Philip Bethge

Tag: technology

  • Ditching Cars for Bullet Trains: Can Obama Get High-Speed on Track?

    President Barack Obama wants to upgrade America’s transport system using high-speed trains, bringing a taste of what is a part of everyday life in Europe and Asia to the United States. But the car-obsessed nation is divided over the plans. Is the mammoth project doomed to failure?

    US Vice-President Joseph Biden is America’s most famous commuter. It has earned him the nickname “Amtrak Joe.” Several times a week, Biden takes an Amtrak train from Wilmington, Delaware to the historic Union Station in Washington, DC. It has been claimed the Democrat now knows the first name of every ticket inspector on the line.

    Biden must have been pleased when he unveiled the government’s new high-speed rail plans at 30th Street Station in Philadelphia last month. The administration plans to spend $53 billion (€38 billion) on passenger trains and rail networks over the next six years. The lion’s share of this has been earmarked for new high-speed connections. The aim is that 80 percent of Americans will have access to “bullet trains” by 2035.

    Such gleaming high-tech marvels could race between San Francisco and Los Angeles at speeds of up to 350 kilometers per hour (220 miles per hour). The planners hope to cut the journey times between Washington and Boston to less than four hours. A T-shaped line in Texas would connect Dallas, Houston and San Antonio. The plan foresees raising hundreds of kilometers of this so-called “Texas T-Bone” off the ground so that longhorn cattle can pass underneath the rails.

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

    “It’s a smart investment in the quality of life for all Americans,” says Rick Harnish of the Chicago-based Midwest High Speed Rail Association. Industry insiders like Ansgar Brockmeyer, of the passenger rail division of Germany’s Siemens Mobility, are thrilled about this locomotive renaissance. “There’s reason for optimism,” he says.

    However, the country’s conservative forces are determined to derail US President Barack Obama’s technological vision. No fewer than three newly elected governors (from the states of Wisconsin, Florida, and Ohio) have completely rejected Washington’s planned cash injection for the country’s railways.

    America’s Legendary Railroads

    In fact it’s difficult to say whether America’s long-neglected trains can ever make a comeback. Large parts of the network are in a desperate state, and most Americans have long-since switched to traveling by car or plane instead.

    And yet the railroad enabled their forefathers to open up the Wild West. Train services were profitable in the US right up until the 1950s. Many lines were legendary, such as the Santa Fe Super Chief, which brought its passengers from Chicago to Los Angeles in luxury. Film stars like Elizabeth Taylor, Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart slumbered in the elegant sleeper cars, and dined in five-star style.

    The California Zephyr is another classic service, with its route stretching for almost 4,000 kilometers (2,500 miles) from the Midwest to San Francisco. In better times, “Vista dome” cars gave passengers a 360-degree panoramic view of the Colorado River, Rocky Mountains and Sierra Nevada. An elite team of hostesses, dubbed the “Zephyrettes,” served drinks and even offered to act as babysitters.

    The Zephyr still runs to this day — but the 51-hour journey makes this more of a treat for diehard railway fans. One such fan is James McCommons from Northern Michigan University. The academic spent a year crisscrossing the US by train before chronicling his experiences in a book. “It’s embarrassing,” he says. “We were the greatest railroad nation in the world, and now we don’t even build a railroad car in this country ourselves.”

    American author James Kunstler complains that “Amtrak has become the laughing stock of the world.” He jokes that the company was clearly “created on a Soviet-management model, with an extra overlay of Murphy’s Law to ensure maximum entropy of service.” Indeed, Amtrak trains currently take more than 11 hours to cover the 600 kilometers (375 miles) from San Francisco to Los Angeles. It hardly helps either that the train is called the “Coast Starlight.”

    A Wake-Up Call

    The high-speed rail plans have therefore come as something of a wake-up call in these circumspect times. Many Americans are amazed to discover that President Obama appears to be serious about investing heavily in the railways. “I don’t know what this fascination with trains is about,” says Michael Sanera of the John Locke Foundation, a free-market think tank. He has only one explanation: “I think there is a lot of frustration primarily by men who maybe didn’t get that train set when they were kids, and now they want to play around with trains.”

    Taking a closer look, it’s easy to see how serious the situation has become. America is facing gridlock. According to a study by the National Surface Transportation Policy and Revenue Commission, the US will need nine new airports the size of the gigantic Denver International Airport and will have to double the number of miles of interstate highways if demand for transportation continues to grow at the current level in the coming decades. In 2009, commuters in the US spent 5 billion hours stuck in traffic jams. That’s seven times as long as in 1982.

    “Four decades from now, the United States will be home to 100 million additional people,” warns US Transport Secretary Ray LaHood. “If we settle for roads, bridges and airports that already are overburdened and insufficient … our next generation will find America’s arteries of commerce impassable.” He considers high-speed trains essential.

    Germany’s Siemens Hopes for New Business

    Rail experts in the US have identified about 10 corridors along which high-speed trains could theoretically run profitably. The most promising of these routes lies in the northeastern part of the country; namely between New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, DC. Because the distances are relatively short and there is high demand, bullet trains could capitalize on their advantages in the region.

    There is also a relatively urgent need for rail connections in the Midwest, for example between Chicago and St. Louis. Although flights between the two cities take just over an hour, Harnish says that delays like check-in and security can easily turn that trip into three hours. By contrast, a high-speed rail line could cover this distance in less than two. Planners believe the route could serve as many as a million passengers a year.

    “In Europe we have seen that high-speed rail connections of under four hours can be competitive,” says Ansgar Brockmeyer from Siemens. The high-speed line between Barcelona and Madrid, which began operating at the start of 2008, has reportedly already captured half of the market share previously held by air travel. As early as 2006, Siemens-made Velaro trains were hurtling down the line at speeds in excess of 400 kilometers per hour (250 miles per hour).

    Siemens now hopes to be able to market the same model of trains in the US. Californians are renowned for being environmentally conscious and tech-savvy — even Arnold Schwarzenegger promoted high-speed trains in California when he was the state’s governor. All this has created favorable conditions for the California High Speed Rail Authority (CaHSRA), which wants to lay 1,300 kilometers of high-speed track, connecting more than 25 cities in the process. Work is due to get underway on a 100-kilometer stretch of the new line in 2012.

    “Our travel time from Los Angeles to San Francisco is going to be two hours and 40 minutes, with stops,” says Rachel Wall of the CaHSRA. “Anyone who has traveled that route knows that driving or flying takes longer.”

    Too Expensive and Too Risky

    Until recently, the industry also had high hopes in Florida. The railway industry expected a call for tenders before the end of the year for the construction of a line between Tampa and Orlando. This could potentially have created thousands of jobs. However, Governor Rick Scott killed the project. Too expensive and too risky is how the Republican governor summarized it, although he has since promised to reconsider his decision.

    A lot is at stake for President Obama. The bullet trains were part of his 2008 election campaign. More recently, he promoted rail projects in his latest State of the Union speech. The president fears the country could fall behind its rivals. China, for instance, plans to lay a jaw-dropping 13,000 kilometers of high-speed rail track by 2020. It’s investing the equivalent of more than $300 billion in this Herculean task.

