Philip Bethge

Category: Stories

  • Saving Moon Trash: Urine Containers, ‘Space Boots’ and Artifacts Aren’t Just Junk, Argue Archaeologists

    California has named the remains of the Apollo 11 mission a state historical resource — to the delight of the young profession of space archaeologists. They fear that the trash and equipment left behind by the United States’ journeys to the moon could someday wind up for sale on eBay if they aren’t protected.

    There is an unwritten law in America’s national parks: Carry out what you bring in.

    When they visited the moon, though, the Americans weren’t nearly as considerate or in touch with nature. Astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong left behind more than 100 items when they left the moon on July 21, 1969, at 5:54 p.m., Earth Time. The items included four urine containers, several airsickness bags, a Hasselblad camera, lunar overshoes and a complete moon-landing step.

    The mission was historically significant. But are the urine containers? (more…)

  • Tribulations at Toyota: The Search for the Gas Pedal Flaw

    Toyota has recalled millions of vehicles due to reports of sticking gas pedals and unintended acceleration. But finding out exactly what causes the problem has proven difficult. An explanation for why most of the accidents have occurred in the US has likewise proven elusive.

    It is an agonizing predicament that Toyota finds itself in — the most excruciating in the company’s history. Vehicles accelerating on their own continue to cause problems, and the inability to bring the matter to a close could spell ruin for the company.

    Worn down Toyota managers wanted to bring a little optimism to the Geneva Motor Show last week, but the latest bad news — that repairs failed to solve the carmaker’s gas pedal problem — ruined the mood. Numerous Toyota drivers in the United States … More

  • Modern Day Flintstones: A Stone Age Subculture Takes Shape

    A modern-day Stone Age subculture is developing in the United States, where wannabe cavemen mimic their distant ancestors. They eat lots of meat, bathe in icy water and run around barefoot. Some researchers say people led healthier lives in pre-historic times.

    By Philip Bethge

    John Durant greets the hunter-gatherers of New York once a month in his apartment on the Upper East Side. They eat homemade beef jerky, huddle around the hearth and swap recipes for carpaccio with vegetables or roasted wild boar.

    Often enough, the host will deliberately skip a few meals the next day. After all, didn’t his earliest ancestors starve a little between hunts? Instead of eating, Durant prefers to run barefoot across Brooklyn Bridge. In the winter, he takes part in the Coney Island Polar Bear swim in the icy Atlantic.

    (more…)

  • Chaos in the Doctor’s Office: Panic in Germany as Swine Flu Spreads

    Fear of swine flu is running rampant in Germany as the number of reported cases — and deaths — continues to grow. Doctors’ offices are inundated by people wanting to get the vaccine, which is in short supply. But health professionals are divided over how dangerous the virus really is.

    Death from swine flu comes unexpectedly, as was the case with six-year-old Kharra Skye Davis from Hot Springs, Arkansas, who spent 20 hours fighting for her life, and with Kyree James Gamble, 5, from Littlestown, Pennsylvania. Both were healthy children, and both lost their lives before they had truly begun.

    In the case of Kharra, who died in September, the cause of death was respiratory failure. The little girl had attended a birthday party, and by that evening she had a fever of 40.5 degrees Celsius (105 degrees Fahrenheit). Kharra quickly developed pneumonia, and by the next day … More

  • SPIEGEL Interview with Al Gore: ‘I Am Optimistic’

    In a SPIEGEL interview, former US vice president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore, 61, discusses Barack Obama’s environmental policies, the endless push by lobbyists to derail reforms and his hopes for a global deal at the climate change summit in Copenhagen next month.

    SPIEGEL: Mr. Vice President, you write in your new book, “Our Choice,” (to be published in German translation on Nov. 23 as “Wir Haben Die Wahl”) that we have at our fingertips all of the tools that we need to solve the climate crisis. The only missing ingredient would be collective will. What makes it so hard for governments to implement change even though most people know what needs to be done?

    Gore: As human beings, we are vulnerable to confusing the unprecedented with the improbable. In our everyday experience, if something has never happened before, we are generally safe in assuming it is not going to happen in the future, but the excepti in Copenhagen next month.

    SPIEGEL: Mr. Vice President, you write in your new book, “Our Choice,” (to be published in German translation on Nov. 23 as “Wir Haben Die Wahl”) that we have at our fingertips all of the tools that we need to solve the climate crisis. The only missing ingredient would be collective will. What makes it so hard for governments to implement change even though most people know what needs to be done?

