Something Else For a Change

Here's a shocker.

American Airlines Testing Anti-Missile Technology

But now American Airlines is flying with new defensive technology on some of its New York to Los Angeles flights.

Developed in New Hampshire by defense contractor, BAE Systems, the cross country passenger jets are now equipped with a laser deterrent system mounted on the plane's belly. It can identify and misdirect an incoming missile. It's being tested for Homeland Security.

Laurie Nuzzo is the Program manager for BAE Systems in Nashua New Hampshire where technology was developed. "Over several years we have been testing and validating the system. So now it is really great to see us now at this point on an in service passenger aircraft."

A few years ago I read about this.Sorry, can't find the earlier source now. We'll just have to believe me. What that earlier story also taught me was that since at least 2005, every air freight company's fleet of transoceanic carriers has this system. Can't be terrorist tow missile like threat. So, these must be for some kind of missile defense.

FindArticles > Insight on the News > May 28, 2001 > Article > Print friendly

U.S. Threatened With EMP Attack

Kenneth R. Timmerman

A new commission will examine how to defend the U.S. against a nuclear electromagnetic-pulse attack that could destroy all our electronic and communications systems.

Back in 1990, when he still was secretary of defense, Dick Cheney appeared before a House Armed Services subcommittee with some surprising news, given the euphoria generated by the destruction of the Berlin Wall. "The Soviet Union is going to disappear," he announced. "But the threat isn't."

Last week, recalling Cheney's warning, Rep. Jim Saxton, R-N.J., told a field hearing of that same commit tee, held at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in northern Maryland, that the "technology is now here" to bring America's way of life to an end.

That technology, said Saxton and Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, R-Md., is electromagnetic pulse, known by the initials EMP. Discovered in 1962 during the last U.S. nuclear test in the atmosphere and code-named "Starfish Prime," EMP long has been recognized as posing a military danger as great as the nuclear weapons that generate it. Indeed, these powerful radio waves can disable virtually all advanced weapons systems as if they were the surge from a lightning bolt striking your home and frying your computer.

Saxton first held hearings on EMP in 1998 when he was chairman of the Joint Economic Committee (see "E-Zapper Could Break the Bank," May 25, 1998).

Now, further attempts are being made to probe how attack by an EMP weapon might affect America's civilian infrastructure. And, according to government scientists interviewed by Insight, the initial analyses of highly classified studies under way at Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., and in other government labs are devastating.

Congress became so disturbed by those first studies that it mandated creation of a new blue-ribbon panel, whose members Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld soon will select, to study U.S. vulnerability to EMP attack. "The list of those selected for the nine-member panel is sitting on Donald Rumsfeld's desk," congressional sources tell Insight. "We expect this to be announced in very short order."

The new commission will examine the threat of EMP weapons, who has them and what damage they can do. Then it will make recommendations to Congress as to how best to protect U.S. military systems and our civilian infrastructure against massive EMP attack.

According to R. Alan Kehs, who heads the Army Research Laboratory at Aberdeen, "No one really knows how susceptible large-scale commercial electronic systems might be to a concerted electronic attack." But increased U.S. reliance on computers and nationwide communications systems touching virtually every aspect of our daily lives has made the United States a target of choice for electronic terrorists and potential enemies.

"A major EMP attack would lead us back a century in our technology," Bartlett tells Insight. "And the technology of 100 years ago couldn't support the population we have today. Just imagine our country with no power and no communications. The only person you could talk to would be the person next to your any meaningful time we would have total chaos."

The entire U.S. market system is at risk. America's commercial infrastructure is all but completely reliant on advanced computers, which can be readily disrupted or even destroyed by a nuclear EMP attack. And now smaller non-nuclear versions of that technology, known as high-powered microwave (HPM) and radio-frequency (RF) weapons, have proliferated around the world. They readily are available to potential terrorists, either directly from Russia, which long led the world in developing these technologies, or in more rudimentary forms from off-the-shelf components.

Under the guidance of Saxton and Bartlett, Congress last year appropriated $4 million to study the potential effect of RF weapons on U.S. commercial infrastructure -- banks, power plants, factories, offices, the commercial telephone network, inventory maintenance, the oil and gas delivery system -- and computers that everywhere make life easier and work more efficient.

As part of that study, the Pentagon hired David Schriner, a California scientist who says he "grew up building things from scratch," to put together a portable RF weapon using commercially available parts and widely known engineering principles.