    Beijing recently sacked Rail Minister Liu Zhijun after what were rumored to be allegations of corruption. The concrete beds of the tracks were apparently laid sloppily.

    But this has done little to dampen enthusiasm for the program. From 2012 onward, trains should be able to catapult passengers from Beijing to Shanghai in less than five hours. Amtrak trains currently cover a similar distance between New York and Atlanta in a decidedly pedestrian 18 hours.

    Rail fan McCommons blames American attitudes for the perilous state of his country’s railway systems. “We have been sold this bizarre idea that only automobiles and air can take care of all our needs,” he says. That’s hardly surprising since two generations of Americans have grown up almost entirely without passenger trains. “It’s not in their imagination to take a train,” he explains.

    Vice President Biden can therefore still consider himself a pioneer if he travels to work by train. He often takes the Acela Express to Washington, the only rail line in the US that’s trumpeted as being high-speed.

    Biden’s ride covers the almost 180-kilometer route from Wilmington to Washington in 75 minutes. The average speed: About 140 kilometers per hour.

    Translated from the German by Jan Liebelt

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

  • Technology Pioneer David Gelernter: ‘Love Is Beyond Watson’

    What does Watson’s Jeopardy victory tell us? Not much, says David Gelernter, the computer science pioneer and Yale professor. SPIEGEL spoke with Gelernter about the prospects of achieveing artifically-created consciousness and the belief that eternal life can be secured on a hard drive.

    SPIEGEL: Dr. Gelernter, the American journalist Ambrose Bierce described the word we are looking for as “a temporary insanity curable by marriage.” Do you know what we mean?

    Gelernter: I don’t.

    SPIEGEL: It’s love. It’s a question from the TV show Jeopardy, and the IBM supercomputer Watson had no problem finding the solution. So does that mean Watson knows what love is?

    Gelernter: He doesn’t have the vaguest idea. The field of artificial intelligence has not even started to address how emotions are represented cognitively, what makes a belief and so forth. The problem is, I don’t think only with my mind. I think with my body and my mind together. There’s no such thing as love without bodily input, output, reaction and response. So love is beyond Watson.

    SPIEGEL: Why, then, is Watson still doing well at Jeopardy?

    Gelernter: Because the body is not involved in playing Jeopardy. You don’t have to mean or to believe a single thing you say. The game is superficial enough to be winnable by an entity with no emotions, no sensations, and no self.

    SPIEGEL: Still, Watson’s opponents, Jeopardy all-time champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, said in interviews that they had the feeling they were playing against a human. How come we can even consider Watson being on a par with us?

    Gelernter: I even consider my macaw Ike to be on a par with me (laughs and points to his macaw). But seriously, I’d rather chat with Watson than with some of the people in my department at Yale. Any baby with a teddy bear immediately anthropomorphizes the teddy bear. We want to see images of ourselves, mirrors of ourselves. Anthropomorphizing is a powerful human urge. So I have no problems calling Watson a “he.” That’s a normal human response.

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

    SPIEGEL: Watson defeated Jennings and Rutter in the competition recently with staggering ease. If not human-like, can Watson at least tell us something about the human mind?

    Gelernter: Watson was not built to study the human mind. And the IBM people don’t claim that they’ve solved any cognitive problems. Watson was built to win Jeopardy. That’s it. For that purpose, it is drawing heavy on the parallel programming strategy. This strategy explicitly says: forget about the brain. The question is, can we burn raw computing power in such a way that we can create something that’s able to compete with a human? The result is an extraordinary piece of technology that — unlike IBM’s chess computer Deep Blue — has major implications for applied artificial intelligence.

    Computers Don’t Know What Pain Is

    SPIEGEL: But could you bring yourself to call a machine like that “intelligent”?

    Gelernter: The question is how superficial you are willing to be with your definition of “intelligence.” When we think of it seriously, intelligence implies a self who is intelligent, an entity that can sense its thoughts, is aware of the fact that it’s thinking and that it is manifesting intelligence. None of that is part of Watson by design.

    SPIEGEL: But let’s assume that we start feeding Watson with poetry instead of encyclopedias. In a few years time it might even be able to talk about emotions. Wouldn’t that be a step on the way to at least showing human-like behavior?

    Gelernter: Yes. However, the gulf between human-like behavior and human behavior is gigantic. Feeding poetry into Watson as opposed to encyclopedias is not going to do any good. Feed him Keats, and he will read “My heart aches, and a drowsing numbness pains my senses.” What the hell is that supposed to mean? When a poet writes “my heart aches” it’s an image, but it originates in an actual physical feeling. You feel something in the center of your chest. Or take “a drowsing numbness pains my senses”: Watson can’t know what drowsy means because he’s never fallen asleep. He doesn’t know what pain is. He has no purchase on poetry at all. Still, he could win at Jeopardy if the category were English Romantic poets. He would probably even do much better than most human contestants at not only saying Keats wrote this but explaining the references. There’s a lot of data involved in any kind of scholarship or assertion, which a machine can do very well. But it’s a fake.

    SPIEGEL: What is so special about the human brain that the machine can’t replicate it?

    Gelernter: The brain is radically different from the machine. Physics and chemistry are fundamental to its activity. The brain moves signals from one neuron to another by using a number of different neurotransmitters. It is made out of cells with certain properties, built out of certain proteins. It is a very elaborate piece of biology. The computer on the other hand is a purely electronic machine made out of semiconductors and other odds and ends. I can’t replicate the brain on a chip just in the same way I can’t replicate orange juice on a chip. Orange juice is just not the same thing as a chip.

    SPIEGEL: Are you serious about your statement that a machine won’t truly be able to think until it can daydream and hallucinate?

    Gelernter: Absolutely. We go through an oscillation between different mental states several times during the day, and you can’t understand the mind without understanding this spectrum. We have wide-awakeness, high energy, high level of concentration, which is associated with analytical capacities. And at the other end of the spectrum, we are exhausted, our thoughts are drifting. In that state, our thoughts are arranged in a different way. We start to freely associate. Take Rilke: All of a sudden it occurred to him that the flight of a swallow in the twilight sky is like a crack in a teapot. It’s a very strange image but a very striking image. Certainly, nobody else ever said it before. These sorts of new analogies and new images give rise to creativity, but also to scientific insights. Emotion has a lot to do with it. Why do you combine a bird flying with a piece of ceramic with a crack? Because, at least in Rilke’s mind, they are tagged with a similar emotion.

    SPIEGEL: But we are certainly able to think without getting so poetic.

    Gelernter: True. At the upper end of the spectrum, when my thoughts are disciplined by the logical rules of induction, analogies play no part. I have hypotheses, and I work my way through to conclusions. That kind of intelligence doesn’t need emotions, and it doesn’t need a body. But it is also of almost no importance to human beings. We think purely logically, analytically, roughly zero percent of our time. However, when I am thinking creatively, when I am inventing new analogies, I can’t do that without my emotional faculty. The body is intensely involved; it created the fuel that drives that process by engendering emotions.

    SPIEGEL: But even Watson might soon be able to come up with interesting analogies. Just give him the right books to read.

