2015: Regent’s Park International Airport

A line of limousines and taxis snakes its way into the Royal Park to deliver 300 well-heeled passengers and their smart luggage to the discreet air terminal. They are in no rush because the flight they are about to board to New York will take two days.

Moored on the grass outside the terminal is a 600ft long behemoth, a vast Hybrid Air Vehicle. A cross between a balloon and an aircraft wing, this new-wave blimp is filled with non-flammable helium and air. Slung beneath is a vast passenger cabin akin to a miniature first-class cruise ship with dining rooms, a ballroom, bars and a casino.

For the same price as a club-class plane ticket, these 300 discerning travellers will eat, sip cocktails and dance as they float serenely across the Atlantic.

There is no runway; there is no need. Once clearance is given for take-off, the captain disengages the hover cushions that suck the craft to the ground, directs the thrust of four 8,000hp engines down, and powers the ship up to 9,000ft.

In 48 hours they will touch down in New York harbour, having burned just a fifth of the fuel used by an aeroplane. It’s a stress-free hop from central London to the centre of Manhattan, with no lengthy airport connections at either end, and no icebergs either.

The doomed R101 in one of the hangers

Airship travel has been a distant dream ever since a catastrophic fire in 1937 ripped through the  LZ-129 Hindenburg as it neared its mooring mast in New Jersey, killing thirty-five people on board and one man on the ground.

Reporter Herbert Morrison’s vivid eye-witness testimony would become the industry’s epitaph: ‘It’s a terrific crash, ladies and gentlemen. It’s smoke, and it’s in flames now; and the frame is crashing to the ground… Oh the humanity!’

Could an industry dogged by tragedy and belonging to a bygone era finally have found the technology to cruise back into the mainstream?

The American Department of Defense thinks so. They have just handed a £315 million contract to design and build the world’s largest flying object to a small British company based in Bedfordshire. Having beaten aviation giants Lockheed Martin, Hybrid Air Vehicles have just four months to build the belly and bones of the craft – the payload module, the fuel tanks, the four engines, the propulsion ducts and bow thrusters (the prototype is pictured on the previous pages).

If all goes to plan these parts will leave its secure manufacturing facility in May, be loaded on a vast Antonov cargo plane, and flown to Arizona where they will join up with the ‘envelope’ (ie, the balloon).

Once assembly is complete, military technology giant Northrop Grumman will add the top-secret surveillance equipment and the vehicle will travel on its own power to a U.S. army base on the east coast of the United States. Once there the U.S. military will put the fully assembled 300ft long craft through its places, flying it with pilots and without.

When it finally completes testing and trials in January 2012, it will leave the US and fly back across the Atlantic to the UK, the first time this has happened since the heyday of Zeppelins in the Thirties.

Guided by a three-man crew, the giant ship will stay at a U.S. Army base here, ready to be deployed. It will be available for use in Afghanistan where it can be flown remotely, climbing to 20,000ft and circling for 21 days, an omniscient god perpetually surveying the battlefield and giving advance warnings of IED attacks and ambushes.

The Cardington airship hangars in Bedfordshire

A zeppelin in a war zone?

Testing has shown that bullets, even missiles pass directly through the envelope because of the incredibly low pressure. Reassuringly, the company insists it has come a long way from the technology of the Thirties.

The 60 per cent helium and 40 per cent air mix replaces flammable hydrogen. And where the classic cigar-shaped Zeppelins struggled against the wind, hybrids use it in combination with their aerodynamic shape  to get more lift. They are helped by vectored thrust, like a Harrier jet, which directs the engine output downwards to provide vertical lift and allows them to take off carrying heavy payloads, even in high winds. They also burn less fuel than a plane while hauling more cargo and, with hovercraft-style landing gear, they don’t require an airport. They can even touch down on water.

The vast 800ft-long Cardington Airship Hangars in Bedfordshire are an eerie sight, dominating the skyline for miles around. Here history looms large.

In 1916 about 800 people worked at Cardington for Shorts Brothers, producing their first airship in 1918. In hard times after the war, the station was closed and construction abandoned, reopening again in 1924 as part of the Imperial Airship Service.

It was in Cardington that the 777ft-long R101, the then biggest airship in the world, was built, and from here that it began its ill-fated final voyage at 6.24pm on Saturday October 4, 1930 bound for India; first planned stop Egypt.

R101 reached London by 8pm, crossed the Channel in two hours, and at midnight a final message went out: ‘15 miles SW of Abbeville speed 33 knots. Wind 243 degrees (West South West) 35 miles an hour. Altimeter height 1,500ft. Air temperature 51 Fahrenheit. Weather – intermittent rain. Cloud nimbus at 500 feet. After an excellent supper our distinguished passengers smoked a final cigar and having sighted the French coast have now gone to bed to rest after the excitement of their leave-taking. All essential services are functioning satisfactorily.’

Two hours later, R101 went into a steep dive, the nose hitting the ground at just 13.8mph. Then fire broke out, from which only eight of the 56 passengers and crew survived. Plans for more advanced and bigger airships were scrapped. After a brief resurgence during World War II when they made barrage balloons for the war effort, the Cardington sheds and the industry slid into decline.

Now, Cardington shed No 2 acts as a temporary home to Warner Brothers’ technicians. The cavernous space was just the job for a full-sized mock-up of Gotham  City for Christopher Nolan’s epic Batman series. The other largely derelict shed is out of bounds, a reminder of the industry’s capricious history.

How the new breed of Hybrid Air Vehicles would look over London’s Olympic complex

But just as cruise ships survived the Titanic disaster, so some enthusiasts never gave up hope for the airship. Among them was Roger Munk, the epitome of a charismatic British engineering visionary. The idea for the Hybrid Air Vehicle was his; he spent much of his  40-year career designing and building airships, completing a number of ‘lighter than air’ projects for the American military.

Yet his own work was haunted by the inherent danger of airships going up in flames. In 1995, a fire apparently caused accidentally during welding work set alight the Weeksville hangar in North Carolina. At half-a-mile long, it was the largest wood-construction building in the world. Supports for the 180-ton doors were being rebuilt when the fire took hold, burning the hangar to the ground and destroying his Sentinel 1000 blimp.

Munk refused to give up. He decided to begin a new project creating a vehicle that would solve some of the problems inherent in airships, especially ground handling and ballast issues. He based his 15-man team in portable huts in the shadow of the Cardington sheds, and went back to the drawing board.

With a small beer tent as a hangar, Munk created the concept of a hybrid. The first prototype was flown in 2000. Though Munk was able to oversee the final perfection of his vision, he died of a heart attack in February 2010 – before the team heard news that they had won the U.S. military contract.

The team now has 100 engineers and designers and the firm has ditched its draughty sheds for two brand new office buildings nearby. But if Hybrid Air Vehicles’ potential is taken up then the team hopes to begin manufacturing and storing the vehicles again in Cardington.

The 50ft long prototype itself seems otherworldly. Almost as wide as it is long, it is surprisingly balloon-like to the touch. Even the most cynical observer cannot disguise the thrill of childlike wonder on feeling just how light this huge craft is. The pressure inside it is just 0.1 psi – a car tyre is between 20 and 40 psi.

CEO Gary Elliott, the man largely responsible for putting together the Northrop Grumman deal, says: ‘We took existing technologies and the concept of an airship, took a step back and thought – why don’t we do this and this differently, so that it projects itself through the air?’

The Hybrid Air Vehicles’ flight simulator

In a nearby office a team of flight-control specialists occupies a meeting room. In the corner of another office sits a full-size mock-up of the cockpit, constructed entirely from cardboard. The cabinetry is the work of the team’s 70-year-old handyman.

Pilots sit here and try out all possible instrumentation combinations to find the most practical configuration. Who needs  virtual reality when you have a few old computer boxes and some photocopied instruments?

A few footsteps away, though, there is a concession to technology – a large simulator which operates using four screens linked to four networked, high-end gaming PCs. Veteran airship pilots, recruited from across the industry, with experience flying blimps and seaplanes, are teaching the computers how to react to various flying situations, so that when a remote operator issues the ship with a command, the automated system will be able to move the controls in the same way as a human pilot; in other words, they are teaching it to fly itself.

The system has been designed by another UK company, Blue Bear Systems Research. It designed the flight-control system of the Harrier jump jet and also designs UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) that can be launched and fly themselves autonomously along a pre-programmed route.

Although every Hybrid Air Vehicle (HAV) will be capable of being flown remotely as a military surveillance platform, it will also be able to operate with a three-man crew – a pilot, co-pilot and load master. It takes about 100 hours of flight training to convert a pilot, though they don’t all make the switch easily, often because they aren’t used to stopping in mid-air.

Dave Burns is a pilot with thousands of hours experience flying passenger airliners for BA and Monarch. He is the company’s test pilot and chief flight training officer, and also the man who will fly the HAV 304 back across the Atlantic.

‘It doesn’t respond like a plane at all,’ says Burns. ‘You move the stick, telling the ship to move, and nothing happens for three or four seconds – and then it responds, which can be a little disconcerting. Plus, the mass underneath it acts like a pendulum, always trying to make it come level again.

‘The difficult thing is landing and take-off. In the past airships had ropes and ground crew waiting; we don’t need those so now what you have to do is present the vehicle so it comes down very slowly.’

