I looked at a few pictures around (area) and couldn't find anything to explain it. Very puzzling! These are huge boulders. There are no indications of any outcrops that could shed such boulders."
- Michael Carr, U. S. Geological Survey -
February 25, 2001 Carlsbad, California - On February 14 while NASA's Near spacecraft was making its historic landing on the Eros asteroid between Mars and Jupiter, a camera on the Mars Global Surveyor orbiting the red planet was under the guidance of an international group of four girls and five boys aged 10 to 15 known as the Red Rover Goes to Mars team.
February 12, 2001 Laurel, Maryland - Scientists at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory broke out the champagne to celebrate today when the clock ticked 3:02:10 p.m. EST and the last picture was taken by NASA's NEAR Shoemaker spacecraft as it lowered at 4 mph for the first historic landing of an Earth vehicle on the asteroid Eros 196 million miles away. Touchdown was in the yellow circle below on the edge of the asteroid's saddle-shaped feature named Himeros.
February 11, 2001 Upton, New York - There was an announcement this week from the Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York that has shaken up particle physicists. Something unknown is causing muons to wobble in a strong magnetic field differently than predicted. That could mean that the fundamental structure of the universe is not quite what physicists thought.
January 21, 2001 Europe - Mad cow disease once thought to be confined to England continues to be found in western Europe. This past week scientists announced the discovery of a diseased cow in Italy. The term "mad cow" comes from the shaking and stumbling of sick animals before they die. The scientific name is bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, now thought to have spread by recycling meat and bone meal from infected animals back into cattle feed. But even after strict measures were taken in England and other European countries to eliminate infected cattle feed, mad cow disease cases have been reported in several western European countries.