A youtube comment on the Palestine Conflict

Look, boys, the problem is in the phrase "Jewish democracy." Such a construct forbids the equal rights of non-Jews, and it will never work. So forget about "racism." There is no Jewish gene. Judaism is a set of cultural choices and practices like any other religion. If Zionist Jews want to persecute and punish people for not making the same cultural choices, let them punish OTHER self-professed Jews who don't measure up. But get the holy boot of the necks of the Palestinians!
-----37Dionysos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DFBWqO_gXjU&feature=g-all-u 

Anonymous message to pro-Israeli groups

Greetings from Anonymous,

It has come to our attention that conservative and pro-Israeli groups throughout the blogosphere have taken advantage of Operation Israel, attempting to solidify public opinion against Anonymous.

TheOtherMcCain.com posted an editorial this morning which stated the following: “If you ever doubted that Anonymous was a terrorist organization, they have now removed all reason for doubt.” The article only contained 55 words of original content by the site itself, the other 90 percent of the article was selected quotations by mainstream media sources.

Let us once again be perfectly clear: Anonymous does not in any way support the use of violence. Anonymous is a world wide collective of individuals whose means pursue human rights, justice, and universal equality for the citizens of every nation.

Pro-Israeli groups throughout the world have grown from a foundation of Israeli/US propaganda and lies.
They arbitrarily dismiss the apartheid system of racial segregation and oppression imposed by the Israeli government on the Palestinian people. The fact of the matter is, in the eyes of the media, only the United States and it’s allies are capable of labeling another state or organization as a terrorists. Throughout our campaign, we’ve been inundated with one response in particular; references to Hamas hiding in school buildings or using women and children as human shields. Selective memory seems to have given pro-Israeli organizations the ability to forget that in 2005 Israeli Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz appeared in court to defend the practice of using Palestinians as human shields in combat after a supreme court outlawed the practice, noting it violated International Law.

The reasons for Anonymous intervention through #OpIsrael should be abundantly clear: What is happening in Palestine is oppression. They have no navy, no army, or air force. There is no war in Gaza. There is only the continuous application of military force by Israel in an attempt to push every last person out of the Palestinian state, despite international laws that make these efforts illegal. This illegal expansion of territory by Israel in to the Palestinian state has been ongoing since1948, making refugees of over 700,000 Palestinians. Today, 
Palestinians are not permitted to live in Israeli settlements, drive on Israeli roads or even travel is the “security” areas surrounding them. These Israeli only housing developments are being built on stolen land, even while being called illegal settlements by the International Court of Justice.

The violence inflicted upon the civilian residents of Gaza is well documented, despite the fact that Israel has adamantly opposed intervention by human rights organizations and the IDF constantly blocks and harasses international journalists.

Despite these facts, Anonymous has not used any anti-Semitic language during our campaign. Nor have we vocalized any support for Palestinian military operations or resistance groups. Our goal was to protect the rights of Palestinian people who are threatened with silence as Israel has made attempts to shut down cell phone and internet service throughout Gaza. We know what happens to victims of oppression when the lights go dark.

It is also worthy to note, that as of yesterday, members of Anonymous participating in #OpIsrael were making attempts to augment our Gaza Care Package for civilians in Tel Aviv by translating the same documents in to Hebrew in the event that they lose access to internet service as well. We do not racially or geographically differentiate between victims of violence or oppression anywhere in the world.

Both Palestinians and Israelis need to find common ground and end the violence that has already resulted in the deaths of innocent people, including children. Israel’s advancement on Palestinian Territories and the racist oppression of Palestinian people needs to end.

We are not terrorists. Governments that fund wars, practice deceit against their own citizens, condone corruption, and turn a blind eye to the deaths of innocent people are terrorists. The word terror does not belong to Israel or the United States. We will judge you by your actions.
Peace and Freedom to all,
#OpIsrael
#Anonymous
Anonymous Gaza Care Package
#OpIsrael Information and Tools
Original PR source

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Will we ever… have safe cigarettes?

(Copyright: Getty Images)

For decades the tobacco industry has tried to come up with alternatives that people would want to smoke, but this is much harder than you would think. 