A German Graf Zeppelin visiting Britain in 1931

Although the first 300ft version of the craft has been commissioned by the U.S. military, the real commercial potential of the vehicles could be for heavy lifting, says director of sales Gordon Taylor who has been living and breathing the things through multiple prototypes since joining his friend Roger Munk in 1997.

‘Our hybrids are based on a blend of technologies, in the same way that a Toyota Prius is a hybrid because it runs on electricity and petrol,’ he says.

‘Firstly it uses aerodynamics. The shape is like a big wing – air moves over it, lower air pressure is created across the top of the wing and it creates lift. Only if it’s fully loaded does it need a runway, and even then, with a 20 knot headwind they can land in three hull lengths.

‘Secondly we use “lighter-than-air” technology. With a normal airship you moor it on the ground to a mast. In order to fly anywhere it has to take off ballast, then it floats up. In a hybrid we push ourselves forward and that immediately generates lift.

‘Thirdly we have vectored thrust: our propulsion ducts rotate like a jump jet. Finally, we have hovercraft-style landing gear – a cushion of air that means that you can land on any reasonably flat surface, including water. This also works in reverse to secure the vehicle to the ground by suction.’

The company has calculated that it would take only 20 minutes to move a shipping container from Milton Keynes to London by HAV – a journey that presently takes hours thanks to traffic. Add a road network that grinds to a halt after a seasonal dusting of snow and you suddenly find an application for a cheaper, faster form of transport.

The Hindenburg disaster at Lakehurst, New Jersey in 1937 which marked the end of the era of passenger-carrying airships

‘You can forget ice road truckers too in places with more extreme cold,’ he adds.

‘They can carry the same load that goes on the back of those trucks and they love the cold because you get more lift in the denser air. We have a version with a 20-ton payload, which is what a Lockheed C-130 Hercules carries. We have plans for craft to eventually carry up to 1,000 tons.’

The team is already in formal discussions with oil companies that routinely spend hundreds of millions of dollars on roads and airports every time they find a new supply of oil or gas. By using HAVs the oil companies would simply be able to touch down without need of an airport.

‘Some of these companies are paying a million dollars a day in the development of infrastructure.

‘You could run these hybrids in convoy too, of course. The price difference between air freight and shipping is huge – so what if you could move freight by air but for a similar price as a ship? It could mean a whole new market in transport.’

Later this year the full-scale version of the current prototype will become the largest flying object in the world. After its initial use in military surveillance and heavy lifting, it could be just a few years before passengers are floating around beneath them. Need to be in New York fast? Take a plane. Don’t mind being in New York a day later? Then take an HAV.

And precisely how long will it take after that  for us to see a fleet of orange easyBalloons hauling budget passengers to and from Malaga?

From Wired Magazine by Steven Levy

But the warehouses aren’t meant to be understood by humans; they were built for bots. Every day, hundreds of robots course nimbly through the aisles, instantly identifying items and delivering them to flesh-and-blood packers on the periphery. Instead of organizing the warehouse as a human might—by placing like products next to one another, for instance—Diapers.com’s robots stick the items in various aisles throughout the facility. Then, to fill an order, the first available robot simply finds the closest requested item. The storeroom is an ever-shifting mass that adjusts to constantly changing data, like the size and popularity of merchandise, the geography of the warehouse, and the location of each robot. Set up by Kiva Systems, which has outfitted similar facilities for Gap, Staples, and Office Depot, the system can deliver items to packers at the rate of one every six seconds.

The Kiva bots may not seem very smart. They don’t possess anything like human intelligence and certainly couldn’t pass a Turing test. But they represent a new forefront in the field of artificial intelligence. Today’s AI doesn’t try to re-create the brain. Instead, it uses machine learning, massive data sets, sophisticated sensors, and clever algorithms to master discrete tasks. Examples can be found everywhere: The Google global machine uses AI to interpret cryptic human queries. Credit card companies use it to track fraud. Netflix uses it to recommend movies to subscribers. And the financial system uses it to handle billions of trades (with only the occasional meltdown).

This explosion is the ironic payoff of the seemingly fruitless decades-long quest to emulate human intelligence. That goal proved so elusive that some scientists lost heart and many others lost funding. People talked of an AI winter—a barren season in which no vision or project could take root or grow. But even as the traditional dream of AI was freezing over, a new one was being born: machines built to accomplish specific tasks in ways that people never could. At first, there were just a few green shoots pushing up through the frosty ground. But now we’re in full bloom. Welcome to AI summer.

Today’s AI bears little resemblance to its initial conception. The field’s trailblazers in the 1950s and ’60s believed success lay in mimicking the logic-based reasoning that human brains were thought to use. In 1957, the AI crowd confidently predicted that machines would soon be able to replicate all kinds of human mental achievements. But that turned out to be wildly unachievable, in part because we still don’t really understand how the brain works, much less how to re-create it.

So during the ’80s, graduate students began to focus on the kinds of skills for which computers were well-suited and found they could build something like intelligence from groups of systems that operated according to their own kind of reasoning. “The big surprise is that intelligence isn’t a unitary thing,” says Danny Hillis, who cofounded Thinking Machines, a company that made massively parallel supercomputers. “What we’ve learned is that it’s all kinds of different behaviors.”

AI researchers began to devise a raft of new techniques that were decidedly not modeled on human intelligence. By using probability-based algorithms to derive meaning from huge amounts of data, researchers discovered that they didn’t need to teach a computer how to accomplish a task; they could just show it what people did and let the machine figure out how to emulate that behavior under similar circumstances. They used genetic algorithms, which comb through randomly generated chunks of code, skim the highest-performing ones, and splice them together to spawn new code. As the process is repeated, the evolved programs become amazingly effective, often comparable to the output of the most experienced coders.

MIT’s Rodney Brooks also took a biologically inspired approach to robotics. His lab programmed six-legged buglike creatures by breaking down insect behavior into a series of simple commands—for instance, “If you run into an obstacle, lift your legs higher.” When the programmers got the rules right, the gizmos could figure out for themselves how to navigate even complicated terrain. (It’s no coincidence that iRobot, the company Brooks cofounded with his MIT students, produced the Roomba autonomous vacuum cleaner, which doesn’t initially know the location of all the objects in a room or the best way to traverse it but knows how to keep itself moving.)

The fruits of the AI revolution are now all around us. Once researchers were freed from the burden of building a whole mind, they could construct a rich bestiary of digital fauna, which few would dispute possess something approaching intelligence. “If you told somebody in 1978, ‘You’re going to have this machine, and you’ll be able to type a few words and instantly get all of the world’s knowledge on that topic,’ they would probably consider that to be AI,” Google cofounder Larry Page says. “That seems routine now, but it’s a really big deal.”

Even formerly mechanical processes like driving a car have become collaborations with AI systems. “At first it was the automatic braking system,” Brooks says. “The person’s foot was saying, I want to brake this much, and the intelligent system in the middle figured when to actually apply the brakes to make that work. Now you’re starting to get automatic parking and lane-changing.” Indeed, Google has been developing and testing cars that drive themselves with only minimal human involvement; by October, they had already covered 140,000 miles of pavement.

In short, we are engaged in a permanent dance with machines, locked in an increasingly dependent embrace. And yet, because the bots’ behavior isn’t based on human thought processes, we are often powerless to explain their actions. Wolfram Alpha, the website created by scientist Stephen Wolfram, can solve many mathematical problems. It also seems to display how those answers are derived. But the logical steps that humans see are completely different from the website’s actual calculations. “It doesn’t do any of that reasoning,” Wolfram says. “Those steps are pure fake. We thought, how can we explain this to one of those humans out there?”

The lesson is that our computers sometimes have to humor us, or they will freak us out. Eric Horvitz—now a top Microsoft researcher and a former president of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence—helped build an AI system in the 1980s to aid pathologists in their studies, analyzing each result and suggesting the next test to perform. There was just one problem—it provided the answers too quickly. “We found that people trusted it more if we added a delay loop with a flashing light, as though it were huffing and puffing to come up with an answer,” Horvitz says.

But we must learn to adapt. AI is so crucial to some systems—like the financial infrastructure—that getting rid of it would be a lot harder than simply disconnecting HAL 9000’s modules. “In some sense, you can argue that the science fiction scenario is already starting to happen,” Thinking Machines’ Hillis says. “The computers are in control, and we just live in their world.” Wolfram says this conundrum will intensify as AI takes on new tasks, spinning further out of human comprehension. “Do you regulate an underlying algorithm?” he asks. “That’s crazy, because you can’t foresee in most cases what consequences that algorithm will have.”

In its earlier days, artificial intelligence was weighted with controversy and grave doubt, as humanists feared the ramifications of thinking machines. Now the machines are embedded in our lives, and those fears seem irrelevant. “I used to have fights about it,” Brooks says. “I’ve stopped having fights. I’m just trying to win.”

Senior writer Steven Levy (steven_levy@wired.com)

From the NewScientist

A STORM of scepticism has greeted experimental results emerging from the lab of a Nobel laureate which, if confirmed, would shake the foundations of several fields of science. “If the results are correct,” says theoretical chemist Jeff Reimers of the University of Sydney, Australia, “these would be the most significant experiments performed in the past 90 years, demanding re-evaluation of the whole conceptual framework of modern chemistry.”