    Gelernter: It’s possible to build a machine that is capable of what seems like creativity — even a machine that can hallucinate. But it wouldn’t be like us at all. It would always be a fake, a facade. So, it is perfectly plausible that “Watson 2050” will win some poetry contests. It might write a magnificent sonnet that I find beautiful and moving and that becomes famous all over the world. But does that mean that Watson has a mind, a sense of self? No, of course not. There is nobody at home.

    SPIEGEL: Can you be sure?

    Gelernter: There is nothing inside.

    SPIEGEL: How can you know, then, that somebody is at home within another human being?

    Gelernter: I know what I am. I am a human being. If you are a human being too, my belief is you are intelligent. And not because you passed a test, not because you showed me you can do calculus or translate Latin. You could be fast asleep, somebody could ask, “Is he intelligent?” And I will say, “Yes, of course. He’s a human being.” The only intelligence everyone has ever experienced firsthand is his own. There is no objective test for intelligence in others. The observable behavior tells you nothing about what is within. The only way we can confidently ascribe intelligence is by seeing a creature like us.

    “Scientists Will Never Reproduce a Human Mind”

    SPIEGEL: There is a lab in Lausanne, Switzerland, where a group of scientists are trying to recreate the brain’s biology in each and every detail, one neuron at a time, in a supercomputer. They hope to replicate a complete human brain within a decade. Wouldn’t that be “a creature like us”?

    Gelernter: They could produce a very accurate brain simulator. They may be able to predict the behavior of the brain down to the transmission of signals. But they’re not going to produce a mind any more than a hurricane simulator produces a hurricane.

    SPIEGEL: Other scientists are far more optimistic. Regardless of all the obstacles, they say, the exponentially growing number of transistors on a chip will provide us with virtually infinite possibilities. If we connect huge numbers of computer chips in the right way and give them the right tasks to perform, then at some point consciousness will emerge.

    Gelernter: It is impossible to create mental states by writing software — no matter how sophisticated it gets. If a simple computer can’t produce orange juice, a much more complicated computer won’t do any better. Computer chips are just the wrong substrate, the wrong stuff for consciousness. Now, can some kind of a miracle happen if you put a lot of them together? Maybe. But I have no reason to believe that such a miracle will happen.

    SPIEGEL: Given that we can manage a really good fake, a robot that pretends to be conscious in a convincing way — would we even notice if it wasn’t the real thing?

    Gelernter: It already makes no difference to us. Just take the robots in Iraq and Afghanistan where they search for mines and so forth. The men on the front lines become emotionally attached to their robots, they’re sad when they are destroyed. And 50 years from now, robots will be much better. There are a lot of lonely people in the world. So now they have a robot, and it is around all the time, chats with them. Sure they will be attached to it. The robot will know all about them. The robot will be able to say things like, “How are you feeling this morning? I realize your back was hurting yesterday.” Will people have human-type feelings towards the robots? Absolutely. And then the question becomes: Does it matter that, in this sense, they are being defrauded? The answer is, given the scarcity of companionship in the world, it probably doesn’t matter in practical terms. However, it certainly matters philosophically. If you care about what it is to be a human being, the robot is not going to tell you.

    SPIEGEL: Things might change if you give him a near-perfect body, equipped with sensors that help him feel things and explore his environment like humans do.

    Gelernter: In that case the machine would be capable of simulating humanness much more effectively. But a fake body attached to a computer is still not going to generate real sensations. If you knocked your foot on something, your brain registers what we call pain. If you think of something good that is going to happen tomorrow, the body responds by feeling good, then the mind feels better and so forth. This feedback loop is very important to human behavior. A fake body, however, is still just binary switches with voltage levels going up and down.

    SPIEGEL: The American computer scientist Ray Kurzweil argues that the Internet itself might be on the brink of becoming super-intelligent, just because it will have computing power beyond imagination. And his beliefs are gaining in popularity. Why are these ideas so attractive?

    Gelernter: Because creating the mind is the philosopher’s stone of the Digital Age. In the Middle Ages, the alchemists tried to produce gold. Now they’ve moved over to the mind. Don’t get me wrong: They are going to produce a lot of interesting science along the way. But they are not going to get a mind.

    If You’re Dead, You’re Dead

    SPIEGEL: The so-called Singularity Movement predicts the advance of highly intelligent machines that will one day perhaps even become part of our bodies.

    Gelernter: We are being offered more ways than ever to destroy humanity by negating the significance of humanness. In the science fiction community there are those who say, “I will live forever insofar as I will be able to take my entire mind state and upload it to some server, and then I can die, but it doesn’t matter if my mind stays there.” Now, any two-year-old child can see the flaw in this argument: When you die, you are dead, and it doesn’t matter if there is one copy or a billion copies of what your mind was before you died. It doesn’t matter to you. You’re still dead. The great philosophical analogy of the second half of the 20th century was that mind is to brain the way software is to computer. But this is ridiculous. There is no analogy between mind and software.

    SPIEGEL: Why not?

    Gelernter: If you have some software, you can make as many copies as you like. You can put it on a million different computers, and it is always exactly the same software. Minds, however, run on exactly one platform. You can’t swap the mind out to some storage medium and then run it again after keeping it offline.

    SPIEGEL: Hypothetically, what would happen if you managed to transfer one person’s brain into another person’s body?

    Gelernter: There would be no mind anymore. As you took the brain from somebody and put it into somebody else’s head, the mind that you used to have is gone because that mind was part of a body and responsive to that body. From a medical standpoint, the question is if the brain is a flexible enough organism to re-tune itself to a different kind of input from a different body. But the original mind would definitely be lost.

    SPIEGEL: Assuming those popular visions of Artificial Intelligence won’t come true in the foreseeable future, where do you see AI research going in the next decade?

    Gelernter: My hope is that the philosophy of mind and cognitive science will develop a very sophisticated theory of how the mind works. The philosophy of mind has been dazzled by computing, which led down the wrong path. We have to get rid of this ridiculous obsession with computing, which has done tremendous damage. People worrying about singularity should go back and read Nietzsche. They should try and understand Kafka seriously. They should read a poet like William Wordsworth. Now, in an entirely separate effort, Artificial Intelligence will produce more and more powerful machines. We’ll rely on them heavily. They will fix problems and answer questions for us all the time. No one will claim that they have minds, least of all the people who built the programs.

    SPIEGEL: One of those powerful assistants might well be a descendent of Watson. Let’s assume it has been shrunken to the size of a pea, and it could be plugged into our brains. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have all that knowledge on hand within your own body?

    Gelernter: I can have all of Watson’s knowledge available already — by just opening my laptop. Does it matter to me if I can get the answer not in 10 seconds but in 10 microseconds? It really depends on how I define my integrity as a human being. Could I get more direct access to a million completely meaningless disconnected facts if I implanted a Watson chip and then go onto Jeopardy? I would win Jeopardy. However, it would give me no happiness, no satisfaction, no feeling of triumph, no feeling of accomplishment.

    SPIEGEL: You wouldn’t feel tempted to get yourself a Watson?

    Gelernter: Sure I would. This is a brilliant, exciting piece of technology. I don’t want to take anything away from it. It puts AI on a track that is going to produce fascinating technology. It uses exactly what we are rich in, namely pure primitive computer power, to produce sophisticated answers to complex questions. We need that ability, and Watson can do it.