There’s an old saying among people who work in public health: Tobacco is the only legal product that, when used as intended, will kill you. Decades of research have thoroughly documented the health problems that result from inhaling tobacco smoke – more than a dozen different types of cancer, heart disease, stroke, emphysema and other respiratory diseases, among others. Are these risks an inevitable part of smoking? Or is there a way of creating safe cigarettes without any of these hazards?
“I think it’s very unlikely,” says Stephen Hecht from the University of Minnesota Cancer Center, who studies tobacco carcinogens – substances that cause cancer. Tobacco smoke is a complex cocktail of at least 4,000 chemicals including at least 70 known carcinogens. No one has made a “cigarette that is significantly decreased in all of these [chemicals] and is still something people would want to smoke, even though the industry has worked on this for around 50 years,” says Hecht. “There’s no indication that it’s possible.”
As Hecht says, it’s not that the industry hasn’t tried. Journalist Will Storr recently documented a history of bungled attempts to create a safer cigarette, from one that passed the carcinogenic smoke through a filter made of another carcinogen – asbestos – to another that heated tobacco rather than burning it, but tasted of sulphur, charcoal, and burning plastic.
The problem is that no single step in the production or consumption process fills cigarette smoke with its dangerous constituents. Some constituents are in the tobacco leaves themselves at the point of harvesting. The plants can absorb metals and metalloids like arsenic and cadmium from fertilisers and the surrounding soil, while sticky hairs on their leaves can gather particles from the air, including radioactive elements like polonium-210.
When the harvested leaves are cured and dried, compounds within them are converted into tobacco-specific nitrosamines (TSNAs), a class of well-known and intensely studied carcinogens. And when the smoker lights up, chemical reactions in the burning leaves fill the smoke with carbon monoxide, hydrogen cyanide and a cocktail of carcinogens – the infamous polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), and vapour-borne “volatiles” like formaldehyde and benzene. As long as you’re burning plant matter and inhaling the smoke, you’ll get a lungful of carcinogens. “There’s no getting around that fact,” says Neal Benowitz, a pharmacologist from the University of California, San Francisco.
Potent drug
As always with toxicology, it’s the dose that makes the poison, and a laundry list of ingredients is a poor way of assessing a product’s true risk. But it’s clear that many of the substances in cigarette smoke, particularly the well-studied TSNAs, PAHs and volatiles, are found at significant levels in both the smoke and the bodies of smokers who inhale it. And, they cause similar patterns of DNA damage to those seen in actual tumours.
The route of exposure also matters. Many of the chemicals in tobacco smoke are also found in other everyday sources, including foods. But there’s a big difference between taking these substances into your guts, where they pass through a soup of enzymes before being actively transported into the bloodstream, and sucking them directly into your lungs where they can passively diffuse into your blood.
There are some measures that could individually reduce the number of carcinogens in smoke: modifying the blend of tobacco; refining the curing process; including charcoal filters to absorb some of the volatiles; and so on. “But there’s no evidence that this does any good,” says Hecht. None of these measures completely deletes the full spectrum of carcinogens, and Hecht adds, “We tend to focus on the compounds that we know are dangerous, but that’s maybe only a few hundred of the 4,000 that are identified. There could be other things going on that we’re not aware of.”


And then there’s nicotine. This highly addictive drug isn’t a carcinogen, but it’s not entirely benign either. It increases heart rate, constricts blood vessels, and contributes to high levels of cholesterol. There’s some evidence that it could stop cancerous cells from self-destructing or promote the growth of blood vessels that bring oxygen and nutrients to tumours. But both of these claims come from studies in lab-grown cells. “It’s not clear if any of this works in a live animal,” says Hecht. “The big thing [about nicotine] is the addiction.” Nicotine is a potent drug – it’s the one chemical that keeps smokers inhaling all the rest.
Nicotine’s addictive properties have led to some spectacular backfires in attempts to create safer cigarettes. From the 60s and 70s, the tobacco industry marketed “low-tar” cigarettes as safer versions of their normal cousins. These so-called “mild”, “smooth” and “light” alternatives contained tiny vents in their filters, which were meant to allow fresh air to dilute the tar – the collective term for the chemical gunge in smoke.
These cigarettes were tested with machines that, sure enough, measured a lower concentration of tar in the ensuing smoke. But, surprise, people aren’t machines. As the smoke from these brands also contained less nicotine, smokers would get their fix by taking longer drags, smoking more frequently, or simply blocking the filters with their fingers. They ended up inhaling more smoke, and despite the industry’s claims, exposed themselves to the same level of carcinogens.
Safer options?
Smokeless tobacco products fare little better. Even though they are sucked, chewed and sniffed, and never set on fire, they still contain many of the same carcinogens as cigarettes, and have been linked to mouth, oesophageal and pancreatic cancers. The one possible exception is snus, a Swedish product that’s not unlike a “tobacco-stuffed teabag” that you stick under your lips. It’s manufactured according to rigorous standards that limit the amount of nitrosamines in the final product, while still retaining that craving-satisfying nicotine. Snus is billed as the reason for Sweden’s low rates of lung and oral cancers, compared to countries where cigarettes are the dominant tobacco product.
“It’s much safer [than smoked products] but not entirely safe, and there’s a possibility that it still poses a cancer risk,” says Benowitz. Indeed, some recent studies have suggested that snus users have a higher risk of pancreatic cancer, and a higher risk of dying from cancer. “If you simplistically said everyone stopped smoking and used snus, there’d be a tremendous health benefit, but the question is whether they would do that,” says Benowitz. His concerns are that snus could make it harder for active smokers to give up their habit by fuelling nicotine addiction, or act as a gateway drug that entices non-smokers to start. “It’s probably better than smoking, but you probably don’t want to put it in your mouth,” says Hecht.
The same arguments apply to e-cigarettes – battery-powered devices that look like cigarettes, and release a nicotine vapour without any of the accompanying carcinogens. At least, that’s the theory – there’s scant data on what they actually release, and how that varies from brand to brand. An analysis from the US Food and Drug Administration showed that some still contained detectable traces of nitrosamines. “In theory, they could be safer than snus,” says Benowitz. “But there’s been hesitation around them because they are unregulated, so who knows what you’re getting.”
The use of both snus and e-cigarettes will probably remain highly controversial, even after more data comes in. This reflects a tension in public health circles: given smoking is so addictive and damaging, is it acceptable or even ethical to reduce that harm by advocating products that are safer, but still not safe? “If we’d never heard of cigarettes, we’d look at a smokeless tobacco product and say, ‘This thing should be banned’,” says Hecht. In a world where tobacco never existed, these arguments would be moot. But that world does not exist; what do we do in this one?

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Vegetative patient Scott Routley says 'I'm not in pain'

By Fergus Walsh Medical correspondent

Continue reading the main story

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• Finding a voice for the brain injured
• Scanner helps paralysed people
• New hope for brain damaged patients Watch

A Canadian man who was believed to have been in a vegetative state for more than a decade, has been able to tell scientists that he is not in any pain.