Under a $950,000 Pentagon contract (which Schriner joked forced him to triple his four-man business to accommodate Pentagon accounting requirements) the scientist tinkered and soon put together two crude weapons. The smaller one was designed so it could be broken down into two parcels and shipped by United Parcel Service from one terrorist to another. The larger was built into a converted Volkswagen bus. Both used ordinary spark plugs to generate the pulse, commercially available coils, common capacitors and simple copper tape. "We wanted to show that by backyard means a weapons system could be built that would have some effectiveness against our civilian infrastructure," Schriner explained during an April 30 demonstration at the Aberdeen Proving Ground.

One incident that made U.S. military planners take notice of the threat occurred a few years ago when a U.S. Comanche helicopter flying out of the now-decommissioned Griffis Air Force base in Rome, N.Y., took out the entire navigational-aids system at the nearby commercial airport. The helicopter had generated a low-level RF pulse during a radar test "which ended up totally disrupting the global positioning system (GPS) being used to land commercial aircraft in Albany, New York, for a couple of weeks," reveals James F. O'Bryon, deputy director of the Pentagon's Operational Test and Evaluation Live-Fire Testing Center, which is studying the impact of EMP and RF weapons on U.S. military systems.

The military began testing Schriner's prototype weapons last year in an effort to determine the vulnerability of common electronic devices such as desktop computers, medical pumps and monitors, home-alarm systems and police scanners. In tests so far, Schriner's devices have temporarily disrupted all of them.

Far greater is the threat from a nuclear EMP attack detonated above the country without the missile ever striking our territory and which could make the United States go dark, silent and cold for months. "What would we do in America if Y2K really came to be?" asks Hostettler. "With an EMP laydown, we're talking about that. Would we have the political will to retaliate?"

Twenty years ago, only the Soviet Union had the capability to launch an EMP attack on the United States by exploding a nuclear warhead 500 kilometers (310 miles) in space. Pentagon planners spent billions of dollars protecting U.S. military equipment against EMP during the Cold War. But during the last decade, the military has canceled many of those protection programs, alleging an end to the threat of a Soviet nuclear strike. And none of our civilian infrastructure is protected because of the high cost.

Some believe the military acted imprudently. "The threat is still there, and it can be delivered in just 30 minutes," former nuclear-weapons designer and top EMP expert Bronius Cikotas tells Insight. "All that has changed is the intent." Intent ca be misread or change overnight, Cikotas argues, whereas "it takes years to harden our systems."

Today, at least 10 countries are working on and RF weapons, according to Cikotas. "Russia has very significant work in this area, and lots of this has propagated to other parts of the world, with scientists basically selling their work."

"Russia's work in this area has been the best in the world, most experts agree. Russia has the best physicists in the world when it comes to RF weapons and EMP," says Barry Crane, a physicist and former F-4 pilot now working at the Institute for Defense Analysis who has visited Russia's top EMP laboratories and design bureaus. "Many of their best EMP specialists are now working on contract in Communist China," Crane tells Insight.

Chinese military planners have written frequently of their intent to wage "asymmetrical warfare" against the United States. They say this means using other weapons, such as EMP and RF weapons, to exploit U.S. vulnerabilities, rather than matching us tank for tank and plane for plane.

But other countries could attack the U.S. mainland with a high-altitude EMP blast as well, and we would have no idea who was behind the attack. "Tonight, Saddam Hussein could fire a crude nuclear warhead from a SCUD launcher hidden on a commercial cargo ship off U.S. territorial waters and shut down the entire East Coast," Rep. Bartlett tells Insight. Bartlett is a scientist by training who holds scores of patents and is considered the top expert in Congress on the effects of EMP.

The more backward the country, the more attractive EMP becomes as a weapon against the United States, Bartlett explains. "If North Korea were to launch a missile straight up and explode a nuclear weapon 500 kilometers over their own territory, it wouldn't do them a lot of damage because they have very little dependence on electronic systems. But it would have a devastating impact on South Korea, as well as on our 37,000 troops stationed there. With North Korea's million soldiers, they could just walk all over us with impunity."

Bartlett and Saxton became deeply concerned by the prospect of an EMP attack by Russia after a little-publicized meeting they and seven other members of Congress held in a Vienna, Austria, hotel in the spring of 1999 at the peak of the Kosovo crisis with a delegation from the Russian Duma, or parliament.

"We were sitting with two Russians," Bartlett recalls, "the third-ranking Communist and Vladimir Lukin, who was Russian ambassador during Bush I and headed the Duma Foreign Affairs Commission. Lukin was very angry. He said that if they really wanted to hurt us, with no fear of retaliation, they would launch an SLBM [submarine-launched ballistic missile], detonate a nuclear weapon high over our country, and shut down our power grid and our communications for six months."