    SPIEGEL: Would you trade your macaw for Watson, if you had to choose?

    Gelernter: No way would I trade my macaw in for any piece of software. Look at him. He’s got a face. He’s got a big smile on his beak. He’s a creature who does have emotions, who has interests, and who is a member of the family. You’d have to offer me a lot more than Watson for my macaw.

    SPIEGEL: Dr. Gelernter, thank you very much for talking to us.

    Interview conducted by Philip Bethge and Manfred Dworschak

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

  • ‘People are basically good’: Twitter-Founder Biz Stone on the networks revolutionary power

    Isaac “Biz” Stone, 36, reportedly set up Twitter with his buddy Jack Dorsey in only two weeks in 2006. Meanwhile, the Network has over 175 million users worldwide.

    Q: Mr. Stone, the movie „The Social Network“ depicts how Facebook-founder Mark Zuckerberg bullied his way to be the youngest billionaire of all times. Would it be possible to tell a similar story about Twitter?

    Stone: I don’t think we’re quite interesting enough to be a movie. We’re not like the dorm room startup and there is not enough intrigue.

    Q: However, you burned three CEO already, after only three years in business. What went wrong?

    Stone: This has a lot to do with what Twitter needed at different times. In 2009 we had about three million users. Now we have about 175 million. For a long time we were working on reliability and we achieved that. But always fighting fires kept us from developing a strong vision what Twitter could be in the future. That’s what we are trying to do right now with a new CEO. And the recent relaunch of Twitter shows it.

    Q: What is Twitter today and how would you explain it to new potential users?

    Stone: Twitter today is a real-time information network that spans everything from your friends’ updates to global news and events. There are 90 million tweets being created every day, and all of these tweets are being archived at subsecond speed by our search engine, which means for any person in the world there’s pretty much going to be something relevant to them in the Twitter network. So I always advise people to search Twitter about something that interests you, whether it’s sports, the name of your company, your city, what’s going on in your neighborhood, and get into it that way.

    Q: But people are overwhelmed anyway with information from the net.

    Stone: I agree, we are living now in an age of infinite information. And we can’t look at all of it. So relevance and timeliness have to be things that we have to pay a lot of attention to. We want people to be able to get the information when and where they need it and without having to sift through it all, so that they can move on with their lives.

    Q: There are millions of tweets like „I am drinking coffee right now“ – nothing anybody needs to know. Is there really a way, to find relevant information in 90 million short messages?

    Stone: Yeah, I think there is. Firstly, by following specific subjects or people on Twitter, you choose yourself which information is relevant to you. But that means that you’re missing out on a lot that potentially could interest you. Therefore, when you search for something in Twitter, we also show you the tweets that relate to your search and that were last created, just seconds ago. As an example, think of the situation a few years ago when that plane landed in the Hudson River. On Twitter, you were able to find that one first picture of that plane on the Hudson just half an hour after the crash.

    Q: You call Twitter even a „triumph of humanity“. Isn‘t that a little bit over the top?

    Stone: If Twitter is going to be a triumph at all, I believe that it will not be a triumph of technology but indeed of humanity. It really depends on what people are going to do with this simple tool; if they help each other during time of crisis, if they raise spontaneous amounts of money for people after a crisis or if they self-organize during a political upheaval. Twitter is designed to work on every phone across the planet because tweets fit in the international character limit for SMS. And there are more than five billion people using mobile phones in the world. This is so empowering. For example, if something happens in China, in Iran, in Haiti or anywhere else halfway around the world, you are able to find out about it instantly on this network because the relevant tweets are rising up and are becoming visible. That makes us realize that we are not just citizens of one country but of the world and that we are all in this together.

    Q: But does that really change anything? Looking at Iran for example: Despite Twitter the situation hasn’t really changed, has it?

    Stone: It depends on what you describe as change. Twitter isn’t in the business of changing a situation in another country. It’s in the business of allowing people to connect and share information about what’s going on. Think about China: Twitter is blocked in China. But people use Twitter in China because they’re figuring out ways around that block.

    Q: Critics believe that real political movements need a strong network and supervision. A flat hierarchy of just well-linked activists would even most likely disturb a real movement. Can Twitter push forward real change?

    Stone: Nobody here at Twitter with their head screwed on right would say that writing a tweet is equivalent to starting a revolution; neither is forwarding an email or updating your status or any of these things. But to say that Twitter would not play a complimentary role in any meaningful event in the world today is an absurd statement. A communication network that allows for information to spread very quickly, very virally, very effectively, can be used in any kind of situation.

    Q: Does that mean that Twitter is in effect a journalistic format?

    Stone: I don‘t think so. But the idea of the teaming up between Twitter and journalism is very powerful. I think Twitter has a knack for breaking news very quickly. So if there’s an earthquake, you’ll find out about it on Twitter before you’ll find out about it at the news desk. But what you won’t have then is what journalism provides, which is the fuller context of the story. What does it mean in relation to the previous three earthquakes and what geo-economic impact is it having on the region?

    Q: The editing and distribution of information was always a domain of professional journalists, and for good reasons. Today, if there is for example a political upheaval, people go to Twitter first. Isn‘t there a big risk of manipulation. How can people distinguish between trustworthy sources and others?

    Stone: Like any tool, Twitter can be used for good and for evil. However, what we’ve noticed over a decade of developing these kinds of systems is, that disinformation has a very short shelf life on these open networks. These networks tend to be self-policing. When you have some people trying to spread disinformation, you have more people debunking that and coming at it with the truth.

    Q: North Korea, for example, is sending out Tweets on a regular basis. Have you ever considered blocking Twitter accounts like that?

    Stone: Removing tweets from the system is something we don’t take lightly. We take free speech and openness very seriously, and there’s only a few scenarios in which we would remove content, like if it is breaking the law. But we can definitely highlight the more relevant information. For us, it is tremendeously important to be relevant and meaningful. We need a network that is important to peoples lives. Otherwise, we won‘t be able to make any revenue.

    Q: Twitter hasn‘t been able to generate a lot of profit so far. How exactly are you going to make money in the future?

    Stone: We are making money already. People don‘t realize this, because we are doing such a good job at our original plan. We optimized for value before profit in the first couple of years. And now we are seeing companies like the airline Jetblue or the coffee chain Starbuck’s using Twitter. And even more encouraging, people are willing to follow these accounts by the millions.

    Q: And the companies pay you money for that service?

    Stone: They pay money if we promote their tweets by putting them for example on top of our so called trend list, which can be found on the Twitter homepage. Anything that’s promoted is very clearly marked. So users can decide themselves if they want to read and follow promoted information. This is working exceptionally well for new products people are already talking about or for things like movies …

    Q: … some believe that because of Twitter they may predict if a movie becomes a blockuster or not…

    Stone: .. exactly. And the advertisers are loving it. Our ads are not banners that we are sticking in front of you that have nothing to do with anything. Our ads are tweets and are therefore part of the natural Twitter experience. In a lot of cases, you’re not even noticing that they are ads.

    Q: Is Germany a big market for you?

    Stone: It is. Germany is one of the first places that we translated the web interface into, and this year we have seen 80 percent growth in Germany. Japan was the first place that we saw such an explosion, and now Germany, France and Italy.