It's the first time an uncommunicative, severely brain-injured patient has been able to give answers clinically relevant to their care.
Scott Routley, 39, was asked questions while having his brain activity scanned in an fMRI machine.
His doctor says the discovery means medical textbooks will need rewriting.
Vegetative patients emerge from a coma into a condition where they have periods awake, with their eyes open, but have no perception of themselves or the outside world.
Mr Routley suffered a severe brain injury in a car accident 12 years ago.
None of his physical assessments since then have shown any sign of awareness, or ability to communicate.
But the British neuroscientist Prof Adrian Owen - who led the team at the Brain and Mind Institute, University of Western Ontario - said Mr Routley was clearly not vegetative.

Continue reading the main story

Panorama: Find out more

• Fergus Walsh presents The Mind Reader: Unlocking My Voice - a Panorama Special
• BBC One, Tuesday 13 November at 22:35 GMT

• Then available in the UK on the BBC iPlayer

"Scott has been able to show he has a conscious, thinking mind. We have scanned him several times and his pattern of brain activity shows he is clearly choosing to answer our questions. We believe he knows who and where he is."

Prof Owen said it was a groundbreaking moment.
"Asking a patient something important to them has been our aim for many years. In future we could ask what we could do to improve their quality of life. It could be simple things like the entertainment we provide or the times of day they are washed and fed."
Scott Routley's parents say they always thought he was conscious and could communicate by lifting a thumb or moving his eyes. But this has never been accepted by medical staff.
Prof Bryan Young at University Hospital, London - Mr Routley's neurologist for a decade - said the scan results overturned all the behavioural assessments that had been made over the years.

Continue reading the main story

FMRI SCANNING

• Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging measures the real-time activity of the brain by tracking the flow of oxygen-rich blood
• The patients were repeatedly asked to imagine playing tennis or walking around their home
• In healthy volunteers each produces a distinct pattern of activity, in the premotor cortex for the first task and the parahippocampal gyrus for the second
• It allowed the researchers to put a series of yes or no questions to severely brain-injured patients. A minority were able to answer by using the power of thought
• In 2010 Prof Owen published research showing that nearly one in five of the vegetative patients were able to communicate using brain activity

"I was impressed and amazed that he was able to show these cognitive responses. He had the clinical picture of a typical vegetative patient and showed no spontaneous movements that looked meaningful."

Observational assessments of Mr Routley since he responded in the scanner have continued to suggest he is vegetative. Prof Young said medical textbooks would need to be updated to include Prof Owen's techniques.
The BBC's Panorama programme followed several vegetative and minimally-conscious patients in Britain and Canada for more than a year.
Another Canadian patient, Steven Graham, was able to demonstrate that he had laid down new memories since his brain injury. Mr Graham answers yes when asked whether his sister has a daughter. His niece was born after his car accident five years ago.
The Panorama team also followed three patients at the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability (RHN) in Putney, which specialises in the rehabilitation of brain-injured patients.
It collaborates with a team of Cambridge University neuroscientists at the Wolfson Brain Imaging Centre at Addenbrooke's hospital, Cambridge.

Panorama's Fergus Walsh meets Professor Adrian Owen to learn what the brain is like when in a vegetative state

One of the patients is diagnosed as vegetative by the RHN, and he is also unable to show awareness in an fMRI machine.
A second patient, who had not been fully assessed by the RHN, is shown to have some limited awareness in brain scans.

The Mind Reader: Unlocking My Voice - a Panorama Special - will be broadcast on Tuesday 13 November at 22:35 on BBC One. Or catch up later on the BBC iPlayer using the link above.

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US to become 'world's biggest oil producer'

 

  Shale oil and gas is now big business in the US

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Related Stories

• 'Infinite' shale fuel to boost US

The US will overtake Saudi Arabia as the world's biggest oil producer "by around 2020", an International Energy Agency (IEA) report has said.

The IEA said the reason for this was the big growth and development in the US of extracting oil from shale rock.
This has enabled the US to gain significantly more extractable oil resources.
As a result, the IEA predicts the US will become "all but self-sufficient" in its energy needs by around 2035.
The US shale oil industry has grown significantly in recent years.
It extracts oil from the ground using a method called fracking - pumping down a mixture of sand, water and chemicals at high pressure.
The industry says the method is safe, but critics say it could cause earthquakes and pollute water sources.
The IEA predicts that the US will be producing 11.1 million barrels per day by 2020, compared with 10.6 million from Saudi Arabia.
Currently the US imports about 20% of its total energy needs.
The IEA also expects that the US will overtake Russia as the word's biggest gas producer by 2015, again thanks to fracking, which can also be used to extract natural gas.
It warns that the big growth in US oil and gas production could have significant geopolitical implications, as it may make the US less concerned about the Middle East.

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A Point Of View: China and multiculturalism

Continue reading the main story

• What kind of superpower could China be? (Martin Jacques)
• Making sense of China (MJ)
• What is history's role in society? (Sarah Dunant)
• The strange allure of teeth (SD)

The vast majority of the Chinese population regard themselves as belonging to the same race, a stark contrast to the multiracial composition of other populous countries. What effect does this have on how China views the world, ask Martin Jacques.