Bartlett says, "This was a much more serious threat than the Chinese threatening Los Angeles or New York during the Taiwan Strait crisis in 1996. We might be able to do without Los Angeles or New York, but it would be very difficult to live without power, communications and computers anywhere in America."

Cikotas, a scientist who has been compared in stature to Edward Teller, still recalls when he first discovered EMP in July 1962 during the last U.S. nuclear test conducted in the atmosphere. That test involved the detonation of a 1.5-megaton weapon at an altitude of 400 kilometers (248 miles) over Johnston Island in the Pacific. "Eight hundred miles away in Hawaii, street-lights went out within seconds," Cikotas says. "Fuses failed on Oahu, telephone service was disrupted on Kauai and the power system went down on Hawaii itself. What caused it was the high-powered electromagnetic pulse set off by the nuclear explosion, which hit Hawaii like a lightning bolt."

All during the Cold War, the Soviet Union optimized its nuclear weapons to emit EMP pulse waves. In the event of war, Soviet targeting officers had worked out detailed schemes to explode nuclear weapons high in the atmosphere over the North Pole and work down over America's East Coast in waves, Bartlett tells Insight.

"An EMP laydown, starting at the Pole, would sequentially blind the United States, making it impossible for us to retaliate," Bartlett explains. "A nuclear EMP attack would bring us to our knees as a nation."

And making matters worse, the United States is totally unprepared, despite repeated warnings in recent years. In early May, as RF weapons were being demonstrated in Aberdeen, President George W. Bush announced his administration's intent to build a national missile-defense system. Protecting against an EMP strike will be just as important and is one more vulnerability bequeathed to Bush from the Clinton/Gore era. So serious is the national-security situation inherited by Bush's team, say Pentagon insiders, that the ongoing strategic review "has become a rattlesnake hunt."

COPYRIGHT 2001 News World Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning

Funny how this very serious article omits the fact that Lukin literally threatened the Clinton admin. in 1999 with this prospect. The Russians were very unhappy about NATO's 78 day bombing of the former Yugoslavia.

During the 1999 NATO Bombings of Serbia

During the 1999 NATO bombing of Serbia, Russian leaders repeatedly inferred that if bombing continued or ground troops entered Serbia, it might lead to nuclear war with Russia. A series of quotes, right up until the bombing stopped, illustrate how serious they were.
“I told NATO, the Americans, the Germans: Don't push us toward military action. Otherwise there will be a European war for sure and possibly world war.'' Russian President Boris Yeltsin, April 6, 1999
"In the event that NATO and America start a ground operation in Yugoslavia, they will face a second Vietnam, I do not want to forecast what is going to start then. I cannot rule out a third world war.'' Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov, April 17, 1999
"If NATO goes from air force to ground force it will be a world catastrophe. (Russia) has never felt such anti-Western, anti-European feelings." First Deputy Russian Prime Minister Anatoly Chubais, April 25, 1999.
“You have to understand that if we want to cause you a problem over this, we could. Someone, we don't know who, could send up a missile from a ship or a submarine and detonate a nuclear weapon high over the United States. The EMP (electromagnetic pulse that destroys electronic and computer equipment) would take away all your capability.” Vladimir Lukin, Chairman of the Russian State Duma Foreign Policy Committee, late April, 1999
“Just let Clinton, a little bit, accidentally, send a missile. We will answer immediately. Such impudence! To unleash a war on a sovereign state. Without Security Council. Without United Nations. It could only be possible in a time of barbarism.” Boris Yeltsin, May 7, 1999
"The world has never in this decade been so close as now to the brink of nuclear war." Viktor Chernomyrdin, May 27, 1999

Wow.

Anyway, I'm sorry I can't find the article I read in 2005. I only put this up because Drudge started it. Normally I hate to be a purveyor of bummers. I guess I prefer whining about silly shit.

Tomorrow, God willing, I'll definitely be at Zeitgeist. Peace out.

I Made a Promise to a Lady

When you write down what somebody said, and someone else asks why you wrote it down, 'I'm buzzed' is usually a useless excuse. Tonight, during the celebration of the Saturnalia, I found myself attracted to that answer.

"Had to buy the multi black pack," Renee (sp?) from Phoenix said at Zeitgeist during dusk-time. I wrote it down. Her friend asked why. I said, if I post it it proves what she said was significant.