    Gore: As human beings, we are vulnerable to confusing the unprecedented with the improbable. In our everyday experience, if something has never happened before, we are generally safe in assuming it is not going to happen in the future, but the exceptions can kill you and climate change is one of those exceptions. Neuroscientists point out that we are inherently better able to respond quickly to the kinds of threats that our evolutionary ancestors survived — like other humans with weapons, snakes and spiders or fire. Also, there is a real-time lag between the causes of the climate crisis and its full manifestation. That makes it seem less urgent to many people… More

  • Grow Your Own Skyscraper

    Three young German architects are designing structures made completely out of living trees, including a pavilion for concerts in downtown Stuttgart. But designing the ultimate treehouse turns out to be trickier than one might expect.

    By Philip Bethge

    Ferdinand Ludwig grows trees on trees. That’s what he does. And he has grafted together — trunk to top, top to trunk — seven young willow trees

    At the moment a scaffold supports the young architect’s unusual tree tower. The roots of individual trees protrude sideways and into containers of soil. But soon the roots will be cut off. And “at that point,” the young architect says, “the trees will finally have merged into a single organism.”

    Ludwig calls this technique “plant addition.” To do it, he uses one-year-old willows that are thin and flexible but at least 10 meters (33 feet) long. Once the willows have matured to full strength, the strands will be able to support the eight-meter (26-foot) tower that Ludwig plans to begin building near Lake Constance in southern Germany at the end of July, as though they were steel beams.

    This is probably the biggest project to date within an innovative branch of architecture — no pun intended. Ludwig and fellow architects, Oliver Storz and Hannes Schwertfeger, call their new specialty “building botany.” As part of this the three men are building structures made from plants as well as studying the elasticity of plane trees and examining how effectively willows can grow around steel pipes at the University of Stuttgart’s Institute of Basics in Modern Architectural Design.

    “In our opinion trees are high-tech material, which is why plant growth is part of our vision,” says Schwertfeger. “We start them off but the tree itself continues the building process,” Ludwig adds. “In architectural terms it’s very risky — but it’s a positive risk.”

    Training trees to grow in all manner of decorative shapes is not new, it has been part of the skilled landscape gardener’s repertoire since the 13th century. And companies like the Israeli firm, Plantware, have perfected these techniques as they have shaped trees into fruit bowls, toilet paper holders and street lamps; they call their work “arborsculpture.” Now Stuttgart’s architectural rebels are taking the concept a step further. They consider the trees to be building materials similar to steel and concrete.

    “The basic rule is this: All forces pass through the wood, from top to bottom,” Schwertfeger explains. And the trio has already built their first structures. For example on Lake Constance where a group of willows surround a metal walkway. And in the Bavarian Forest, trees form a “diagonal support frame” for a bird watching station. And now the pioneers are planning to build a “green room” in downtown Stuttgart. The project, dubbed “Satellite,” will consist of a 120-square-meter (1,290-square-foot) pavilion for exhibitions and concerts.

    Meticulous Maintenance

    The basis of their work is always the same. First, the architects build a conventional support structure. Young, flexible trees are attached to the structure and bent into the desired shape. As the trees grow, they take on more and more of a load-bearing function. After a few years — and what Ludwig calls a “botanical certificate of fitness” inspection by a structural engineer — the support structure can be removed. At which point the roof and floors that have been inserted should be supported entirely by the trees.

    But that’s not quite as easy as it sounds. For instance, there is the “risk of strangulation” if metal fasteners obstruct the flow of sap. The architects have already had to tack on “sap bypasses” made from branches to keep their botanical building material alive. In addition, just like an ornamental garden, a tree structure requires meticulous maintenance. “Or else everything turns back into shrubbery,” Ludwig says.

    The architects are developing these methods on grounds belonging to a cultural association in northern Stuttgart. At the site, Ludwig is trying to figure out how best to “weld together” different trees while Storz tests the strength of basket willows. Two hundred trees are lined up in a straight row inside scaffolding that has concrete weights hanging from it. Four times a day, a system of computer-controlled winches use the weights to rock the trees back and forth in an elaborate pattern.

    ‘A Tree Doesn’t Want to Become a Wall’

    The tree-bending experiment is designed to solve a problem that the botany builders didn’t expect. They noticed that when trees were attached to a frame, they no longer seemed to have any reason to develop their own strength. However, the stresses of being bent this way, with the concrete weights, artificially stimulates growth and improves stability.

    “We have to subject ourselves to the tree’s own structural rules,” says Storz. For instance, trees are incapable of forming two-dimensional structures. “A tree doesn’t want to become a wall,” Ludwig adds.