I was on a taxi journey in Shanghai with a very intelligent young Chinese student, who was helping me with interviews and interpreting. She was shortly to study for her doctorate at a top American university. She casually mentioned that some Chinese students who went to the US ended up marrying Americans.
I told her that I had recently seen such a mixed couple in Hong Kong, a Chinese woman with a black American. This was clearly not what she had in mind. Her reaction was a look of revulsion. I was shocked. Why did she react that way to someone black, but not someone white? This was over a decade ago, but I doubt much has changed. What does her response tell us - if anything - about Chinese attitudes towards ethnicity?
China's population is huge.

Continue reading the main story

Find out more

• Martin Jacques is an economist and author of When China Rules the World
• A Point of View is usually broadcast on Fridays on Radio 4 at 20:50 BST and repeated Sundays, 08:50 BST

• Listen to A Point of View on the iPlayer
• BBC Podcasts - A Point of View
• Four Thought podcast

What people aren't generally aware of, though, is that more than nine out of 10 Chinese people think of themselves as belonging to just one race, the Han. This is remarkable. It is quite different from the world's other most populous nations: India, United States, Indonesia and Brazil. All recognise themselves to be, in varying degrees, multiracial and multicultural.

True, a country that is the size of a continent has obviously been home to countless different races down the ages. But that is not how the great majority of Chinese see themselves today.
Why is this?
The answer takes us back to the birth of modern China more than 2,000 years ago. China is extremely old - the longest continuously existing country in the world. The eastern half of China - where the vast majority of Chinese live now and lived then - has been more or less united ever since 211BC.
Over that extraordinarily long period - as a result of war, occupation, absorption, assimilation, ethnic cleansing and government resettlement - the sense of difference between the many races that lived in the eastern half of China was slowly eroded.
Fundamental to this process was the gradual emergence of a shared cultural identity.

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Han Chinese

• Trace ancestry back to Huaxia people who lived along northern China's Yellow River
• Name comes from Han Dynasty that ruled a unified China from 206BC til 220
• Han have absorbed many ethnic groups, taking on aspects of their culture and language
• Speak a variety of dialects and even distinct languages, but share a common writing system based on Mandarin
• Traditional Han beliefs are Confucianism and Daoism

China, along with part of today's Middle East, was home to the first settled agricultural communities in the world. They gradually supplanted nomadic culture and ushered in the beginnings of centralised governance.

Over the last two millennia, China has generally been one of the most advanced, often the most advanced, civilisation in the world. It is hardly surprising that, with a rich history like this, the Chinese have a very powerful sense of their cultural identity.
Every country has its own unique story of ethnicity. Take the US. It starts with arrival of the European settlers and the near extermination of the native American population, to be followed later by large-scale African slavery. Not surprisingly, these experiences have profoundly influenced American attitudes and the country's behaviour as a global power.
How did China evolve? It is essentially the story of the Han and the way in which over a period of two millennia they came to absorb the great majority of other ethnic groups.

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Ethnic minorities in China

Of the 55 recognised ethnic minority groups, the 10 largest are:

• Zhuang (16.9 million)
• Hui (10.59 million)
• Manchu (10.39 million)
• Uyghur (10.07 million)
• Miao (9.43 million)
• Yi (8.7 million)
• Tujia (8.35 million)
• Tibetan (6.28 million)
• Mongol (5.98 million)
• Buyei (2.87 million)

Source: 2010 China census

Before the victory of the Qin dynasty in 221BC, China was divided into many different states. The process of its subsequent unification was the creation of an empire. But whereas all the other great empires of the world have long since broken up, China remains united. Why? In one word - the Han. The Han identity has served as the glue which has kept a geographically and demographically vast country together. Without that shared identity, China would long ago have fallen apart.

The China I have been talking about is the eastern half of present-day China, where more than 90% of the population lives. What then of the western half? This is a different story. It accounts for over half the territory of China but contains only about 6% of its population.
Whereas the eastern half of China dates back about two millennia, the western part is far more recent, having only been incorporated about 300 years ago.
From the mid-17th Century, large tracts of the western region were conquered by the Qing dynasty in a series of brutal wars. The inhabitants of these lands were not Han. With their different physical appearance, darker skin, distinctive customs and lower level of development, the Han saw them as the Other, as "barbarians".
Not surprisingly, the Chinese government, both imperial and communist, has long had a troubled relationship with parts of the western regions, notably Tibet and Xinjiang.

If the strength of the Han identity is that it has held China together, its weakness, I would argue, has been its relative lack of respect for difference, an underlying assumption that the non-Han should become like the Han - indeed eventually be absorbed into the Han. This attitude is not difficult to understand, it is how the Han became almost, but not quite, synonymous with being Chinese, or, to put it another way, how China was created.
Ethnicity is a powerful determinant of how societies perceive others. So is China, as a global power, likely to view the rest of the world?
Just as with the US, China will naturally tend to see the world in its own image. An unusual feature of China, in this respect, is that its history is so atypical: a huge population who overwhelmingly consider themselves to share the same identity. This helps to explain why the Chinese have tended to think of Africa as one, just like China, rather than a complex mosaic of different ethnicities and cultures.
The fact that China has had little experience of, or exposure to, the rest of the world until very recently - the past 30 years to be exact - has served to reinforce a tendency to see other countries through a Chinese prism.