In other news, a girl named A**a said at me tonight, "Math is beautiful." A**a is an accountant.

Beauty is The Standard of Math. Math is The Standard of Beauty.

Germany and Turkey

Courtesy of this blog:

juti

June 25, 2008 11:47 PM

Berlin/deu

I watched the game in Kreuzberg, a part of Berlin mostly inhabited by Turkish and it was just amazing. The Turkish supported the Germans and likewise. The streets were packed with cheering people (from both sides) after the game. Just great! In would have loved to see Turkey vs. Germany in the finals. What a great game it would have been. Congratulations to the Turksih for a fighting so hard!!!!

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IrishEuropean

June 25, 2008 11:54 PM

Berlin/deu

I cannot tell you what the spirit in Berlin was like this evening - all Turkey's goals were enthusiastically applauded by the audience in a restaurant where I watched the game - indeed cheered. Spontaneous applause.

The fireworks and the car horn blowing continue now. I am cheering with the Germans, with no reason to do so other than living here and having seen an absence of loutishness and xenophobia in coming to this point.

I want Germany to win - if only for the party on Sunday night ;)

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dholliday

June 26, 2008 12:09 AM

Berlin/deu

Hi juti!

I watched it in Neukölln (Ä), we too had a great communal atmosphere between both sets of fans.

cato74

June 26, 2008 1:50 AM

Berlin/deu

Just returned from Kurfürstendam street here in Berlin - a big party for any of the teams.

Niko2

June 26, 2008 3:05 AM

Mainz/deu

I liked the pictures of the German players comforting Hamit. Nuff said.

This is so funny!

547274809496

June 26, 2008 5:45 AM

Bonn/deu

Hello football experts! I'm just a humble person who doesn't know much about football. I just thought that the 3 (three) german goals looked very nice, especially number 1 and 3. The 2 turkish goals could have been saved by Lehmann who didn't have a very good day yesterday, to put it mildly.

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Travesty Strikes Turkey

Derek Rae says "we thought we'd seen it all" and that's almost right. Technical difficulties robbed the home viewer of half the goals scored in Germany v Turkey. What a bummer!

And then some.

July 1, 2008

Jagr should only be re-signed if he doesn't have to play "5 in the picture". People talk about him resisting that style as if that's a bad thing. If changing tactics is a prerequisite to bringing him back, we should all be rooting for that to happen. Rangers were like 5th in goals against, like 25th in goals scored and they were dreadful to watch most nights. They sucked in the playoffs, too, for the most part.

That said, if it came down to a choice between Jagr and Sundin, I'd rather have Sundin. Difference to me is, Jagr is a powerful player while Sundin is a power player. Rather have him leading by example.

The Theory

Results of experiments on e. coli at Michigan State University have been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Historical contingency and the evolution of a key innovation in an experimental population of Escherichia coli

Zachary D. Blount, Christina Z. Borland, and Richard E. Lenski^*

Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824

Contributed by Richard E. Lenski, April 9, 2008 (received for review March 26, 2008)

The role of historical contingency in evolution has been much debated, but rarely tested. Twelve initially identical populations of Escherichia coli were founded in 1988 to investigate this issue. They have since evolved in a glucose-limited medium that also contains citrate, which E. coli cannot use as a carbon source under oxic conditions. No population evolved the capacity to exploit citrate for >30,000 generations, although each population tested billions of mutations. A citrate-using (Cit⁺) variant finally evolved in one population by 31,500 generations, causing an increase in population size and diversity. The long-delayed and unique evolution of this function might indicate the involvement of some extremely rare mutation. Alternately, it may involve an ordinary mutation, but one whose physical occurrence or phenotypic expression is contingent on prior mutations in that population. We tested these hypotheses in experiments that "replayed" evolution from different points in that population's history. We observed no Cit⁺ mutants among 8.4 x 10¹² ancestral cells, nor among 9 x 10¹² cells from 60 clones sampled in the first 15,000 generations. However, we observed a significantly greater tendency for later clones to evolve Cit⁺, indicating that some potentiating mutation arose by 20,000 generations. This potentiating change increased the mutation rate to Cit⁺ but did not cause generalized hypermutability. Thus, the evolution of this phenotype was contingent on the particular history of that population. More generally, we suggest that historical contingency is especially important when it facilitates the evolution of key innovations that are not easily evolved by gradual, cumulative selection.

In other words, specifically those of a blogger at conservapedia.