Luc Montagnier, who shared the Nobel prize for medicine in 2008 for his part in establishing that HIV causes AIDS, says he has evidence that DNA can send spooky electromagnetic imprints of itself into distant cells and fluids. If that wasn’t heretical enough, he also suggests that enzymes can mistake the ghostly imprints for real DNA, and faithfully copy them to produce the real thing. In effect this would amount to a kind of quantum teleportation of the DNA.

Many researchers contacted for comment by New Scientist reacted with disbelief. Gary Schuster, who studies DNA conductance effects at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, compared it to “pathological science”. Jacqueline Barton, who does similar work at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, was equally sceptical. “There aren’t a lot of data given, and I don’t buy the explanation,” she says. One blogger has suggested Montagnier should be awarded an IgNobel prize.

Yet the results can’t be dismissed out of hand. “The experimental methods used appear comprehensive,” says Reimers. So what have Montagnier and his team actually found?

Full details of the experiments are not yet available, but the basic set-up is as follows. Two adjacent but physically separate test tubes were placed within a copper coil and subjected to a very weak extremely low frequency electromagnetic field of 7 hertz. The apparatus was isolated from Earth’s natural magnetic field to stop it interfering with the experiment. One tube contained a fragment of DNA around 100 bases long; the second tube contained pure water.

After 16 to 18 hours, both samples were independently subjected to the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a method routinely used to amplify traces of DNA by using enzymes to make many copies of the original material. The gene fragment was apparently recovered from both tubes, even though one should have contained just water.

DNA was only recovered if the original solution of DNA – whose concentration has not been revealed – had been subjected to several dilution cycles before being placed in the magnetic field. In each cycle it was diluted 10-fold, and “ghost” DNA was only recovered after between seven and 12 dilutions of the original. It was not found at the ultra-high dilutions used in homeopathy.

Physicists in Montagnier’s team suggest that DNA emits low-frequency electromagnetic waves which imprint the structure of the molecule onto the water. This structure, they claim, is preserved and amplified through quantum coherence effects, and because it mimics the shape of the original DNA, the enzymes in the PCR process mistake it for DNA itself, and somehow use it as a template to make DNA matching that which “sent” the signal (arxiv.org/abs/1012.5166).

“The biological experiments do seem intriguing, and I wouldn’t dismiss them,” says Greg Scholes of the University of Toronto in Canada, who last year demonstrated that quantum effects occur in plants. Yet according to Klaus Gerwert, who studies interactions between water and biomolecules at the Ruhr University in Bochum, Germany, “It is hard to understand how the information can be stored within water over a timescale longer than picoseconds.”

“The structure would be destroyed instantly,” agrees Felix Franks, a retired academic chemist in London who has studied water for many years. Franks was involved as a peer reviewer in the debunking of a controversial study in 1988 which claimed that water had a memory (see “How ‘ghost molecules’ were exorcised”). “Water has no ‘memory’,” he says now. “You can’t make an imprint in it and recover it later.”

Despite the scepticism over Montagnier’s explanation, the consensus was that the results deserve to be investigated further. Montagnier’s colleague, theoretical physicist Giuseppe Vitiello of the University of Salerno in Italy, is confident that the result is reliable. “I would exclude that it’s contamination,” he says. “It’s very important that other groups repeat it.”

In a paper last year (Interdisciplinary Sciences: Computational Life Sciences, DOI: 10.1007/s12539-009-0036-7), Montagnier described how he discovered the apparent ability of DNA fragments and entire bacteria both to produce weak electromagnetic fields and to “regenerate” themselves in previously uninfected cells. Montagnier strained a solution of the bacterium Mycoplasma pirumthrough a filter with pores small enough to prevent the bacteria penetrating. The filtered water emitted the same frequency of electromagnetic signal as the bacteria themselves. He says he has evidence that many species of bacteria and many viruses give out the electromagnetic signals, as do some diseased human cells.

Montagnier says that the full details of his latest experiments will not be disclosed until the paper is accepted for publication. “Surely you are aware that investigators do not reveal the detailed content of their experimental work before its first appearance in peer-reviewed journals,” he says.

How ‘ghost molecules’ were exorcised

The latest findings by Luc Montagnier evoke long-discredited work by the French researcher Jacques Benveniste. In a paper inNature (vol 333, p 816) in 1988 he claimed to show that water had a “memory”, and that the activity of human antibodies was retained in solutions so dilute that they couldn’t possibly contain any antibody molecules (New Scientist, 14 July 1988, p 39).

Mirror-Image Cells Could Transform Science — or Kill Us All

Dmitar Sasselov was at the end of a long day of having his mind blown when the really big idea hit him. Sasselov, an astrophysicist and head of the Origins of Life Initiative at Harvard, was sitting in the front row of a packed lecture hall at the university last spring, listening to the famous human genome sequencer J. Craig Venter talk about his efforts to synthesize new forms of life. Sasselov had introduced the bald, perpetually sunburned biotech entrepreneur at another lecture that morning, and he’d spent the day squiring Venter around campus.

By John Bohannon for Wired Magazine

But Sasselov’s thoughts were light-years away. Two months earlier, a Delta II rocket had blasted off into the darkness above Cape Canaveral carrying the Kepler space telescope; Sasselov is on the team using Kepler to hunt for Earth-like planets around the Cygnus constellation—looking, ultimately, for extraterrestrial life. And he was frustrated. Because no matter how much data he and his colleagues collect—gases in the atmosphere, a fingerprint of color on the surface—they’ll never actually see aliens themselves. And that makes it impossible to answer one of the most basic questions of astrobiology: How diverse is life in the universe? If there is life somewhere other than here, does it look like earthly life, with DNA and protein? Or could it run on something else? Venter’s lecture about artisanal bacteria mapped suddenly onto Sasselov’s frustration. Why not just do what Venter was doing? If Sasselov wanted to study aliens, why not just make them himself—or at least the next-best thing? He imagined himself looking at synthetic aliens on a lab bench, “gazing at the other,” as he puts it, “similar to us but not the same.” He uncapped his red pen and scribbled a note: “Arrange a mtg/chat w Jack & GMC,” it read. “Chiral E. coli w GMC and put it into a vesicle w Jack & subject two cultures to planetary environments.”

Translation: Go to the synthetic biologists Jack Szostak and George Church. Ask them to create a life-form that runs on an operating system different from our own, based on mirror-image versions of earthly proteins and DNA. Let these alien cells grow and mutate, and see how they survive. If it worked, those new cells—Church called them “mirror life”—could answer one of the deepest questions about the origin of life, not just here on Earth but everywhere in the universe. They might also open up new avenues of discovery in materials science, fuel synthesis, and pharmaceutical research. On the down side, though, mirror life wouldn’t have any predators or diseases to limit its reproduction. They would have to keep an eye on that.

Four billion years ago was a hellish time on planet Earth. It was the end of the aptly named Hadean eon: Volcanoes spewed lava across rock baked by ultraviolet radiation; asteroids blasted craters into the landscape. But the worst of the bombardment—including the colossal impact that knocked loose the chunk that became our moon—was over. There were oceans of water and plenty of complex organic chemicals. So in some wet place, maybe near an undersea hydrothermal vent, maybe in the clay on the shore of a shallow pond, organic molecules started to replicate. No one knows exactly where or when or how, but life began.

It was nothing fancy at first. But soon those replicating molecules clothed themselves in a skin of fat, a membrane to keep their complex chemistry from diluting away. And with surprising speed, those bubbles of goop gave rise to a living, functioning cell, the Last Universal Common Ancestor of everything alive today—LUCA. Using the genetic differences between today’s living things as a molecular clock, we can calculate when that ancestral cell first emerged: about 3.5 billion years ago.

Since then, life has been busy. At last count, there were as many as 100 million species on the planet, and billions more have gone extinct. And yet, at the most basic level of biochemistry, it has just been more of the same. Every organism runs on the same operating system that LUCA invented. Peel back a cell’s membrane and you’ll find a blur of activity, thousands of chemical reactions taking place all at once. The conductors of this biochemical ballet are the proteins, nano-size building blocks and machines that control the speed and timing of every reaction. From breaking down sugars to clearing waste to repairing the membrane, the unique shape of each protein determines its job, as specifically as a lock to its key.

The LUCA operating system was an ingenious solution to keeping track of all those thousands of proteins. Biochemists call it the central dogma: Genetic material, in the form of a long nucleic acid polymer called DNA, stores a digital record of every protein’s design. Another nucleic acid, RNA, carries the information to a molecular machine called a ribosome, which reads the RNA and strings together amino acids to form the protein. Once the string is complete, the protein snaps itself into the right shape and gets to work.

But there is at least one viable alternative to LUCA: the mirror image of the entire system. Biochemistry is the story of shapes, and this is its strange plot twist. Lots of molecules come in multiple conformations—sticking together the same atoms can sometimes yield different three-dimensional structures that are the mirror images of each other, a property called chirality. Indeed, most of the basic molecules of life—from the nucleic acids of the genome to the amino acids of the proteins—have mirror-image versions. And all cells have enzymes called isomerases, which flip certain molecules into their mirror versions. But for some reason, in the machinery of living things on Earth, one side of the mirror goes almost wholly unused. All of us earthlings, from algae to elephants, have proteins made of left-handed amino acids and a genome of right-handed nucleic acids. (When chemists say handed, they’re generally referring to the direction that polarized light skews when beamed through a pure solution of the molecule.) No one knows why LUCA picked one side of the mirror and not the other.