    Q: The Germans do really mind their privacy …

    Stone: … well, yes, and the good thing about Twitter is that we’re very, very clear about our policies in this respect. We tell people that Twitter is a very public and open service. Here in the US, tweets are going to go on CNN, they’re going to go in the Library of Congress of the United States, which is archiving public tweets. Once you send out a tweet, it is out there. We’ve tried to make this abundantly clear.

    Q: Do you still read a newspaper?

    Stone: Well, actually I read Google news, and so wherever Google news sends me is where I end up. So I guess I’m putting my faith in Googles algorithms to determine what I should and what I shouldn’t read. I don’t know if that’s the best way to do it or not.

    Q: And you really think that people will do good just because they can share information?

    Stone: I believe that people are basically good, and if you give them a very simple tool that allows them to express that basic goodness, they will. We’ve seen it over and over again. The more people are connected on something like Twitter, the more empathy they begin to feel for people who are halfway around the world. They are suddenly walking in the other people’s shoes in a way that they might not have done in the past. I think this really brings people together.

  • Mushroom Clouds and Everpresent Danger: Surviving Cameramen Recall Nuclear Test Shots

    By 1963, the United States had detonated more than 200 nuclear weapons in the atmosphere. Cameramen and photographers working for a secret special unit recorded the acts of destruction. Some of their sensational images have been declassified, and the last remaining eyewitnesses are now sharing their experiences.

    (-> VIDEO at SPIEGEL ONLINE)

    The atomic missile with the explosive power of 1.5 kilotons of TNT detonated precisely above the heads of the five United States Air Force scientists. At first the men felt only the heat from the explosion. But then the blast wave forced them to their knees.

    George Yoshitake’s camera was clicking the entire time.

    At 7 a.m. on July 19, 1957, the cameraman was standing with a small group of nuclear scientists on the Yucca Flat test site in the state of Nevada. A fighter jet had fired the missile at an altitude of five kilometers (3.1 miles), which was considered a safe distance from the ground. “I was busy behind the cameras,” Yoshitake recalls. “Then I could see the flash go off out of the corner of my eye.” He looked up. “There was this huge, doughnut-shaped cloud up in the sky where the blast when off.”

    The only thing protecting him from the bomb’s fallout was his baseball cap.

    Yoshitake is one of the few people who have stood directly underneath an exploding atom bomb and survived. The American was one of about 40 photographers and cameramen in the 1352nd Photographic Group of the US Air Force. Their mission was top secret. Today Yoshitake, now 82, can finally talk openly about his experiences.

    The special unit’s job was as fascinating as it was dangerous. To film and photograph the American nuclear tests in the Nevada desert and in the South Pacific, the foolhardy men had to place themselves within only a few kilometers of the centers of the explosions.

    Images the Public Never Saw

    Between 1947 and 1969, the material was edited to make more than 6,500 motion pictures in a secret film studio in the Hollywood Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, just a few kilometers from the bright lights of Sunset Boulevard. The studio on Wonderland Avenue was called the Lookout Mountain Air Force Station. Using special film and high-speed cameras, cameramen and photographers used the film and photographic footage to artfully produce motion pictures and still photographs.

    “Those men are great guys; they documented a period of time that was both unique and hopefully will never be repeated,” says US documentary filmmaker Peter Kuran, 54, who is working on the story of the “atomic filmmakers.” Kuran wants to preserve the historic film material for posterity. “The photos are the icons of an era,” he says.

    At the height of the Cold War, the superpowers embarked on a spectacular race to develop nuclear weapons. It was accompanied by an unparalleled propaganda war that involved large numbers of tests. By the time the international Treaty banning Nuclear Weapon Tests In The Atmosphere, In Outer Space And Under Water, or Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (NTBT), was signed in 1963, the Americans alone had already detonated more than 200 atomic and hydrogen bombs in the atmosphere. The goal, from the very beginning, was to create impressive images to convince politicians to approve ever-growing military budgets.

    But the public never saw most of the images. “The work these people did was so secretive that nobody even knew who they were for a long time,” says Kuran. It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that the first photographs and films were declassified, thanks to the documentary filmmaker’s relentless efforts. Kuran traveled throughout the United States, searched through archives and urged the US Department of Energy to release the films and photographs.

    Copies of the material are now stored in gray cardboard boxes in the basement of Kuran’s house in Vancouver, Washington. Nuclear weapons have become a central focus of his life. “When I was 15, I visited Japan with a YMCA (youth) group,” he says. “We happened to be in Hiroshima on the anniversary of the bombing and I saw a film about the destruction of the city. I was the only American in a crowded room full of Japanese. Everyone was looking at me.”

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international

    Kuran felt horrified and ashamed. Initially, he embarked on a career as a developer of special effects for productions like director George Lucas’s “Star Wars” movies. But he couldn’t forget his experience in Japan. More than three decades later, he coincidentally came into contact with those chroniclers of the nuclear tests who were still alive. The nuclear filmmakers were grateful for the attention. “We’re finally getting recognized for some of the work we did,” says Yoshitake. “It was liberating to be able to talk about it.”

    The cameraman now lives in Lompoc, California, about a three-hour drive north of Los Angeles. He is one of the last surviving members of the photographers’ unit. Most of the others died long ago, many of cancer. Yoshitake says he is “more in contact with the widows.”

    From 1955 to 1963, Yoshitake worked for the nuclear weapons test program. “I filmed about 30 explosions,” he reports. “The amazing ones, the most spectacular ones were the hydrogen bombs in the Pacific.” The bombs were usually detonated early in the morning, before dawn, says Yoshitake. “They told us to look away at the initial blast,” he recalls. “For several minutes after the blast, you could see this eerie ultraviolet glow high up in the sky. And I thought that was so spectacular, so meaningful.”

    The images from the Pacific seem almost magical, including the photos of the seven-kilometer fireball created by “Shrimp,” the most powerful bomb the United States ever detonated. On March 1, 1954, a 15-megaton bomb, part of an operation called Castle Bravo, exploded over the Bikini atoll. The destructive power unleashed by the explosion was more than twice as high as the experts had predicted and tore a crater two kilometers in diameter into the island. Within a few minutes, a mushroom cloud rose 40 kilometers into the sky. The entire archipelago was contaminated with radiation and remains uninhabited to this day.

    The cameramen came within about 30 kilometers of the artificial suns in the South Pacific. In the Nevada desert, Yoshitake and his colleagues even came within about eight kilometers of the fireballs. “We could see how the shockwave came rolling across the valley floor,” says Yoshitake. “We hung onto our cameras so we wouldn’t fall over.”

    A few seconds after the explosions, the men also felt the heat from the bombs. The cameraman took it all in stride. “We were young. For me it was a just a job at the time. Only now do I realize how dangerous the work was,” he says.

    For Yoshitake, the work only became unpleasant when it was time to document the effects of the bombs. He shudders when he remembers a test performed in June 1957 under the code name “Priscilla.” Only 30 minutes after the detonation, he had to photograph monkeys, sheep and pigs that had been placed in close proximity to the blast site. “A few of the animals were still alive,” says Yoshitake. The skin on the pigs was charred black, he says, while the eyes of the monkeys had been taped open so that scientists could study the effect of the flash of light on the retina. “The animals were squealing, crying. It smelled of burned flesh. It was just terrible.”

