Victor D. Chase

Physicians are now implanting manmade devices designed to enable the deaf to hear, the blind to see, and the paralyzed to move. Each of these seemingly miraculous “cures” are the fruits of a burgeoning field known as neural prosthetics. The immediate goal of this work is to reverse sensory and motor afflictions that heretofore have been beyond the pale of modern medicine. These implants that replace damaged circuitry in the nervous system, also hold the potential to resolve psychiatric illnesses, restore the ability to form memories in damaged brains, and to even endow the able-bodied with superhuman powers by extending the visible and audible wavelengths, and by increasing learning capacity and memory.

“Earthquakes don’t kill people,”
seismologist Arthur Rodgers says.  “Buildings do.”

“There are casualties in earthquakes because buildings collapse,
freeway sections collapse, and bridges go out,” says Rodgers,
a member of an earthquake modeling team at the Department of
Energy’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).
In essence, “We are vulnerable to earthquake damage because
we choose to build and live near places where earthquakes occur.”

Within the next several
decades, ice over the Arctic will completely
disappear during the summer.  That’s
just one of the clear and dramatic predictions to
come from models developed by the Climate Ocean
and Sea Ice Modeling (COSIM) program at the Department
of Energy’s Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Additionally, “The models now predict
globally an average surface temperature
rise of 2 to 4 degrees Celsius over the
next 100 years,” says the program’s
project manager, Philip Jones.  And
the oceans account for more than
70 percent of the Earth’s surface.

First they turn red, then they die. The cause of death is neither envy, rage, nor jealousy. Rather it is a common drug and cosmetic dye, known by its FDA name, D&C Red 28, 27 (water and oil soluble, respectively). The victim of this substance is the fruit fly, long the bane of farmers throughout the world and almost equally the bane of many citizens in areas where the traditional response to infestations of the flies is large scale spraying of malathion, a controversial pesticide.

The sight of fruit flies sends shivers down the spines of farmers who stand to lose millions of dollars whenever they appear. As a group, fruit flies are true to their name in that they primarily attack tree fruit, including plums, peaches, citrus fruits, apples, pears, and cherries. The Mediterranean fruit fly has also been implicated as a pest in grapes, tomatoes, eggplant, and bell peppers, among others.

Under international agreement, anytime fruit flies, including both the Mexican and Mediterranean flies, are found in an area the produce from that region is quarantined from export to uninfested areas. To get rid of this blight, a costly protocol must be followed. First, malathion, a member of the organophosphate family of pesticides, is sprayed. This must frequently be done in populated residential areas. After the spraying, flies sterilized by radiation are released to further control the population.

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Most of us like to have a certain amount of structure in our lives, yet all too frequently the complexity of modern-day living confronts us with what seems more like chaos than order. When that happens, we strive to regain a level of organization that helps us deal with the complexities of our imperfect world.

Much the same holds true in the inanimate world of computerized data, which is increasingly confronted with confusion merely by virtue of its exponential growth. As a result, IBM researchers are developing a series of complex software systems aimed at bringing this seemingly uncontrollable mass of information, known as unstructured data, into an orderly, usable, structured state.

The growth of unstructured data tracks the evolution of computer utilization. During the 1960s, computing was primarily a backroom, punch-card operation, used for basic functions like billing and tracking inventory. Gradually, computers moved to the front office to handle more people-oriented transactions such as making airline and hotel reservations. Most of these tasks could be accomplished by categorizing and accessing information in ordered rows and columns of numbers, known as relational databases. It is precisely this type of routine "grunt work" that computers were originally designed to handle.

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