Theoretically, a cell could be based on “wrong-handed” molecules. Its biochemistry would work just like ours—DNA to RNA to proteins—but it would be completely incompatible with earthly life, its chiral twin. And now, thanks to recent advances in genomics, cell membrane science, and synthetic biology, an ambitious researcher could go beyond theory and build it from the ground up. The tools are here (well, almost here) to make mirror life from scratch.

Photo: Spencer Higgins

Sasselov is the ultimate talent scout for a problem like this. Because of his job at the Origins of Life Initiative, he knew George Church was already trying to build mirror-flipped molecular machines that could translate genes into proteins, and he knew that Church didn’t have anything to put them in. The membranes of earthly cells are built of fat and protein molecules with the wrong chirality. But Sasselov also knew that if there was anyone in the world who could create a membrane that would work, it was Jack Szostak. “They’re both pioneers, but in different ways,” Sasselov says. “They are my favorite people, and my mentors.”

So he brought them both to a café in Cambridge and made his pitch: Build a fully functioning mirror cell made of molecules they themselves would synthesize. Or, to put it another way: Don’t just create new branches on the tree of life, as Venter was doing with his tweaks of existing cells. Instead, create an entirely new tree.

Church went for it immediately. He’d been looking at similar ideas for years. But Szostak didn’t think it would work. “I’m not saying it’s impossible,” he says, sitting in his office at Massachusetts General Hospital a year after that first meeting. “I’m just saying it requires a lot of hard steps.” Nevertheless, he agreed to support the project.

A soft-spoken 58-year-old Canadian with boyish good looks, Szostak won the Nobel Prize last year for his work on telomeres, the protective end caps of chromosomes. He also created the artificial yeast chromosome, critical to advances in DNA cloning and gene mapping. Lately, Szostak has been working on the origin of those membranes that somehow came to enclose and protect LUCA and every cell since. Inside test tubes in his lab float microscopic, hollow spheres of fat—primitive membrane bubbles. Given the right molecular ingredients, they spontaneously self-assemble, grow, and divide, but they’re much simpler than a naturally occurring cell membrane. The fatty acids have no chirality; their mirror image is the same molecule. So if they were injected with, say, the guts of mirror life, there would be no wrong-handedness to get in the way.

And that’s where Church comes in. He’s 6′5″, with a gnarly beard and a science fiction fan’s optimism. It’s his job to build the genome and protein infrastructure for mirror life. But … could mirror cells actually survive on Earth? “Everything I know from chemistry and physics says that this should work,” he says. Then he gets a little silly: “Hey! I know a great shortcut to get our mirror ribosome! I just need a four-dimensional being to pick me up, rotate me in 4-D, and put me back as my mirror self.”

Szostak still says he’d bet against their success. The cautious scientist in him can’t see how the mirror cell, once full of chirally flipped molecular machinery, will come to life. “Forget about all the technical issues of making mirror ribosomes, mirror peptides, and mirror DNA,” he says. “The complexity of reconstituting a normal cell, or even a simplified cell with 1,000 components, is mind-boggling. You don’t just mix these things up and get it to work.” Still, he agreed that if Church got his part figured out, they could use his membranes to keep everything in. Szostak hopes that even attempting to make mirror life could lead to a better understanding of how ribosomes work and cells evolved. He doesn’t mention the possibility that mirror life could earn someone serious money.

The week that Sasselov met with Szostak and Church to discuss mirror life, a catastrophe was under way across the Charles River at Genzyme, one of the largest biotech companies in the world. Two of its top sellers—medicines for treating the rare genetic disorders Gaucher’s disease and Fabry disease—are proteins. In people with these maladies, fats accumulate in the blood, organs, and brain, causing symptoms from burning pain to kidney failure—unless they get the drugs, produced by genetically modified cells suspended in giant nutrient pools called bioreactors. But that week, a virus that disrupts cell reproduction infected one of the bioreactors. The entire plant had to be shut down.

It was a hard summer for Genzyme, as well as for the people who rely on its medications. While the company decontaminated its bioreactors, thousands of patients around the world rationed their drug supplies. Genzyme’s stock price dropped 20 percent.

When Church talks about mirror life’s quirky advantages, invulnerability to this kind of mishap is high on his list. “Viruses can’t touch a mirror cell,” he says. No virus has evolved to infect it. And even if a normal virus did figure out how to get past the membrane of a mirror cell—which usually requires a mechanism that would be thwarted by wrong-handed molecules—the mirror genome would be unreadable to the attacker. Viruses work by hijacking their victims’ genomes, taking over the cellular machinery for making proteins to build more of themselves; a normal virus wouldn’t have any effect on a mirror cell’s factory. This makes mirror life a potential workhorse for biotech.

As it happens, the cell that Sasselov ultimately wants to create—a chiral twin of E. coli—couldn’t make proteins like Genzyme’s cells. It would make the chirally flipped versions, which would almost certainly be useless.

But that’s not the sort of mirror cell Church has in mind. The problem, he says, is that billions of years of evolutionary R&D have made today’s bacterial cells tough, adaptable, and very good at making more of themselves—but inefficient at spitting out designed-to-order molecules in a bioreactor. Church wants a “minimal mirror cell” to produce specific proteins: mirror, normal, and even mixes of the two but far more efficient than a bioreactor full of finicky, genetically engineered cells.

THE CASE FOR MARS

THE POETRY OF REALITY

WE ARE ALL CONNECTED

The fresh-faced 39-year-old man, in a dark T-shirt and jeans, is talking about travelling to Mars. Not now, but when he’s older and ready to swap life on Earth for one on the red planet. “It would be a good place to retire,” he says in all seriousness. Normally, this would be the time to make one’s excuses and leave the company of a lunatic. Or to smile politely and humour a space nerd’s unlikely fantasies. But this man needs to be taken seriously for one compelling reason: he already has his own spaceship.

From the Guardian by Paul Harris

This is Elon Musk, a brilliant entrepreneur who made a fortune from the internet and has invested vast amounts of it in building his own private space rocket company, SpaceX. Indeed, far from being crazy, Musk is the real-life inspiration for the movie character Tony Stark, the playboy scientist hero of the Iron Man franchise.

There are some similarities. Outside the SpaceX plant in the baking southern California sun, Musk’s sexy electric sports car sits in a reserved parking space (he co-founded Tesla, the firm which makes the vehicle), resembling the sort of motor Stark would drive. Musk is also engaged to the beautiful British actress Talulah Riley, star of St Trinian’s and St Trinian’s 2, and he used to get thrills from flying his own private military jet fighter.

What’s more, like Stark, Musk is on a mission to save the world. But while Stark’s aim was to battle evil-doers and achieve world peace, Musk’s mission is a little grander. He wants to secure humanity’s future by turning the human race into a space-faring people able to colonise other planets. It’s the only way, Musk believes, that we can be saved, either from destroying ourselves or from some outside calamity. To put it mildly, Musk thinks big and takes the long view. “It’s important that we attempt to extend life beyond Earth now,” he says in an accent hinting at his childhood in South Africa. “It is the first time in the four billion-year history of Earth that it’s been possible and that window could be open for a long time – hopefully it is – or it could be open for a short time. We should err on the side of caution and do something now.”

SpaceX is Musk’s attempt to do that something. Its headquarters are situated within earshot of the busy runways of Los Angeles International airport. The company’s logo stands proudly on an otherwise nondescript hangar-sized building. But inside, a revolution in space travel could be taking place.

The factory floor has been roughly organised into an assembly line to make space rockets, part of a process of wresting the future of space travel out of the hands of government bodies, such as Nasa, and into the hands of private businesses. Using its hyper-efficient Merlin engines, SpaceX has successfully flown its first rocket, Falcon 1, up into space, where it put a satellite into orbit. Then it successfully flew the much bigger Falcon 9 rocket earlier this year. Now the company is working on Dragon, a space capsule that will sit on top of a Falcon 9 and deliver first cargo – and then, hopefully, astronauts – to the International Space Station.

That is stunning stuff. SpaceX, which was only founded in 2002, is not even a decade old. Yet it is doing things in space that some countries with their own national space programmes have not yet achieved. “When we launched the initial rocket actually leaving the launch pad, that was awesome,” Musk says, gazing at the Dragon module being built. “Getting into orbit was when a lot of people thought: OK, it’s real. That’s something that South Korea tried a couple of times and they failed. Brazil tried three times and they failed. This is normally something a country does, and only a few countries have succeeded.”

SpaceX is not alone in aiming for the stars. A raft of private firms have joined in a new space race. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, is building a suborbital rocket called the Blue Origin New Shepard. John D Carmack, the man behind video games Doom and Quake, has his eyes on a lunar landing. Virgin Atlantic boss Richard Branson is aiming to kickstart space tourism with his Virgin Galactic project. Yet SpaceX is the most advanced and ambitious. Its rockets have already flown into space and it has won hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business contracts for future voyages.

Incredibly, however, SpaceX does not feel like a huge operation. It defeats the received wisdom that only major world powers, or gigantic corporations such as Boeing, can truly set their sights on leaving the grip of Earth’s gravity. Instead, SpaceX feels like a dotcom company. Inside the factory are all the accoutrements one expects of a booming Silicon Valley enterprise. All the office space is open-plan and even Musk has an open cubicle like everyone else. Employees – who dub themselves SpaceXers – wear casual T-shirts and are not afraid to sport goatee beards and a smattering of tattoos. They often travel around the assembly floor on tricycles and until recently, before SpaceX’s employee roster topped 1,000 people, Musk was personally involved in every single appointment. He believes the “all in it together” work culture of a start-up is vital to achieve the firm’s staggeringly ambitious agenda. “People work better when they know what the goal is and why. It is important that people look forward to coming to work in the morning and enjoy working.”