    At least the cameramen wore protective suits on those missions into the center of destruction. But when they confronted the nuclear blasts from afar, they were wearing nothing but shorts and T-shirts. “We had dosimeters that measured our radiation load. That was it,” says Yoshitake’s former colleague, Ken Hackman, 72, who spent months in the Pacific to photograph the tests. He remembers how reckless the military’s behavior was at the time: “After the detonation, B-57 bombers would always fly directly through the mushroom cloud to collect samples. After the planes had landed again, they were decontaminated by men who were only wearing rubber boots as protection.”

    To this day, Hackman sees the bomb tests through the eyes of a photographer. The flash from a nuclear weapon is 10 times as bright as the sun, he says. The photographers had to wear heavily tinted special glasses to prevent burning of the retina. “Everything turns a bright white, and there’s no color at all anymore,” says Hackman. “Once the initial brightness is away, it really is very beautiful to look at.” He has vivid memories of a working trip to Hawaii, where he stood on a volcano and photographed the colorful aurora of an exploding hydrogen bomb. The play of lights in the sky was caused by the strong magnetic field generated by the detonation.

    Capturing the Blast

    The photographers tried out almost every camera model available at the time and tested completely new photographic techniques. Automatic cameras were placed a few hundred meters from the point of explosion, with thick lead shields protecting the film material from gamma radiation. The most advanced film cameras of the day were capable of recording 15 million images per second. The filmmakers even experimented with 3-D photography.

    The US company EG&G was the main source of the inventions. One of the founders of EG&G was Harold Edgerton, who later became world-famous for his photographs of bursting drops of milk. For the nuclear weapons test program, the engineers at EG&G developed a special film with three coatings, each with a different level of sensitivity. The so-called XR film made it possible to photograph the detonations with a single high-speed camera, despite tremendous fluctuations in light intensity.

    The XR film enabled the photographers to capture the power of the weapons in brilliant orange, yellow and red tones, creating highly alienating images of “psychedelic quality,” says Kuran. The US space agency, NASA, later used the technology to photograph its moon missions.

    Eventually the EG&G engineers even managed to capture the first microseconds of atomic explosions on film, using the “Rapatronic,” a camera developed specifically for this purpose. Because a mechanical shutter would have been much too slow, the device had an electronic “light valve” made of polarized special glass, which could be rendered translucent by means of an electric pulse.

    The engineers placed up to 16 of these high-tech cameras near the point of explosion, which allowed them to capture the birth of the atomic hellfire, so to speak. The bubble-like nuclear blast images almost look like living creatures in the photos. The billowing formations of heat and radiation, at temperatures of up to 10 million degrees Celsius, resemble oddly shaped amoeba.

    The Dichotemy Between Destruction and Beauty

    Most of these images are still under lock and key today. Only military physicists are permitted to analyze the images for the purpose of improving the designs of bombs. The US government is still hesitant to release the photos and films completely. But it is critical, says Kuran, that the material be processed and digitized, “before it turns to dust.”

    He has already assembled five documentaries from the film and photographic footage, which he distributes through his website. A sixth film, about the neutron bomb, is in the works. “My goal is to present as realistic an impression as possible of the power of these weapons, but I’m also fascinated by this bizarre dichotemy, how destructive they were and how beautiful they were,” says Kuran.

    The filmmaker hopes that his work will serve as a warning against nuclear testing. But the work has also taught him a surprising lesson. “Personally, I have less fear of nuclear weapons than I used to have,” says the documentary filmmaker. “Now I know that if somebody exploded a big hydrogen bomb 30 kilometers away from me, chances are I will probably survive.”

    Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

  • Jump-Starting the E-Car Revolution: New Mercedes Has Tesla Technology Under the Hood

    Mercedes and Toyota are bringing new electric cars onto the market that rely on technology from the Californian automaker Tesla. The startup company, whose sports cars already have a cult following in Hollywood, has pioneered the use of laptop batteries in electric autos.

    Experts considered the idea of using laptop computer batteries to power a car laughable at best — until the car turned out to actually work, sending shock waves through the industry.

    Tesla, a Silicon Valley startup company, first presented its whimsically designed electric sports car in the summer of 2006. The car body was made by Lotus and power for the engine came from 6,831 standard small batteries, bundled together into a high-voltage packet that allowed the car the same bursts of speed as a Porsche.

    Now, the same construction has caught on at both Toyota and Daimler, two of the world’s most famous car manufacturers. Both companies hold shares in Tesla and buy batteries and control technology from the Californian startup for small production runs of passenger cars.

    Mercedes-Benz will start production this fall on a series of 500 cars in an electric version of its A-Class. The car floor contains two rechargeable Tesla batteries, each constructed from 1,960 individual batteries. These provide the vehicle with enough power to reach speeds of 150 kph (95 mph). The car has a range of about 200 kilometers (125 miles) on a single charge, if driven at a moderate pace.

    It seems surprising that Daimler would really need Tesla to accomplish this, …. More

  • Sci-Fi Author Daniel Suarez: ‘We Have To Regain Control Over Our Own Data’

    Programmer Daniel Suarez has written books about a future where human lives are controlled by software. Suarez’ sci-fi scenario involves a malicious, murdering ‘bot’ network. It’s fiction — but Suarez warns that the groundwork for such a future is being laid by the likes of Facebook, Twitter and mobile phone firms.

    SPIEGEL: Mr. Suarez, in the novels “Daemon” and the sequel “Freedom” you have invented a world in which small software applications that run automated tasks — generally called “bots” — control us and determine our destiny. Science fiction writers have often been prescient: Could this be a warning that applies to our current reality?

    Daniel Suarez: Well, the sequel is certainly fiction — but my fiction is only just over the horizon. I present a world that’s different but it’s familiar enough that it freaks people out a little. And it should. Because even today, we are surrounded by an army of bots that influence our lives profoundly.

    SPIEGEL: Some examples?

    Suarez: Sure, let’s take a look at what recently happened at Wall Street.

    SPIEGEL: On May 6, the Dow Jones suddenly dropped by nearly 1,000 points.

    Suarez: And then (bounced) back a couple of minutes later. And those were bots, trading with each other, beyond human control. They evaporated a trillion dollars of wealth in 20 minutes. Or look at medical decisions: Recently there was the case of several women who were kicked off their health insurance just because they were diagnosed with breast cancer. And it wasn’t a person that made this decision. It was a bot. They can do really atrocious things. And nobody questions it. Bots also work out your credit rating, which will determine whether you get a loan, an apartment or even a job interview. And that data never goes away.

    (—> read original interview at SPIEGEL ONLINE International)

    SPIEGEL: Where does all this data come from?

    Suarez: Data is gathered all the time. Just take your mobile phone. Geo-location data collected by your (mobile phone service) provider is not just about your movements. It’s about who you are with and what you will do next. There was a recent study at the Northeastern University in Boston, examining 50,000 cell phones and their owners. After some time, the researchers found they could predict the movements of any individual with 93 percent accuracy. And you can start to correlate that data with other data — for example, with credit card purchases or surveillance camera footage.