Bear in mind, too, that the Chinese have a deep pride in their own cultural achievements, many believing that, for understandable reasons, their civilisation, and their history, is greater than all others. Such an outlook also tends to accentuate a China-centric view of the world.
When I first got to know the Chinese, one of the things I most enjoyed about them was their powerful sense of who they were, their confidence in who they were. They did not defer to white people. I liked that and respected them for it. It was as if their remarkable history resided in each and every one of them and made them walk tall.
Despite the fact that for the best part of two centuries China came to suffer hugely at the hands of the West, and to lag badly behind the West, the Chinese never stopped believing in themselves. Such pride and confidence is to be admired. In my view, though, it can also have a downside - a tendency to look down on others. If the Chinese have always considered themselves to be at least the equal of white Westerners, a common, though by no means universal, attitude has been to regard those of darker skin as inferior.
My horrified student friend was a case in point.
But why is this? Its roots are deep. For many centuries, white has had positive connotations in Chinese culture and black negative ones. Perhaps the reason is that those who toiled all day in the fields became dark while the aristocratic elite, protected from the sun, remained pristine white. To this day, interestingly, skin whitening products are enormously popular amongst Chinese women, as they also are in Japan and Korea and elsewhere.

Didier Drogba now plays in Shanghai

Over the past two centuries, the Chinese have been hugely aware of the fact that white societies around the globe have been dominant while those of colour, especially African, have been poorer and much less developed. Success breeds respect, failure can all too easily attract scorn. Remember, those of African descent, until the past few decades, have been remote and distant from the Chinese, far removed from their knowledge and experience, a situation which can foster ignorance and prejudice.
There are small signs of change.
Didier Drogba, the Ivory Coast footballer who now plays for Shanghai Shenhua, has spoken in glowing terms about how the Chinese have received him.
As China becomes increasingly familiar with the world - as is now happening in such a dramatic way, from Africa to Latin America, and South Asia to Central Asia - parochial if deep-seated prejudices will come under growing pressure.

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Understanding the National Debt and Budget Deficit

The maths that made Voyager possible

By Christopher Riley and Dallas Campbell BBC Four

In 1961, mathematics graduate Michael Minovitch decided to take on the hardest problem in celestial mechanics - the "three body problem".

Continue reading the main story

Related Stories

• Particles point way for Voyager
• To boldly go beyond the Solar System
• Voyagers ride 'magnetic bubbles'

Nasa's Voyager spacecraft have enthralled everyone with their exploits at the edge of the Solar System, but their launch in 1977 was only possible because of some clever maths and the persistence of a PhD student who worked out how to slingshot probes into deep space.

On the 3 October, 1942, the nose cone of an early V2 test rocket soared high above the north German coast before falling back to a crash-landing in the Baltic Sea.
For the first time in history, an object built by humans had crossed the invisible Karman line, which marks the edge of space.
Astonishingly, within 70 years - just one human lifespan - we'd hurled another spacecraft right to the edge of the Solar System.
Today, 35 years after leaving Earth, Voyager 1 is 18.4 billion km (11.4 billion miles) from Earth and about to cross over the boundary marking the extent of the Sun's influence, where the solar wind meets interstellar space.
Sometime in the next five years, it will likely break through this so called "bowshock" and head out into the galaxy beyond. Its twin, Voyager 2, having flown past all the outer giant planets, should pass over into interstellar not long after.

Continue reading the main story

Nasa's Voyager probes

• Voyager 2 launched on 20 August 1977; Voyager 1 lifted off on 5 September the same year
• Their official missions were to study Jupiter and Saturn, but the probes were able to continue on
• The Voyager 1 probe is now the furthest human-built object from Earth
• Both probes carry discs with recordings designed to portray the diversity of culture on Earth

• To boldly go beyond the Solar System

It's easy to take this monumental achievement for granted, but the gateway to the outer Solar System remained shut for the first 20 years of the space age.

In 1957, as Sputnik 1 became the first engineered object to orbit our home planet, mission planners started to look towards other worlds to propel their probes.
Spacecraft were quickly dispatched to the Moon, Venus and Mars. But there was one major limiting factor to reaching more distant destinations.
For a voyage to the outer planets, you must escape the gravitational pull of the Sun, and that demands a very large rocket indeed. And given what an "uphill" gravitational struggle it would be to reach them, such a journey to the furthest planet - Neptune, more than four billion km (2.5 billion miles) away - could easily take 30 or 40 years.
At the time, Nasa couldn't guarantee a spacecraft for more than a few months of operational life, and so the outer planets were considered out of reach.
That was until a 25-year-old mathematics graduate called Michael Minovitch came along in 1961.
Excited by UCLA's new IBM 7090 computer, the fastest on Earth at the time, Minovitch decided to take on the hardest problem in celestial mechanics: the "three body problem".

The issue was being able to reach the outer planets in practical timeframe

The three bodies it refers to are the Sun, a planet and a third object such as an asteroid or comet all travelling through space with their gravities acting on each other. The problem is predicting exactly how the gravity of the Sun and the planet will influence the third object's trajectory.
Astronomers had been pondering the three-body problem for at least 300 years, ever since they'd started plotting the path that comets took as they fell through the inner Solar System towards the Sun.
Undeterred by the fact that some of the finest minds in history, including Isaac Newton hadn't solved the three-body problem, Minovitch became focused on cracking it. He intended to use the IBM 7090 computer to home in on a solution using a method of iteration.
In his spare time, whilst studying for his PhD during the summer of 1961, he set about coding a series of equations to apply to the problem.
Feeding data on planetary orbits into his model, Minovitch had made progress by the autumn, but was anxious to check his data. So in the summer of the following year, during an internship at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Lab he persuaded his boss to give him more accurate data on planetary positions to re-test his model.
To his delight, he ran the simulations again and found his solution still worked. What he had achieved made possible an extraordinary breakthrough in spacecraft propulsion.
Minovitch had shown that as a craft flew close to a planet orbiting the Sun, it would steal some of the planet's orbital speed, and be accelerated away from the Sun. Such acceleration, without using a single drop of rocket propellant seemed too good to be true, and Minovitch's critics were quick to try to discredit him.