In fact, SpaceX’s Silicon Valley-style culture springs from Musk’s own background as one of the most successful – and wealthy – figures to emerge from the internet. His interest in technology began early. He bought his first computer at the age of 10 when he was growing up in Pretoria, South Africa, the son of a Canadian model and a South African engineer. Musk taught himself to write computer programs and sold his first commercial software – fittingly, a space game called Blastar – when he was just 12. He left at 17 to work on a relative’s farm in Canada, before going to the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated with two degrees, one in physics and the other in economics, before winning a place in 1995 at Stanford as a graduate student. He stayed there for two days before fleeing to start his first internet company, Zip2, which produced publishing software. In 1999, he sold it for more than $300m (£193m) and co-founded X.com, which eventually turned into PayPal. It was sold to eBay in 2002 for $1.5bn.

All of which left Musk wealthy beyond belief and could have led to a life of idle bliss. But besides being a very rich man, Musk is a determined one. Talking to him is a slightly unsettling experience. He is open and friendly, but there is a sense that – on some level – he is operating on a slightly higher plane. Asked why he does what he does, he gives an answer that seems rehearsed but rings totally sincere. “When I was in college there were three areas that I thought most would affect the future of humanity. Those were the internet, the transition to a sustainable energy economy, and space exploration and ultimately extending life beyond Earth and making it multi-planetary.”

For Musk, the best way to achieve that third goal was to popularise space travel and make it affordable. Thus SpaceX and its fleet of rockets were born. He investigated the science behind rocket launching and concluded that there was no real reason why it was so expensive. He believed the space industry was dominated by inefficient government bodies. By starting afresh, and going back to basics, Musk believed getting into space could be done quickly and cheaply. He was right. SpaceX’s Merlin engines are beautifully engineered and powerful, but simply made. They run on highly refined kerosene that costs less than petrol. The rockets they power – in the shape of the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 – are also simple. They have fewer stages (where one bit of the rocket separates from the other) than their rivals and are mostly re-usable. Thus they can put cargo into space for a fraction of the cost.

The Dragon module is also a throwback. It looks nothing like the space shuttle, which it essentially hopes to replace as the “taxi” service to the International Space Station. Instead, it resembles something from the 60s, being shaped like a shuttlecock. Not that Musk cares about looks. He just cares about the fact that it is being designed with windows: a sign of his commitment to one day put astronauts, including himself, inside it. “I would like to go up in a Dragon at some point,” he says. A few years after its first flying. I think it would be great, huge amounts of fun. A very life-changing experience.”

Of course, Musk’s life has already changed. You can’t be a real-life Tony Stark with plans to retire to Mars and not generate publicity. But it has not been easy for him. Musk, beneath his shell of otherworldliness, is charming and funny, but he finds being in the public eye difficult. He would prefer to spend his time happily working on his rockets, not giving interviews. “I had to learn to be a little more extroverted,” he says. “Ordinarily, I would sit in design meetings all day, exchanging ideas with people. But if I don’t tell the story then it doesn’t get out, and I want to try and get public support for extending life beyond Earth.”

Unfortunately, Musk has discovered that celebrity has a dark side. In his case, that was a painful divorce from his ex-wife, Canadian author Justine Musk, with whom he has five children. The split generated its fair share of media attention, not least because Justine has blogged extensively about the epic legal tussles over the terms of their settlement. As more details emerged, Musk decided to publish his version of events on the Huffington Post. The lengthy piece, in which he wrote about his finances and his relationship with Talulah Riley, began with the words, “Given the choice, I’d rather stick a fork in my hand than write about my personal life.”

Musk’s desire for privacy is perhaps surprising in a man so driven and successful. “I hate writing about personal stuff,” he says. “I don’t have a Facebook page. I don’t use my Twitter account. I am familiar with both, but I don’t use them.”

Outside work, where he spends up to 100 hours a week, Musk says he devotes nearly all his spare time to being a good dad. His children are the reason he gave up flying his military jet. “I have five kids and Iron Man does not have any kids,” he says. “After having kids and running companies, I had so many responsibilities I decided it was not wise to take personal risks.”

So are Musk and his entrepreneurial kin the future of space travel? As Nasa, the big daddy of the global space business, struggles with reduced budgets and a sceptical public, it seems perfectly possible. SpaceX is getting into orbit for a fraction of the cost of the space shuttle programme. It aims to make money as an ongoing business concern, rather than draining an ever-tightening public purse. It wants to drive the costs down and improve reliability and make space travel something that is open to everyone. Only private business, Musk thinks, can do that. “The fundamental barriers are improving reliability and reducing cost, and the government is not that good at either. Would you prefer to fly Virgin Atlantic or Soviet-era Aeroflot?”

But Musk remains a dreamer, not just a businessman. He did not create SpaceX to get rich for the second time. Instead, he is risking his fortune to start a company in a field most people said could not support a project like SpaceX. Again and again, he returns to the themes that keep him going. He sees what SpaceX is doing as part of humanity’s destiny. “I think life on Earth must be about more than just solving problems… It’s got to be something inspiring even if it is vicarious. When the US landed on the moon it was for all humanity. We count that as a human achievement. Anyone who could get near a TV got near a TV. If there was one TV in an African village and you had to walk 50 miles to get there, you’d do it,” he says.

And through it all is the desire to colonise Mars. Musk insists that his most powerful Falcon 9 rockets could already launch missions to Mars if assembled in Earth’s orbit. He wants SpaceX to help humanity spread into space, just like the first European explorers setting out for the New World. “One of the long-term goals of SpaceX is, ultimately, to get the price of transporting people and product to Mars to be low enough and with a high enough reliability that if somebody wanted to sell all their belongings and move to a new planet and forge a new civilisation they could do so.”

Musk’s belief that this can be achieved in two decades is something that most experts would scoff at but Musk, characteristically, finds it frustratingly slow. “Twenty years seems like semi-infinity to me. That’s a long time,” he says, as if surprised that anyone could doubt his aims. It is certainly tempting to dismiss it as a flight of fancy. Except, behind him on SpaceX’s factory floor, Musk’s nascent fleet of working space rockets are already being built.

Space race: the private firms aiming to fly you to the stars

SpaceX is not alone in aiming for the stars. A raft of private firms, set up by billionaires, most of them former CEOs or founders of dotcom or IT companies, have joined in a new space race. These space-age entrepreneurs include:

■ Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, now America’s largest online retailer. He set up his space company, Blue Origin, in 2000, though its existence only became public in 2003 when Bezos started buying land in Texas so that he could build a test site for his spacecraft. Blue Origin’s main project is New Shepard, a vertical take-off and landing rocket, that is designed to take tourists to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere: the edge of space .

■ John Carmack, the man behind video games such as Doom and Quake, has set up a company called Armadillo Aerospace which is developing a series of spacecraft including a lunar landing vehicle and a spacecraft which is also aimed at taking tourists to the edge of Earth’s atmosphere. Fares will cost around $100,000, says Carmack. The Virginia-based travel firm Space Adventures has signed an exclusive deal with Armadillo to sell tourist seats on its spaceships.

■ Richard Branson, is planning to start suborbital space-tourist flights on his Virgin Galactic spaceplanes within the next two years. In 2004 he signed a deal with the US inventor Burt Rutan to use the spaceplane technology that he had just developed. When flights begin, a small craft carrying half a dozen passengers – who will pay up to $200,000 – will be flown to the edge of the atmosphere. After a few minutes, the spacecraft will then spiral back to the ground. Branson says he expects first flights to begin within two years.

■ Jeff Greason’s XCOR Aerospace also aims to start suborbital tourist flights. XCOR is based in California where it designs, builds and operates rocket engines and rocket-powered vehicles to government and private markets. The Lynx spacecraft – fuelled by liquid oxygen and kerosene – is a two-seat rocket plane that can take off and land on a runway. The spacecraft has been designed to make up to four flights a day, carrying a single passenger into space where he or she can briefly experience weightlessness before returning to Earth.

■ Steve Bennett is Britain’s principal space engineer. His company, Starchaser, is developing rockets that are intended to blast paying passengers on 20-minute long suborbital flights that will include several minutes in which they will experience the delights of zero gravity.

■ However, SpaceX is the most advanced and ambitious player in the field. Its rockets have already flown into space and it has won hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business contracts for future payload launches.

Camilla Turner

From the NewScientist by Bob Holmes

The main reason is that the genetic engineering of animals – with the exception of mice – has been a slow, tedious process needing a lot of money and not a little luck. Behind the scenes, though, a quiet revolution has been taking place. Thanks to a set of new tricks and tools, modifying animals is becoming a lot easier and more precise. That is not only going to transform research, it could also transform the meat and eggs you eat and the milk you drink.

The first transgenic animals were produced by injecting DNA into eggs, implanting the eggs in animals and then waiting weeks or months to see if any offspring had incorporated the extra DNA. Often fewer than 1 in 100 had, making this a long, expensive process. “That’s just really inefficient,” says Scott Fahrenkrug, a geneticist at the University of Minnesota in St Paul.