    In other words, anyone who expects your everyday residential structure or functional building from these builders of the botanical will be disappointed. But it is precisely this divergence from classic architecture that fascinates the Stuttgart architects.

    The technique creates structures “that change quite considerably, that require one to adapt. Their uses change constantly too,” says Schwertfeger. “Each structure is a blend of fiction and reality,” notes the doctoral candidate, quickly adding that: “In our case, the fiction component is relatively high.”

    Unfortunately, everyday reality keeps catching up with this fascinating, abstract theory. One example: for the past few weeks Ludwig has had a problem that someone embarking on a career in building with trees can certainly do without. He has somehow developed an allergy to plane trees.

    Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

    –> read original article at SPIEGEL Online International

  • Cloned Meat Soon to Hit European Supermarkets

    Cattle cloning has long been standard practice in the United States. Now EU agriculture ministers have decided that cloned meat and milk should be allowed onto the European market. Not everyone is pleased.

    By Philip Bethge

    Anyone who considers creation sacred should make sure they never talk to a cattle breeder. In-vitro fertilization, artificial insemination and embryo transfer are the terms of their trade. And now another word from the lexicon of reproductive medicine has joined the breeder’s jargon: cloning.

    The European Union’s agricultural ministers decided on Monday of last week that in the future, the meat and milk of the offspring of cloned animals should be allowed on the European market. The European Parliament still needs to approve the proposal. However environmental and animal protection organizations responded immediately to the news and condemned the decision. They consider cloning to be unethical and cruel, and warn that the risks of cloned meat for human health have not been adequately researched.

    The ministers’ decision was long overdue. In the US and South America, cloning has long been standard practice among breeders. German experts like Heiner Niemann from the Institute for Animal Breeding at the Friedrich Loeffler Institute also have high expectations of the technique. “In the future, cloning will be one of the standard cattle-breeding techniques,” says Niemann.

    The technology is already widely used in the US. Companies like ViaGen, Cyagra or Trans Ova Genetics offer cattle clones for between $10,000 and $20,000. The benefits are obvious: Multiple copies can be made of a bull with particularly desirable characteristics. And multiple “superbulls” naturally have more offspring than just one — meaning more premium meat for the breeder.

    “With elite animals, cloning can quickly pay for itself,” says Mark Walton of ViaGen. Karen Batra from the Biotechnology Industry Organization estimates there are already about 600 cloned super cattle in the US. The meat of their offspring is already on sale in supermarkets, she says, explaining that it doesn’t need to be specially labeled. “For breeders, cloning is just another reproductive technique, much like in-vitro fertilization,” says Batra.

    But critics see significant differences. Cloning is said to produce deformed animals with short life expectancies. The cloned sheep Dolly is known to have met a painful end. But genetics expert Heiner Niemann claims that “major progress” has been made since then. Far fewer embryos die and “defects” are much more seldom.

    The meat of the cloned animal itself doesn’t end up in supermarkets, however: Both the US and Europe prohibit its sale. What ends up in the store freezers are the steaks from the clone’s offspring. Its quality is indisputable — and these animals are not even clones. Both the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced last year that the milk and meat of the offspring of cloned animals pose no health risks.

    So is it only a matter of time before “cloned” meat is to be found on European supermarket shelves too? After all, it can’t be distinguished from normal steaks. The European Parliament needs to decide soon, before American products start landing on the European market unnoticed.

    According to an EFSA report, the technology “is on the verge of widespread commercial use.” The institution’s experts expect the technique will be used around the world “before 2010.”

    –> read original article at SPIEGEL Online International

  • Nuclear Renewal: Siemens Seeks to Cash In on Russia’s Atomic Adventure

    Nuclear power is back in vogue in Russia, with 26 new reactors scheduled for construction by 2030. German industrial giant Siemens has grabbed a piece of the pie. But safety and financial concerns threaten to overshadow the country’s atomic ambitions.

    Olga Kurochkina can hardly hide her delight at making her German guests squirm. She has just served them caviar and pirogies and is now triumphantly waving a document in their faces. “Our students recently debated whether Germany needs nuclear energy,” says Kurochkina, a teacher at an elite Moscow high school. “The arguments, of course, favor electricity from nuclear energy.”

    Kurochkina insists that there are “significant disadvantages” to all other energy sources. Wind turbines? “They produce infrasound, which causes depression.” Solar cells? “They cause local cooling of the air.”

    It is hard to believe, but … More