The domain of the Sun's influence is called the heliosphere: The Voyagers are approaching the edge of this enormous balloon of charged particles thrown out into space by our star

Without funds for further computer time, and in a bid to persuade Nasa to embrace his discovery, he drew up by hand hundreds of theoretical mission trajectories to the outer planets. Among them was one very special flight path that would become the Voyagers' trajectory.
But in 1962 the Jet Propulsion Lab was preoccupied with supporting Project Apollo, and no-one spotted Minovitch's breakthrough.
It would take another summer intern called Gary Flandro to identify the opportunity.
A spacecraft engineer, grounded in the hard realities of spaceflight, Flandro knew that any mission to the outer planets would have to be flown as fast as possible, otherwise the craft might not last long enough to reach its destination.
So in the summer of 1965, he began to look at whether the solution to the three-body problem could be put to practical use in exploring the outer planets. He started by drawing graphs of where these planets were going to be in the coming years.
And to his surprise, the plots revealed that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune would all be on the same side of the Solar System in the late 1970s.
Using a solution to the three-body problem, a single mission, launching from Earth in 1977, could sling a spacecraft past all four planets within 12 years. Such an opportunity would not present itself again for another 176 years.
With further lobbying from Minovitch and high level intervention from Maxwell Hunter, who advised the president on US space policy, Nasa eventually embraced Minovitch's slingshot propulsion and Flandro's idea for a "grand tour" of the planets.

The solution came through using the most powerful computer of the day

Initially named "Mariner-Jupiter-Saturn", or MJS, funding to build two spacecraft was released in the early 1970s. The twin craft would eventually become known as the Voyagers.
To reach Neptune they would have to last for over a decade in space, operating in the darkest reaches of the Solar System billions of km from the Sun.
They would require radiation-hardened electronics to survive their encounters with the magnetosphere of Jupiter, and an artificial intelligence autonomous enough to make independent decisions when too far away from Earth for help.
Although still lacking funding to extend its mission beyond Saturn, Nasa's optimistic engineers loaded enough control propellant on board to keep the probes' dishes orientated towards the Earth for decades after passing Saturn.
They'd also built the Voyager power supply system to last until at least the year 2020. But most visionary of all, they'd included five experiments on board that were capable of analyzing space beyond the Solar System.
In 1977, as the duo launched from Earth, no-one dared imagine that they would survive long enough to make such measurements. But in 2012, they're still going strong - their pitifully weak signals just a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a watt of power by the time they reach the Earth. New discoveries are still being made.
Today, in a darkened lecture theatre at JPL - named after the same Theodore von Karman whose boundary to space our machines first crossed 70 years ago - sits a model of the Voyagers.
These great machines are now carrying our spirit of exploration across a boundary the Hungarian-American engineer could only dream of - into interstellar space.

Voyager: To The Final Frontier will be broadcast on BBC Four on Wednesday 24 October, 2012. It is produced and directed by Christopher Riley and presented by Dallas Campbell.

The author Christopher Riley stands in front of the Voyager exhibition at JPL

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A Point Of View: What kind of superpower could China be?

• Making sense of China (Martin Jacques)
• What is history's role in society? (Sarah Dunant)
• The strange allure of teeth (SD)
• Charity shop blues (SD)

China is on course to becoming a superpower - but not in the way many expect, writes economist Martin Jacques.

Beijing these days is positively throbbing with debate. It may not have the trappings of a western-style democracy, but it is now home to the most important and interesting discussions in the world.
When I addressed an audience of young Chinese diplomats at their foreign ministry a year ago, it was abundantly clear that a fascinating debate is under way about what kind of foreign policy might be appropriate for the global power China is in the process of becoming.
What will China be like as a superpower? You might think it is already - it is not.
Its military power is puny compared with that of the US. While America has 11 aircraft carriers, China only commissioned its first last month - based on, of all things, a Ukrainian hull.

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• Martin Jacques is an economist and author of When China Rules the World
• A Point of View is usually broadcast on Fridays on Radio 4 at 20:50 BST and repeated Sundays, 08:50 BST

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And its global political influence is still extremely limited.

The only sense in which China is a superpower is economic - that is, its economy is already over half the size of the US economy and projected to overtake it around 2018, notwithstanding its reduced growth rate of 7%. But this is overwhelmingly a function of China's huge population. In terms of technology and living standards it lags far behind the US.
So when we speak of China as a superpower, we are talking about the future.
A common reaction to the idea of China as a superpower is that it will be like the US - except worse. Worse because it is not a democracy, it has a communist government and because its people are not like us. I guess that gives some the jitters.
In fact we should not expect China to behave in the manner of the US. It will be very different. And nor should we assume that it will necessarily be worse.
Why will it be different? Because its history is so different. Articles about China's growing involvement with Africa - in terms of trade and investment - often talk of the "new colonialism".
Beware historical ignorance. China has never colonised any overseas territories. Overseas empires were a European speciality, with Japan getting in on the act for a short while too.
China could have colonised South East Asia, for example, in the early 15th century. It had the resources, it had enormous ships, many times bigger than anything Europe possessed at the time. But it didn't.