In mice, geneticists found a way round this problem: producing cells with the desired modification first, before growing entire animals. The researchers alter the DNA in embryonic stem cells growing in a dish, then inject successfully modified cells into embryos. This yields chimeras with a mixture of cells that can be bred to produce mice in which all the cells are modified. It has become cheap and easy: there are now many millions of GM mice in labs worldwide, including extraordinary creations like the “supermouse” capable of running twice as far as normal, “brainbow” mice whose neurons light up in different colours and even mice that do not fear cats.

Saved by the clones

It is not yet possible to grow embryonic stem cells from other animals – except, since last year, rats – so this technique does not work for other species. However, improvements in cloning mean that for many species ordinary cells can be altered, and entire animals then produced by cloning cells with the desired modification.

At the same time, biologists have developed more efficient ways of adding DNA to cells, by hijacking natural genetic engineers such as viruses, and jumping genes capable of “copying and pasting” themselves. All these advances mean the effort and cost needed to produce GM animals has decreased a hundredfold, says Fahrenkrug.

Researchers are also developing far more precise ways of altering DNA, rather than relying on random insertion. One promising new tool is the zinc finger nuclease: a DNA-cutting enzyme attached to a “zinc finger” that can be customised to bind to specific DNA sequences. Zinc finger nucleases allow engineers to cut a cell’s DNA at a preselected spot. When the cell attempts to mend the cut, it often leaves out a few DNA letters or incorporates a few extra ones, so this method can be used to destroy, or knock out, specific genes.

“This will revolutionise genetic engineering of animals,” says Bruce Whitelaw, a geneticist at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, UK. “You can design your zinc finger to cut at a specific site in the genome, and it doesn’t matter what that genome is. It could be pig, sheep, dog, rat – it doesn’t matter.”

What’s more, in theory, if you also add a bit of DNA flanked by sequences matching those on either side of the cut, the cell should sometimes be tricked into repairing the cut by splicing in the added DNA – a process known as homologous repair. In other words, the extra DNA is added exactly where you want it. Rumour has it that researchers at the biotech company Sigma-Aldrich are the first to use zinc fingers to achieve this in animals.

The ability to easily and precisely modify animals will undoubtedly lead to huge pay-offs in research and medicine. Whether it will transform the animal products we consume is less clear.

The US Food and Drug Administration, which regulates GM animals, has yet to approve one for agricultural use. The first candidate, a fast-growing salmon, has been under review for more than a decade, in part because of fears it could affect wild populations. Such concerns would not apply to most farm animals or pets, and last year, the FDA appeared to be preparing the ground for commercial production of GM animals when it published guidance on the steps a company would have to take to obtain FDA approval. The European Union is working on a similar statement, but this is not expected to be finalised until 2012.

Ultimately, the adoption of GM farm animals may hinge on public opinion and the demand for the benefits they can offer. That demand may be felt most urgently in countries such as China, where meat consumption is skyrocketing. “I anticipate that genetically engineered livestock will be first used in China, Cuba and other places around the world, and then come to the US and Europe,” says James Murray, an animal geneticist at the University of California, Davis. “It’ll be the reverse of what you saw with the plants.”

So in 20 years’ time will GM animals be as widespread as their botanic counterparts are now? “Technologically, nothing is standing in our way,” says Fahrenkrug. “Really, the issue is coming down to: what are you going to make?” Some of the likeliest future developments are presented below.

Tasty meat, milk or eggs

Don’t expect a cow to walk up to your restaurant table and offer you a prime cut anytime soon. Nonetheless, genetically modified farm animals could provide us with more nutritious meat, milk and eggs, while causing fewer pollution problems and perhaps suffering less too.

Pigs whose muscles are enriched with omega-3s have already been created, and researchers are exploring similar options with milk. Meanwhile, a team at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, has developed a pig that contains a gene for a bacterial enzyme that enables them to absorb more phosphorus from their feed. These “Enviropigs” excrete less than half as much phosphorus as ordinary pigs, thus reducing the pollution problem from intensively reared animals. The pigs have not yet been approved for human consumption, but China has begun importing them for testing. “They’re obviously very interested – they consume half of the world’s pork,” says Scott Fahrenkrug of the University of Minnesota. A similar effort under way in fish could reduce pollution from fish farms.

Animals could also be modified to reduce disease risk. Hematech of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, has created a cow that can’t get BSE because it lacks the protein that turns rogue and triggers mad cow disease. Other ideas being tried or considered include making pigs and chickens less susceptible to influenza, and chicken eggs that produce human antibodies to rotavirus, protecting people who eat the eggs against this common gastrointestinal pathogen.

Welfare could be improved, too. Cows have been modified to produce a compound that protects them against udder infections, for example. Engineering could also end the quick slaughter of half of all offspring of dairy cattle and laying hens, whose owners have little use for male animals. This could perhaps be done by inserting genes on a bull’s Y chromosome to cripple male-producing sperm. “The idea has been around for 15 years, but now the efficiency of making transgenics is so high that this problem will be solved within the next couple of years,” says Fahrenkrug, whose group is one of about 10 worldwide working on the issue.

Pets in all colours

The first genetically modified pet to go on sale was a medaka, or rice fish, with a green fluorescent jellyfish gene, launched in Taiwan in 2003. The “Night Pearl”, or TK-1, is sterilised before sale.

It was swiftly followed by the GloFish, a zebrafish with fluorescent genes from jellyfish or corals that has become a popular aquarium fish in the US and parts of Asia, with green, red and yellow versions available and more on the way. Like the medaka, it was a spin-off from scientific research. It is not approved in Australia, Canada, California or Europe, though there have been illegal imports. If released into the wild, it would only have a chance of surviving in tropical regions.

Several years ago, there was talk of genetically engineering cats and dogs that people would not be allergic to. That never happened, but new methods would make knocking out the relevant genes much easier if attempted today.

While there are valid reasons to be concerned about the welfare of GM pets, conventional breeding can also produce deformities, as seen in many dog breeds.

Pharming drugs

Genetic engineering is now a standard technique in the production of many protein-based drugs. Human insulin, for example, has long been produced by cultures of bacteria carrying the human insulin gene. Pharmaceutical companies are eager to turn animals into drug factories, too. That’s because animal cells alter many of their proteins by tacking on sugars and other “decorations”, an extra step that bacteria cannot perform. As a result, many proteins – most importantly, antibodies – work much better if they are made in animal cells.

One such animal-produced protein has already been approved for clinical use by the US Food and Drug Administration. An anticoagulant called antithrombin III is purified from the milk of genetically engineered goats created by GTC Biotherapeutics, a biotech company in Framingham, Massachusetts.

Many others are under development. The Dutch company Pharming has several products in the pipeline, including human lactoferrin produced in cow’s milk. This antimicrobial compound could be added to foods such as yoghurt. Open Monoclonal Technology of Palo Alto, California, has engineered rats to produce human antibodies. Its first product, an anti-cancer antibody for treating lymphoma, should be in clinical trials within two to three years. And Hematech of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, has produced cattle that it plans to use to make human antibodies to potential bioweapons such as anthrax and smallpox.

Understanding genes

We have around 23,500 genes. What do they all do, and which gene variants contribute to common diseases? By disabling genes to see what happens, geneticists can work out what they do. Until recently, however, this was possible only in mice, which are not always the best animals to use. Now genes can be “knocked out” in an ever-growing range of animals.

At the Medical College of Wisconsin, Howard Jacob has used zinc finger nucleases to knock out 43 genes in rats associated with increased risk of high blood pressure or kidney disease. Once, knocking out even a single gene in rats would have been enough to earn someone a doctorate. “I’ve now done 43 PhD’s work in nine months,” says Jacob. He is now raising the resulting animals to see to what extent each gene contributes to disease risk.

Tacking diseases

The new techniques are being used to create animals that are a big improvement on the mouse “models” used to study human diseases today. “Not only is this low-hanging fruit, it is easier politically to deal with,” says Scott Fahrenkrug at the University of Minnesota. “Most people are OK with this kind of work. The bigger issues are the agricultural ones.”

For instance, Randall Prather’s team at the University of Missouri in Columbia has disabled the CFTR gene in pigs, which causes them to develop symptoms of cystic fibrosis. Using these pigs, the researchers have shown that the lung inflammation characteristic of the disease in humans develops as a result of bacterial infection (Science Translational Medicine, vol 2, p 29ra31). Earlier mouse models of cystic fibrosis had been unable to resolve this question, because mice lacking the CFTR gene do not develop lung disease.

Fahrenkrug’s team have created pigs with high cholesterol by deleting a protein that mops up LDL cholesterol. Since the heart and arteries of pigs are roughly the same size as those of humans, the modified pigs are a realistic testbed for stents and other devices to keep blocked arteries open.

Xenotransplants

Many people die waiting for organ transplants. Animals could provide an unlimited supply, if only the human immune system did not reject them. So geneticists have been working for years to create pigs whose organs lack the molecules that trigger rejection, such as alpha 1,3-galactosyltransferase. The race is gathering momentum.

Already, a team led by Heiner Niemann at the Institute of Farm Animal Genetics in Mariensee, Germany, has begun testing pig organs modified to be compatible with monkey immune systems. The aim is to get monkeys to survive for 180 days after the transplant – a milestone that would mean they could begin considering trials in humans. So far, however, they have fallen short of that goal. “Occasionally you get the 180 days, but not on a regular basis,” says Niemann.