    SPIEGEL: Is the data being used already?

    Suarez: I’d be shocked if it wasn’t. Firstly, it would be part of the war on terror. But then it is also about selling things. Bots screen a vast ocean of data (for patterns). And they are very effective. Whether it’s about helping an intelligent agency find members of the opposition or selling people ice cream at the exact moment they’re most susceptible to buying an ice cream. If you can come up with a sophisticated bot algorithm, then you’re going to make a lot of money.

    SPIEGEL: In your books the story line involves a software tycoon and game designer Matthew Sobol, who accidentally creates a highly sophisticated network of bots that go into action when Sobol dies of cancer. The network, eventually named Daemon, then starts to dismantle civilization as we know it and even convinces followers to murder. How does all this happen?

    Suarez: The incentive is money. Basically all money exists as a series of ones and zeroes in databases. So, if you’ve got bots that are inside those systems, they can create money and then hand it to anybody. The bots also know who you’ve talked to, what your job is, what your hobbies are and so on. By the way, this is exactly what social media already does these days. There are 400 million people on Facebook. And Facebook is constantly being (researched) by bots. Those bots aren’t even intelligent. I don’t think it’s going to take a greater-than-human intelligence to trap us.

    SPIEGEL: In your books, you talk about a Darwinian struggle for survival between bots and humans. That sounds a little far fetched. Is the survival of humankind really at stake?

    Suarez: No, but our quality of life could be. A life where bots tell us what to do every second — get up, go to work, do this, have kids with this person — is completely reasonable. Bots determine our economic opportunities; We have already accepted that. So, really, how much of a journey is it from that point to having bots determine what other opportunities you get in life? All the decision making would be done by bots and we wouldn’t even notice.

    SPIEGEL: But surely there are still people behind all of this, programming the bots and coming up with a purpose for them?

    Suarez: Sure, and I’m not saying it’s a vast conspiracy. You don’t find evil people sitting in the corner going “ha, ha, ha.” (The programmers) are all good citizens. But the whole thing can easily get out of hand. There are networks of bots out there with 10 million machines. Who’s controlling them? You tell me where the process that’s attacking your data is, physically. You can’t just shut it down.

    SPIEGEL: Couldn’t one just pull the power plug out?

    Suarez: How would you unplug the Internet? There is no way. Data centers have generators these days. They don’t rely on the electrical grid. And you wouldn’t know where to start anyway. Even if you shut down 20 percent of the (Internet), it would still exist. My point is that we are creating something very powerful. And we don’t understand the implications. Bots are like parasites, they evolve all the time. Eventually, we loose control.

    SPIEGEL: So what can we do about that?

    Suarez: We have to regain control over our own data. I think that transparency is the key. If you know where you are at, you can act accordingly. And if somebody else wants to use your data, you should be able to decide yourself if you want to hand it over.

    SPIEGEL: So as a software specialist, how do you take care of your data?

    Suarez: I don’t have a Facebook page. I don’t use Twitter. I don’t give anyone a lot to grab onto. Sometimes, I even take out the battery of my mobile phone so that I can’t be localized. A very small group of powerful people is deciding what’s going to happen with your data, and they’re using bots to help implement what they want to do. That has nothing to do with democracy. It’s all about efficiency. And that’s the really scary thing about it. I’d prefer we don’t take that trip. Otherwise, this could really end up being a hellish world.

    (—> read original interview at SPIEGEL ONLINE International)

    This article was published first in German in the DER SPIEGEL-supplement Kultur SPIEGEL

  • BP’s Oil Disaster: The Dangers and Difficulties of ‘Bottom Kill’

    SPIEGEL-Online International: BP has only one arrow left in its quiver, a method known as ‘bottom kill.’ The idea is for relief wells to stop the gushing oil from below, but the technical challenges are formidable. Past experiences show that the oil may continue flowing into late autumn.

    For the engineers, it was a blessing in disguise. They had drilled to a depth of up to 3,500 meters (11,500 feet) below the sea floor when gas and oil suddenly began shooting upward. But there was no explosion. The 69 workers at the site were evacuated and no one was killed.

    It was the morning of Aug. 21, 2009, when engineers lost control of the well beneath the West Atlas oil rig in the Timor Sea off Australia’s northern coast. (more…)

  • Hidden Menace in the Gulf of Mexico: Oil Spill’s Real Threat Lies Beneath the Surface

    The Gulf of Mexico spill is vastly larger than the Exxon Valdez accident in 1989, but where is all the oil? While efforts to protect coastlines have been making the headlines, the real ecological catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico is unfolding deep beneath the water’s surface.

    Samantha Joye was sure she was right. Somewhere down there, the toxic clouds were sure to exist. And now she was holding the evidence in her hands. A thin film of oil glistened in one of the small sample bottles Joye had filled with water taken from more than 1 kilometer (3,300 feet) beneath the surface.

    “You could see it. Everybody saw it,” Joye, a professor of marine sciences at the University of Georgia, wrote on her blog. Besides, the sample taken from the Gulf of Mexico smelled as if it had come directly from a gas station.

    Joye made this important discovery a few days ago on board the research ship Walton Smith, near the location where the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig went up in flames on April 20.

    The scientists are now referring to the site as “Ground Zero.” They have spotted oddly shaped “pancakes of oil” floating on the surface there, Joye reports, as well as “bizarre orange and black stringers, as deep in the water column as you could see.”

    –> Read original story at SPIEGEL Online International

    The scientist lowered her sample container into this toxic soup. The preliminary lab results show what many had already feared: Massive amounts of oil are billowing beneath the water’s surface in the Gulf of Mexico. Several teams of scientists have spotted clouds containing oil in the depths of the ocean, a number of which are several hundred meters thick and extend for several kilometers.

    The discoveries have added a new dimension to the fight to contain the oil spill. While thousands of workers and volunteers are currently defending the coastlines of Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida against the reddish-brown scourge, what could be a far greater ecological catastrophe is taking shape out in the ocean.

    Where’s the Oil?

    According to new estimates, more than twice as much oil has flowed into the Gulf of Mexico in the last 50 days than was spilled from the oil tanker Exxon Valdez into Alaska’s Prince William Sound in 1989.

    But where has all the oil gone?

    Relatively little has reached the coasts so far, leading scientists to fear that much of it is still lurking underwater. And in addition to the oil, the water is contaminated with massive amounts of chemicals that BP workers have been spraying for weeks to disperse the oil. “In my opinion, the situation is comparable to that of a hurricane that’s building up off the coast and gaining in strength,” warns Larry McKinney of the Harte Research Institute for Gulf of Mexico Studies in Corpus Christi, Texas.

    Majestic whale sharks and rare Kemp’s Ridley sea turtles are now swimming through the oily water. Sperm whales and thousands of dolphins are forced to breathe the toxic fumes on the ocean surface. A myriad of plankton organisms migrate, in a day-and-night rhythm, up and down through a water column contaminated with oil. Finally, ancient reefs on the ocean floor are suffering beneath the toxic soup.