China's first aircraft carrier is a former Soviet vessel, the Varyag

That is not to say China ignored its neighbours. On the contrary. For many, many centuries it dominated them - as a result of its sheer size and far more advanced level of development. China's relationship with them was based not on colonialism but what we now know as the tributary system. It neither ruled them nor occupied them. Rather, in return for access to the Chinese market and various forms of protection, the rulers of tribute states were required to give gifts - literally tribute - to the Emperor as a symbolic acknowledgement of China's superiority.
The tributary system comprised what we know today as East Asia, home to one-third of the world's population. It stretched from Japan and Korea to the Malay Peninsula and parts of Indonesia.
It proved remarkably stable, lasting for at least 2,000 years and only coming to an end around 1900.
The West and China share an important characteristic - they both believe they are universal, a model for all others. But the way they have interpreted this in practice has been entirely different. For Europe, and latterly the US, it meant projecting their power around the world, most spectacularly during the heyday of colonialism in the 19th and first half of the 20th Century, when a large part of the world found itself under European rule.
We governed from afar, exported our ways of doing things, imposed our languages, our education, our religion and much else besides.

Zheng He's statue looks across to the city of Nanjing

The Chinese, in contrast, preferred to stay at home. They believed the Middle Kingdom, the old name for China, literally meaning the centre of the world, was the highest form of civilisation. So why step outside into ever darkening shades of barbarianism?
The seven great voyages of Zheng He between 1405 and 1433 around the East and South China Seas and across the Indian Ocean as far as East Africa left no permanent mark - they were about demonstrating the glory of the Middle Kingdom rather than a desire to conquer. Those who left China to settle in South East Asia were seen as leaving civilisation and deserving of no support or protection by the Emperor.
Compare that with the way in which Britain and France celebrated the heroes of their colonial expansion. Our cities are littered with statues and street names in their memory.
There is another reason why the Chinese have tended to stay at home. The country is huge, diverse - and extremely difficult to govern. The overwhelming preoccupation of its rulers down the ages has been how to maintain order and stability and thereby retain power. It remains just as true today.
Rather than look outwards, China's leaders look inwards. The exception was China's own continental land mass. Its expansion, rather than to the four corners of the world, was confined to its own continent.
The most dramatic example was the westward march of the Qing dynasty from the mid-17th Century which, in a series of bloody and brutal wars, doubled the physical size of China.
So what, you might ask, does all this history tell us about how China might behave as a great global power? A great deal.

Europe, I would argue, has historically been an extremely aggressive and expansionist continent. Its own history has been characterised by seemingly endless wars which were then transplanted onto a global stage during the era of colonial expansion and world war. Military might, the projection of power around the world, and the desire if necessary by force to impose our way of life on others, have been fundamental to the European story.
And it is not difficult to see how the US - itself the product of European overseas expansion and settlement - inherited these characteristics from us.
China won't be like this. It is not in its DNA. Its rulers will be far less interested in seeking to dominate the rest of the world and far more concerned with keeping themselves in power. That is what ruling a country containing a fifth of the world's population obliges. When Xi Jinping becomes Chinese leader next month, his in-tray, as with Hu Jintao before him, will be overwhelmingly filled with domestic rather than foreign issues.
In time China will certainly come to enjoy huge global power. It will be exercised, however, in a rather different way.
The iconic form of western power has been military. Extraordinarily, the US today accounts for around half of global defence expenditure. Before, European colonial expansion was only possible because its fighting capacity was massively superior to that of the rest of the world.

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See also in the Magazine

"Chinese history can be read as a series of peasant rebellions. One in the 19th Century, led by a man who thought he was Christ's brother, lasted 15 years and caused at least 10 million deaths."
Read more about Hong Xiuquan from Carrie Gracie and about great Chinese figures by following the links below

• The emperor: Qin Shi Huang
• The bureaucrat: Wang Anshi
• The warlord: Liu Bei

That kind of overweening military power has never really been a Chinese characteristic.

Instead the quintessential forms of Chinese power will be economic and cultural. Over time, China's economic strength - given the size of its population - will be gigantic, far greater than that of the US at its zenith. Already, even at its present low level of development, China is the main trading partner of a multitude of countries around the world. And with economic power will come commensurate political power and influence. China will, if it wishes, be able to bend many other countries to its will.
Cultural power will also be important to the Chinese. Theirs is a remarkable civilisation - having enjoyed a place in the sun not once but several times. During the Tang dynasty, for instance, from the 7th to the 10th Century, and most remarkably during the Song dynasty from the 10th to the 13th Century, with major advances in a host of fields from biology and hydraulic engineering to architecture, medicine, mathematics and cartography.
The Chinese are enormously proud of their historical achievements. They believe that theirs is the greatest civilisation there has ever been.
They have a strong sense of their own superiority rooted in history. They have long had a hierarchical view of the world, with China at the top. And the rise of China is likely to accentuate these views.
But don't expect the Chinese to be impatient about their rise. In 1972 Henry Kissinger is reputed to have asked Zhou En Lai, the former Chinese premier, what he thought of the French Revolution. Zhou En Lai's response: "It's too early to know".
The Chinese have a completely different conception of time to Westerners. Whereas Americans think very short, the Chinese think very long.
For them a century is nothing.

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Is Human Nature Fundamentally Selfish or Altruistic?