Meanwhile, Scott Fahrenkrug of the University of Minnesota and his colleagues are working on another major barrier to pig-to-human transplantation: the presence of dormant viruses within the pig genome that could, in theory, reawaken and infect a human recipient. Fahrenkrug has added a gene for a human antiviral protein into pigs in the hope that it will suppress the viruses. If it works, the likely first application will be transplants of insulin-producing islet cells from pigs to humans. “This is personal issue for me,” says Fahrenkrug. “I have friend and family members that have died from the complications of diabetes.”

Bob Holmes is a consultant for New Scientist based in Edmonton, Canada

By Tom Jenks

You’ve waited patiently and now you’re up at bat. You want to take a few practice swings before the real thing right? Here, lie down on this comfy memory foam, inside a chamber fitted with noise canceling material, and wrapped in wire mesh and aluminum foil to block any stray electromagnetic radiation. “Here, put these on and just float on a sea of bliss,” the facilitator says as he hands you a pair of glasses, headphones and GSR meter for your finger. A flicker of doubt crosses your mind. “What the hell, it’s Burning Man, man,” your inner psychonaut reassures you as the lid closes. Inside you hear the GSR on your finger driving the sound in your headphones. You’re agitated and so is the sound. The light from the special glasses also indicates significant stress. “Shit, I’m a mess.” Bhvvvv. More agitated sound. Bhvvv. “Damn it!” Bhvvvvvvvv. “Forget this crap I’m just going to get comfy on this memory foam and float through the clouds.” Beewwwww. The sound is calm, the light is serene. “Wow, that was easy. I just let go of fears and relaxed into the moment.” The lid opens, you step into the hot seat, slide on the GSR meter, and instantly the cymatics projection explodes into the most beautiful shimmering fractal the crowd has ever seen.

This galvanizes the mass of onlookers into a frenzy. You whisper to yourself, “I never thought such beauty was possible!” As you stand there in a state of unrivaled ecstasy, the crowd catches your fire and starts chanting – beauty, beauty, beauty, beauty!!! Bvvvhhaaaaaoo! “What the?” The pyramid of lights whirs to life as the sound amps up and lights go from red to orange to green up towards the top. The crowd is overjoyed! A facilitator notices your perplexed gaze and tells everyone, “Beneath the pyramid is a Random Event Generator and the lights and sound goes up or down depending on the coherence or odds against chance of the outcomes. It has been found that focusing intently on it can raise the coherence and thus elevate the light, pure white light being the highest level of coherence at the top.” The energy is electric. A bolt of lightning blasts through your head and ripples out through the people concentrating on raising the pyramid of light. The words come out of nowhere and past your lips, “We are infinite potential!” The light races through indigo, violet and ultraviolet – a sudden collective gasp – boom. Pure white light blasts out of the top and bathes all in the primordial essence of being. All you can do is wonder. You’ve disregarded Terrence and have given in to astonishment. You think it’ll never end, but something creeps up, like a serpent through your veins, a nagging doubt – “is it real?” Immediately the light is gone, the pyramid plummets to a dull red and blackness envelops all. Guess not. You walk off the stage, kick the dust, and choke down a sugary drink at the nearest bar. A single tear rolls down your cheek and splashes in the playa dust. “For a moment… it was real.”

And it could be. It’s all technically possible – just a matter of connecting a few cords to a few computers and whatnot. I’m not an audiovisual or computer technician by any stretch, but I don’t see why it can’t be done with a little group mind and elbow grease. If this project piques your interest, join up and let’s make it happen!

Some operational thoughts: The above is only one permutation of many amazing possibilities. I’d like your input to improve it! For example:

We could use brainwave entrainment with an audiovisual synthesizer (using specific light and sound frequencies) to drive the brainwaves into say, an Alpha or hypnagogic state, and see how that affects the GSR and cymatic patterns. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainwave_entrainment
Audiovisual synthesizer: http://www.mindmodulations.com/light-sound-mind-machines.html?TreeId=1

Perhaps a dance floor covered with salt, with a massive transducer underneath, pumping in the vibes from wireless GSR meters on the dancers? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galvanic_skin_response

Could the cymatic pattern be projected as a 3d hologram instead of merely on a flat screen? Or we could throw on a mixture of cornstarch and water to create a non-Newtonian fluid and grow some 3d cymatic creatures!
Cymatics in action – video of changing sand patterns: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YedgubRZva8&feature=related
General Cymatics info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cymatics
http://www.cymatics.org/

We could have 4 participants each with GSR meters hooked up to the original setup, with one side getting as agitated as possible and the other trying to remain calm, and have emotion battles! Perhaps the tones from each side would be averaged together to produce 2 different cymatic patterns, one the product of restlessness, and the other the result of serenity.

Other measures of biofeedback could be used, such as the coherence of heart rhythms, pulse rate, or even an EEG of brainwaves. The raw data from each of these could be displayed on a separate screen, with a high/low record holder list.
Biofeedback devices: http://www.mindmodulations.com/biofeedback-neurofeedback.html?TreeId=1

The Random Event Generator idea could be expanded to have 3 separate towers of lights with three different REGs, with one mega tower in the middle averaging the coherence of all three. We could add some kind of reward, like a beautiful sound when the lights reach certain levels of coherence, with a loud gong at the top. Perhaps integrate specific chakra sounds from the root (red) with a C sound to crown (white) B sound.
Chakra sounds: http://www.cymascope.com/chakrasacredsound.html
REG general info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_event_generator
REG light: http://www.psyleron.com/lamp.aspx
REG capable of linking with computer: http://www.psyleron.com/reg1.aspx

The original color progression was inspired by the levels of consciousness chart here: http://www.kheper.net/topics/Wilber/levels-of-consciousness.jpg

The REG aspect would be interesting to simply record and correlate it with events such as Burning the Man or the Temple, or even with the level of ambient sound or light levels on the playa.

We could strategically place some dream machines around the REG pyramids to help entrain brainwaves to an Alpha or hypnagogic state. These are rotating cylinders with slits cut up the sides, on top of record players with light bulbs inside. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamachine

Finally a very basic option is to simply have microphones for people to sing, chant or play music into and see what cymatic patterns they produce.

I would also propose we develop a short survey of people’s experiences, to get data on how well it works (how mystical/transpersonal the experiences are) for different people, and particularly of interest would be to record a rough estimate of people’s value structure (developmental stage) and also note any pharmacological agents at work. This data, when correlated with people’s biofeedback record, would be invaluable!

This entire setup may seem like an impossible dream, but so has every idea that ever tested the perceived boundaries of creation. I cannot think of a more empowering or trans-formative technological achievement to devote resources to. Let’s use our ingenuity, our technical expertise, our vision, and our burning passion to do what has never been done, to manifest the mind, and will novelty into being. Let’s go to moon, 21st century style.

Other rockets of this class, such as Boeing’s Delta IV and the Atlas V, operated jointly by Boeing and Lockheed Martin, are children of the military-industrial complex. Though built by private firms, they are the result of taxpayer-financed programmes, often on a “cost-plus” basis, that only superficially resemble anything which a real entrepreneur would recognise as free-market capitalism. By contrast SpaceX, though subsequently buoyed up by a $1.6 billion contract with NASA, America’s space agency, to fly missions to the international space station, had to raise the initial development money itself—much of it from Mr Musk’s back pocket.

The important point about Falcon 9, so called because its lift-off is propelled by nine of SpaceX’s proprietary Merlin rocket motors, is that it is powerful enough to put people into orbit. Other private space companies are either restricted to launching small, unmanned satellites (Orbital Sciences Corporation’s Pegasus, for example), or—in the case of Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic—hope to take tourists on suborbital hops of the sort that NASA gave up almost 50 years ago and the Russians never bothered with in the first place. SpaceX has gone for the jugular. Though it will take many more launches and a lot of inspections before the system can be “man-rated”, as the jargon has it, prototypes of manned space capsules are already lying around in SpaceX’s factory in Hawthorne, California.

Just in time, too. For America’s current manned system, the government-owned space-shuttle fleet, is about to be withdrawn from service. The last shuttle flight is pencilled in for November. After that, American astronauts who wish to visit the space station (largely an American-financed project, despite its “international” soubriquet) will be reduced to hitching lifts on Russian rockets. If Falcon 9 does, indeed, manage to get man-rated, they may be spared that indignity. Those astronauts that are there will, in any case, be able to have their groceries delivered by Falcon 9. The question of man-rating does not affect its ability to take supplies to the station.

The vehicle itself is a two-stage affair. The heavy lifting is done by the nine-engine cluster, fuelled by kerosene and liquid oxygen. That burns for three minutes, before being jettisoned. The payload, a capsule known as Dragon, is then carried into orbit by a single-Merlin-engined second stage that burns for a further six minutes. The unmanned version of that capsule is designed to accommodate six tonnes of goodies for the inmates of the space station, or could be replaced by a heavy satellite, if that is what the client wants.

The heavy-satellite-launching market is quite crowded already, though, what with Atlas, Delta, the “European” (in reality, almost exclusively French) Ariane and Russia’s Proton. So Mr Musk’s real bet is on the ultimate man-worthiness of the system. That will not only open up the taxi-to-the-space-station market, but will also allow him to tout for tourist business. At the moment, the Russians have this sewn up (though Space Adventures, the travel agency that actually books flights on those rockets for people who have the requisite $20m or so, is American). Who knows, a little competition might even bring the price down from something that is out of this world, to a level that is merely stratospheric.