    ‘There Aren’t Any Plumes’

    “We are now entering a different phase of this disaster,” Samantha Joye, the marine biologist, told the news agency Bloomberg in an interview. “Everybody has been focusing on the surface impacts, which is normal. But now we’ve got to switch gears and start thinking about the deep water.”

    For Joye, it’s also a matter of her reputation as a scientist. Her team discovered the first signs of the monstrous oil clouds in mid-May. But BP CEO Tony Hayward disputes that the clouds even exist. “The oil is on the surface,” he said. “There aren’t any plumes.” He argues that, because oil is lighter than water, it will always float to the surface. BP scientists, at any rate, have found “no evidence” of underwater oil clouds.

    The oil executive is trying to prevent the environmental damage from becoming more and more apparent. The US’s entire Gulf fishing industry could be shut down for years if the scientists’ fears turn out to be true. In the end, the overall damage will determine how much BP will be expected to pay in compensation.

    Despite BP’s claims, the evidence of submarine pollution is now overwhelming. Scientists at the University of South Florida also recently discovered an enormous amount of oil at about 1,000 meters (3,280 feet) beneath the surface. The cloud of finely dispersed oil particles extends for 35 kilometers, billowing to the northeast of the Deepwater Horizon accident site. It’s one of the most species-rich regions of the Gulf of Mexico.

    An Underwater World in Peril

    The scientists lowered highly sensitive measuring devices from on board their research ship, the Weatherbird II, and took water samples from various depths. Their results suggest that the cloud is drifting toward the DeSoto Canyon, which is near the coast, on the edge of the continental shelf. There, nutrient-rich water rises from the depths and supports an enchanting underwater world. Fishermen catch meter-long red tuna, shimmering kingfish and grouper. Magical gardens of intricately branched corals flourish on the sea floor. Green brittle stars, glass-rope sponges and fish like the splendid alfonsino and the blackbelly rosefish populate the reefs.

    “Unfortunately, the depth at which the oil is coming out of the well is home to the greatest diversity of species in the entire Gulf region,” explains Thomas Shirley of the Harte Research Institute. Biologists have counted more than 1,000 species at that depth, and they can only guess at what the oil and chemicals are doing to them.

    Scientists are already collecting the first signs of the damage. Biologists John Dindo and Andrea Kroetz are bent over their catch at Dauphin Island Sea Lab in Alabama. They have just returned from a scientific haul. Atlantic sharpnose sharks, marked with yellow plastic bands, have been placed on ice in boxes, next to valuable red snappers with sharp teeth.

    The scientists, who spent 22 hours at sea, are working under high pressure. “We are experiencing these things for the first time,” says Dindo. “We have to collect as much data as possible so that we can study the effects of the oil on the animals.” The fish look normal, but laboratory analyses must now be performed to determine whether the pollutants have already affected their tissue.

    Bathed in Oil

    Dindo has been working at the Sea Lab on Dauphin Island for 37 years. The island off the Alabama coast lies directly in the path of the oil. The first reddish-brown lumps of oil washed up on the region’s beaches last week. The military has built a wall to protect the island’s sand bars.

    But Dindo is more concerned about the open sea than the beaches. “The spawning season for many fish has just started. What happens when fish eggs and larvae are bathed in oil?” the 61-year-old scientist asks. An entire year’s worth of young fish could be lost.

    The scientists are worried about acute poisoning, as well as genetic damage and later deformities. “The oil impairs the organ functions of the marine creatures,” says toxicologist Joe Griffitt of the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory in Ocean Springs. This, he adds, will impair fertility and larval development. Oil components could also become concentrated in the food chain.

    The oil is suspended in the water in tiny, barely visible droplets, which the scientists call “rosebuds.” The emulsion develops directly at the well head, deep beneath the surface, says Griffitt. When the hot oil shoots out of the ocean floor and comes into contact with very cold water under high pressure, methane gas is released, which then atomizes the oil.

    The Dead Zone

    The toxicologist fears that the chemicals that BP are using to fight the oil are actually promoting the formation of oil clouds. The company has already used about 3.8 million liters of the chemicals, about a quarter of which they released into the water directly at the wellhead.

    “The oil alone would slowly rise to the surface,” says Griffitt, “but when it becomes mixed with the dispersants, it remains in the water column.” Although bacteria attack the emulsion there and gradually destroy the oil, the microorganisms consume much of the oxygen dissolved in the water in the process. The result could be that fish and zooplankton die off on a large scale due to the creation of an oxygen-deficient “dead zone.” “The chemistry of the sea water is being completely turned around, and we have no idea what happens next,” says Griffitt.

    In fact, scientists know very little about the effects of oil deep in the ocean. Neither BP nor the US scientific authorities have attached much importance to the issue until now. For the first time, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has now dispatched a ship, the Gordon Gunter, to study the phenomenon. The scientists on board are using various devices, including heavy-duty sonar equipment and an underwater robot named “Gulper.”

    Waiting for Research Funding

    But the funding for independent projects is coming in very slowly, even though BP has pledged $500 million in immediate aid to support the research. Zoologist Eric Hoffmayer of the Gulf Coast Research Laboratory, for example, has been waiting for weeks to receive money from the emergency funds.

    Time is of the essence for Hoffmayer. He is studying one of the most fascinating animals of the Gulf, the whale shark, which the oil is putting in mortal danger. “When whale sharks swim into the oil, their gills become clogged,” the zoologist warns. “They can no longer absorb oxygen and die within a few minutes.”

    The sharks, which can grow up to 14 meters (46 feet) long, are particularly at risk because they constantly swim with their mouths open to filter microorganisms out of the water. In the process, up to 6,000 liters of water an hour flow through their respiratory organs.

    Ironically, one of the most important feeding grounds for the massive animals lies off the mouth of the Mississippi River, where Hoffmayer has already spotted groups of up to 50 individuals. The sharks are attracted by large masses of plankton, which feast on the tons of nutrients that the river carries into the ocean.

    ‘Out of Sight, Out of Mind’

    What can be done about the oil clouds beneath the ocean surface? The scientists don’t have any answers. And the ghostly oil shroud is growing larger and larger. Samantha Joye and her team have located a cloud near the damaged wellhead that is about 15 kilometers long, 5 kilometers wide and 100 meters thick. Besides, the oil farther to the south appears to have reached the Loop Current, an ocean current that could carry the oil to Florida. Other currents could even carry it up the US East Coast and into the Gulf Stream.

    The scientists’ greatest concern is this year’s hurricane season. “A powerful storm would be enough to distribute the oil throughout the entire water column,” warns James Cowan, an oceanographer at Louisiana State University.

    A technology to remove the pollution doesn’t exist. Besides, BP is hardly likely to clean up the water voluntarily. In fact, it might suit the company all too well if the disaster remained hidden beneath the waves, says Cowan. “Out of sight, out of mind.”

    Clogged Up

    Nevertheless, Cowan recently got a first-hand look at the underwater oil spill when he lowered a robot with an attached camera to a depth of 150 meters, about 120 kilometers west of the accident site. “First we saw droplets of oil, but then we couldn’t see anything at all,” Cowan reports.

    The underwater oil soup was so thick that it clogged the camera lens and the robot’s headlights.

    Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

    –> Read original story at SPIEGEL Online International