There are two claims made in the paper: that a strain of E. colii evolved the ability to utilize citrate, and that the strain first had a mutation which while it did not allow the utilization of citrate, in some fashion potentiated the later mutation. The first claim is supported by the optical density data in figure 1.

The second claim is demonstrated by repeat experiments using stored samples. In some cases, the ability to utilize citrate evolved, in some cases not. They report on the strains used, how often the ability evolved, etc. - divaricatum 11:30 June 20 2008 (PDT)

The argument on the talk page is not significant here. I only wanted to highlight this because it is totally going to cause a storm within the creation vs. evolution community. What this indicates is that life is capable of creating new abilities without having previously the genetic code.

Creationists believe mutation is real. Happens all the time. Some genetic code shuts down or begins to work. Here is a case where it seems creationists must face a possibility they've previously held fast can't be true. E. coli got something from nothing.

Wow. It's magic.

Of course the mystery is still there as to how it did it. The only thing the research team knew for sure is when a mutation sequence began that resulted in novel information, and they could make more of it do it again.

But it does not rule out God. It does offer a challenge to young earth creationism, sudden emergence, and the literal word of the Holy Bible.

Evolutionists of course love this for the threat it poses to intelligent design.

Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab

A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers' eyes. It's the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait.

And because the species in question is a bacterium, scientists have been able to replay history to show how this evolutionary novelty grew from the accumulation of unpredictable, chance events.

Twenty years ago, evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski of Michigan State University in East Lansing, US, took a single Escherichia coli bacterium and used its descendants to found 12 laboratory populations.

The 12 have been growing ever since, gradually accumulating mutations and evolving for more than 44,000 generations, while Lenski watches what happens.

Profound change

Mostly, the patterns Lenski saw were similar in each separate population. All 12 evolved larger cells, for example, as well as faster growth rates on the glucose they were fed, and lower peak population densities.

But sometime around the 31,500th generation, something dramatic happened in just one of the populations – the bacteria suddenly acquired the ability to metabolise citrate, a second nutrient in their culture medium that E. coli normally cannot use.

Indeed, the inability to use citrate is one of the traits by which bacteriologists distinguish E. coli from other species. The citrate-using mutants increased in population size and diversity.

"It's the most profound change we have seen during the experiment. This was clearly something quite different for them, and it's outside what was normally considered the bounds of E. coli as a species, which makes it especially interesting," says Lenski.

Rare mutation?

By this time, Lenski calculated, enough bacterial cells had lived and died that all simple mutations must already have occurred several times over.

That meant the "citrate-plus" trait must have been something special – either it was a single mutation of an unusually improbable sort, a rare chromosome inversion, say, or else gaining the ability to use citrate required the accumulation of several mutations in sequence.

To find out which, Lenski turned to his freezer, where he had saved samples of each population every 500 generations. These allowed him to replay history from any starting point he chose, by reviving the bacteria and letting evolution "replay" again.

Would the same population evolve Cit+ again, he wondered, or would any of the 12 be equally likely to hit the jackpot?

Evidence of evolution

The replays showed that even when he looked at trillions of cells, only the original population re-evolved Cit+ – and only when he started the replay from generation 20,000 or greater. Something, he concluded, must have happened around generation 20,000 that laid the groundwork for Cit+ to later evolve.

Lenski and his colleagues are now working to identify just what that earlier change was, and how it made the Cit+ mutation possible more than 10,000 generations later.

In the meantime, the experiment stands as proof that evolution does not always lead to the best possible outcome. Instead, a chance event can sometimes open evolutionary doors for one population that remain forever closed to other populations with different histories.

Lenski's experiment is also yet another poke in the eye for anti-evolutionists, notes Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. (Am thinking creationists would wonder "what other pokes do you mean?" --ed.)

"The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events," he says. "That's just what creationists say can't happen."

Of course I didn't get how serious this was until I read the words of NS writer Bob Holmes. So it isn't just novel information, it required a series of mutations to do it. That could be the model for why eyes evolved, or how scales became breasts or how eggs became wombs. Either it mutated over and over again because it wouldn't give up until it got what it wanted, or it was part of a sequence of planned steps to achieve more robust colonies through learning how to take what was once nothing of value and turn it into a source to metabolize.

Did I say wow. I really mean it now

Delayed gratification

Zidane and Wenger. Coca-Cola strip in the background. Meta fooqin physical! Zidane looks influential, still. In fact, tonight here's a prediction:

Zizou is the heir to der Kaiser's throne.

But, what do I know?

Funny.

This week...what would Charlemagne think?