From the New York Times by Kenneth Chang

“Every astronaut we have come in here just says, ‘Wow,’ ” said Robert T. Bigelow, the company founder. “They can’t believe the size of this thing.”

Four years from now, the company plans for real modules to be launched and assembled into the solar system’s first private space station. Paying customers — primarily nations that do not have the money or expertise to build a space program from scratch — would arrive a year later.

In 2016, a second, larger station would follow. The two Bigelow stations would then be home to 36 people at a time — six times as many as currently live on the International Space Station.

If this business plan unfolds as it is written — the company has two fully inflated test modules in orbit already — Bigelow will be buying 15 to 20 rocket launchings in 2017 and in each year after, providing ample business for the private companies that the Obama administration would like to finance for the transportation of astronauts into orbit — the so-called commercial crew initiative.

President Obama’s budget proposal for 2011 calls for investing $6 billion over five years for probably two or more companies to develop spacecraft capable of carrying people into space. Then, instead of operating its own systems, like the space shuttles, NASA would buy rides for its astronauts on these commercial space taxis.

“This represents the entrance of the entrepreneurial mind-set into a field that is poised for rapid growth and new jobs,” Maj. Gen. Charles F. Bolden Jr., the administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said in February. “And NASA will be driving competition, opening new markets and access to space and catalyzing the potential of American industry.”

Officials have been careful not to say their commercial crew plan relies on a market beyond NASA, but for now, Bigelow appears to be the only non-NASA buyer for commercial crew services.

“Nobody,” Mr. Bigelow said of competition he sees on the horizon.

Thus, the rosier promises of the president’s plan rest on this enigmatic, 100-employee company located on 50 acres of desert not far from the casinos and strip clubs and the ability of Mr. Bigelow, an iconoclast who made his fortune in real estate including the Budget Suites of America hotel chain, to get his dreams off the ground.

He has spent about $180 million of his own money so far and has said he is willing to spend up to $320 million more. An expansion of the factory will double the amount of floor space as the company begins the transition from research and development to production.

Mr. Bigelow only occasionally gives interviews, and except for Michael N. Gold, the director of Bigelow’s Washington office, the employees almost never speak publicly. A company document titled “Some Important Bigelow Aerospace Cultural Values” implores employees, “Keep your work and the work of your co-workers very private from people outside the company.” (Mr. Gold said that the confidentiality stems from federal regulations designed to protect technological information and that the engineers are busy working.)

The Las Vegas site is hemmed by barbed wire and patrolled by armed guards.

The soundness of the business case is unknown to outsiders. Mr. Bigelow declines to say if he has firm commitments from any countries or companies to rent space on his space stations. In recent years, he has played down the notion that he is building a space hotel for rich tourists, although he says space tourism could provide a part of his business.

Over the past year, Mr. Gold visited countries like Japan, South Korea, Singapore, the Netherlands, England and Sweden to gauge interest. A stay on a Bigelow station, including transportation, is currently priced at just under $25 million a person for 30 days. That is less than half the more than $50 million a seat that NASA is paying for rides alone on Soyuz spacecraft to the International Space Station. Doubling the stay to 60 days adds just $3.75 million more.

For a country or company willing to sign up for a four-year commitment, the lease for an entire six-person module would cost just under $395 million a year, and that would include transportation for a dozen people each year. “You see why this is attractive for the sovereign client market,” Mr. Gold said.

The Bigelow prices are good through 2018, and Mr. Bigelow said the prices would drop by then if, as he expects, rocket prices drop.

“We’re very comfortable with our numbers,” he said, although he declined to discuss the details. Space Exploration Technologies Corporation, or SpaceX, which is the most optimistic in reducing launching costs, estimates that rides to space on its Falcon 9 rockets would be $20 million a seat.

“You have to trust a little bit that we’re making these investments because we think it’s going to make sense economically at the end of the day,” Mr. Bigelow said. “We won’t execute our business plan if those numbers aren’t there.”

His space stations are not his only interest in space. “I’ve been a researcher and student of U.F.O.’s for many, many years,” Mr. Bigelow said. “Anybody that does research, if people bother to do quality research, come away absolutely convinced. You don’t have to have personal encounters.”

He added: “People have been killed. People have been hurt. It’s more than observational kind of data.”

Other views that run counter to mainstream science include a belief in the power of prayer and a disbelief in the Big Bang theory.

The idea of inflatable spacecraft dates back almost to the beginning of the space age, solving a stubborn conundrum with putting stuff in space. Rockets are tall, but not particularly wide. With inflatable spacecraft, the structure can be packed tightly into the payload and then filled with air once in orbit.

NASA’s Echo I and Echo II satellites, launched in 1960 and 1964, were large Mylar balloons. NASA commissioned Goodyear to build prototypes of an inflatable space station, which looked like a big rubber inner tube.

The rubber space stations never flew, in part because of an obvious design weakness — they could pop if hit by meteoroids.

The idea remained dormant until the 1990s, when NASA started exploring how to build living quarters for a human mission to Mars. William C. Schneider, then the senior engineer at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, returned to the inflatable design.

Instead of rubber like the 1960s Goodyear design, Dr. Schneider used an airtight bladder surrounded by Kevlar straps. “It dumps its pressure load into the straps,” Dr. Schneider said. “Those two together make a very efficient design.”

Outside the straps, alternating layers of aluminized fabric and foam absorb and disperse the impacts of micrometeoroids, providing better protection than metal structures, Dr. Schneider said.

Even though he was sure the design was sound, he built two prototypes of the TransHab module and demonstrated their resilience in a swimming pool and a vacuum chamber. “People would think of it as a balloon,” said Dr. Schneider, who now is a visiting professor at Texas A&M University. “In cases, it was six times as good as needed. It’s absolutely verified.”

In the meantime, the Mars plans were shelved as too expensive, and TransHab was reimagined as a crew quarters module for the International Space Station. Then the space station costs grew, and in 2000, Congress prohibited NASA from spending any more money on TransHab.

Mr. Bigelow, 66, said that he was inspired by NASA’s successes of the 1960s, culminating with the Moon landings, and that he always hoped to invest in space someday. He read about TransHab in 1998, and learning of the project’s imminent demise, he established Bigelow Aerospace in 1999 and bought an exclusive license to the NASA patents.

Dr. Schneider joined Bigelow as a consultant. The Bigelow designs are essentially very close to his NASA work, Dr. Schneider said, with some changes like replacing the Kevlar with Vectran, another bullet-resistant fabric. There are also some notable improvements like the addition of small windows, already tested on the Genesis I and II test modules that were successfully launched from Russia using converted ballistic missiles.

“He had great manufacturing capability,” Dr. Schneider said. “They have some real good engineers as well. I’m sure they will be very successful.”

The biggest hole in his plans, Mr. Bigelow said, is the one not entirely in his control: getting to and from the space stations.

For a while, Bigelow and Lockheed Martin were collaborating on a small capsule that would launch on an Atlas V rocket, which currently launches Air Force satellites and other payloads. Lockheed Martin won the NASA contract for building the Orion crew capsule for NASA’s Constellation program and dropped out of the work with Bigelow.

Mimicking the $10 million X Prize that spurred the development of the suborbital spaceplane SpaceShipOne, Mr. Bigelow offered $50 million to anyone who could build an orbital spacecraft. No one tried to claim the prize before it expired in January.

Bigelow is collaborating with Boeing using $18 million that NASA has provided for preliminary design of a commercial crew capsule.

Keith Reiley, the program manager at Boeing for the capsule, said he was not very familiar with Bigelow’s space station plans, but was impressed with what Bigelow has contributed to Boeing’s capsule. “They’re a lot more entrepreneurial than we are,” Mr. Reiley said, “and it’s refreshing for us.”

If the Boeing spacecraft is ready by 2014, that is when the dance of Bigelow space station modules will begin.

A habitat called Sundancer, with an inflated volume of about 6,400 cubic feet, would launch first. A separate rocket would then carry two Bigelow astronauts to take up residence in Sundancer as additional pieces — a second Sundancer, a larger habitat of about 11,700 cubic feet, and a central connecting node — are launched. The modules are to dock by themselves with the astronauts present to fix any glitches.

Once the stations are up, Bigelow still needs to demonstrate that it can juggle the logistics of supplying food, water and air, as well as fix the inevitable glitches that will arise. Mr. Bigelow said that he would hire people with the needed experience and skills, and that space stations were not all that different from hotels.

“I’ve had four decades of serving people, tens and tens and tens of thousands of people, all over the southwest part of the United States,” he said. “I have four decades of building all kinds of things. The principles are the same.”

As a private company, Bigelow can operate space stations much more efficiently than NASA and its governmental partners can operate the International Space Station, Mr. Bigelow said. (Another of the company values declares: “Make up your mind quickly. Don’t take forever, people are waiting, the company is waiting, the future is waiting and time costs money.”)

NASA’s interest in inflatables has also been revived once again. Among several large technology demonstration projects proposed in the president’s 2011 budget is an inflatable module for the International Space Station. Bigelow is currently talking to NASA about that.

Mr. Bigelow envisions variations of the inflatable modules being used for a Moon base or a mission to Mars.

“Our hope is that we can serve NASA,” he said. “Because we can do it so much more economically.”