Human inclinations are not primarily selfish: kindness and altruism have been evolutionarily valued in mates, and even the youngest children often try to be helpful

By Maia Szalavitz | @maiasz | October 8, 2012 | 

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Did selfishness — or sharing — drive human evolution? Evolutionary theorists have traditionally focused on competition and the ruthlessness of natural selection, but often they have failed to consider a critical fact: that humans could not have survived in nature without the charity and social reciprocity of a group.
Last week on Slate, evolutionary anthropologist Eric Michael Johnson explored the question against the backdrop of two cultural events in 1957 — the consequences of the rogue, selfish activities of a pygmy hunter in a Congo forest, who used the group’s collective hunting efforts to benefit only himself, and in New York City, the publication of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged, whose protagonist champions the author’s notion that human nature is fundamentally selfish and that each man “exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.”
Atlas Shrugged counts many politicians as admirers, perhaps most notably Republican vice presidential candidate, Paul Ryan, who cites the book as one of his main inspirations for entering politics and is known to give Rand’s books frequently to his interns.
(MORE: ‘Paradise Built in Hell:’ How Disaster Brings Out the Best in People)
So, does Rand’s theory comport with current evolutionary theory? The data is not exactly kind to her position. For example, Johnson describes an anthropologist’s account of the pygmy tribesman, Cephu, in the Congo who lived by the Randian ideal that selfishness is the highest morality. Cephu was part of the Mbuti tribe for whom “hunts were collective efforts in which each hunter’s success belonged to everybody else,” Johnson writes, detailing how the tribe “employed long nets of twined liana bark to catch their prey, sometimes stretching the nets for 300 feet. Once the nets were hung, women and children began shouting, yelling, and beating the ground to frighten animals toward the trap.”
It was a group effort, for most:

But one man, a rugged individualist named Cephu, had other ideas. When no one was looking, Cephu slipped away to set up his own net in front of the others.

Soon caught in this blatant attempt to steal meat, Cephu was brought in front of the whole tribe:

At an impromptu trial, Cephu defended himself with arguments for individual initiative and personal responsibility. “He felt he deserved a better place in the line of nets,” [the anthropologist Colin] Turnbull wrote. “After all, was he not an important man, a chief, in fact, of his own band?” But if that were the case, replied a respected member of the camp, Cephu should leave and never return. The Mbuti have no chiefs, they are a society of equals in which redistribution governs everyone’s livelihood. The rest of the camp sat in silent agreement.
Faced with banishment, a punishment nearly equivalent to a death sentence, Cephu relented.

He apologized, handed over his meat to the tribe and then, essentially, was sent to bed without dinner. As Johnson explains, selfishness is considered far from a virtue in such tribal groups, which still live in ways similar to our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Indeed, every such group ever studied has been found to idealize altruism and punish selfishness, in everything from their mythologies to their mating practices.
(MORE: How Economic Inequality Is (Literally) Making Us Sick)
Although Rand accepted that early human life was a collective effort, she failed to realize how this shaped our brains. In most societies, for example, a man like Cephu would be seen as the opposite of a good catch for a woman wanting a partner. A good mate — and one whose genes were likely selected for and passed on in our earliest evolutionary history — would have been a cooperative hunter, one who didn’t put his own goals ahead of those of the tribe. He would have been altruistic in battle too, particularly when warring with other groups. A selfish soldier, after all, is known as a coward, not a hero.
The evidence for altruism as a critical part of human nature isn’t limited to anthropology. Studies of 18-month-old toddlers show that they will almost always try to help an adult who is visibly struggling with a task, without being asked to do so: if the adult is reaching for something, the toddler will try to hand it to them, or if they see an adult drop something accidentally, they will pick it up.
However, if the same adult forcefully throws something to the ground, toddlers won’t try to retrieve it: they understand that the action was deliberate and that the object is unwanted. These very young children will even assist (or refrain from helping) with a book-stacking task depending on what they perceive to be the adult’s intention. If the adult clumsily knocks the last book off the top of the stack, the toddler will try to put it back; if the adult deliberately takes the last book off, however, toddlers won’t intervene. Even before kids are taught to chip in — perhaps especially before they are told it’s an obligation — children are less selfish than often presumed.
Another study found that 3- to 5-year-olds tend to give a greater share of a reward (stickers, in this case) to a partner who has done more work on a task — again, without being asked — even if it means they get to keep less for themselves. And those cries of “That’s not fair!” that plague sibling relationships: they’re not only selfish; they reflect children’s apparently innate desire for equity.
(MORE: The Upside of Gossip: Social and Psychological Benefits)
Fundamental tendencies toward altruism aren’t only seen in children, either. Worldwide, the aftermath of natural disasters are typically characterized by heroism and a sharing of resources — within the affected community and in others farther way — not selfish panics. During the terrorist attacks of 9/11, for example, there were no accounts of people being trampled rushing out of the World Trade Center towers; rather, those who needed assistance descending were cared for, and calm mainly prevailed. The same occurred after the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear meltdown in Japan in 2011. The cases in which people stampede or look out only for themselves tend to be rare and involve very specific circumstances that mitigate against helpfulness.
Moreover, our stress systems themselves seem to be designed to connect us to others. They calm down when we are feeling close to people we care about — whether related to us or not — and spike during isolation and loneliness. Even short periods of solitary confinement can derange the mind and damage the body because of the stress they create. And having no social support can be as destructive to health as cigarette smoking.
Of course, none of this is to say that humans are never selfish or that we don’t have a grasping, greedy part of our nature. But to claim, as Rand does, that “altruistic morality” is a “disease” is to misrepresent reality.
(Share the love and read the rest of Johnson’s fascinating feature here.)
MORE: An Evolutionary Explanation for Altruism: Girls Find It Sexy

Maia Szalavitz is a health writer at TIME.com. Find her on Twitter at @maiasz. You can also continue the discussion on TIME Healthland’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIMEHealthland.

Read other related stories about this:

• Ayn Rand vs. the Pygmies Slate

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