SPAN: July/August 2008 by SPAN magazine

l7Imbassador David C. Mulford and Foreign Secretary Shivshankar J't.Menon signed a landmark agreement on July 4, strengthening educational exchanges between India and the United States. The agreement doubles the size of the 58-year-old Fulbright exchange program with India, and makes India and the United States full partners in the program. "Together, we have seized upon the importance of bringing new energy into our longstanding agreement," said the Ambassador. "What we have done today will bring priceless benefits to thousands of young people in both our countries in the years ahead." Reflecting this new partnership, scholarships awarded under this

program will now be known as Fulbright-Nehru Scholarships. Signed at Hyderabad House in New Delhi in the presence of U.S. Congress members Gary Ackerman, Russ Carnahan, Sheila Jackson-lee, AI Green, Thaddeus McCotter and Randy Neugebauer, the agreement represents the strong and growing people-to-people ties that bind the world's oldest and largest democracies, and emphasizes the value both countries place on education and scholarly exchange. Named for its sponsor, Senator J. William Fulbright, the program was established by the U.S. Congress in 1946 to promote "international goodwill through the exchange of students in the fields of education, culture and science." It now operates in 155 countries. Since the signing of the first exchange agreement between Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and then-Ambassador Lay Henderson on February 2, 1950, more than 5,000 Indians have traveled to the United States, and more than 9,800 Americans have come to India as Fulbright scholars.

July/August 2008

Front cover: A mosaic of 53 images recorded by Ihe Galileo spacecraft in 1992 uses filters and an exaggerated false color scheme to show the mineral composition of the moon's surface. Courtesy NASNJPL.

SPAN Publisher: Editor-in-Chief: Editor: Associate Editor: Urdu Editor: Hindi Editor: Copy Editors: Art Director: Deputy Art Directors: Editorial Assistant: Production/Circulation Manager: Printing Assistant: Business Assistant: Research Services:

Left: A montage of planelary photos taken by spacecraft managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. From top, Mercury, Venus, Earth (and moon), Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Courtesy NASNJPL.

Larry Schwartz Lisa A. Swenarski de Herrera Laurinda Keys Long Deepanjali Kakati Anjum Naim Giriraj Agarwal Richa Varma Shah Md. Tahsin Usmani Hemant Bhatnagar Khurshid Anwar Abbasi Qasim Raza Yugesh Mathur Rakesh Agrawal Alok Kaushik Shaji T. Kommery Bureau of International Information Prograrns, The American Library

.New Media Change U.S. Politics By Thomas B. Edsall

52 . Electing America's

Lawmakers

By Laurinda Keys Long

Can We Survive on the Moon?

57 Who Owns the Moon?

58 . Social Development:

Seeking UFOs Underground Will a Genetically Modified Papaya Seed Help Indian Farmers?

Making a Difference

By Tomas Alex Tizon

.Achievers: Manjunath Bhandary By Richa Varma

By Glenn Harlan Reynolds

8 . Agriculture:

McCain vs. Obama A photo essa

Advertising: How Click Fraud-Could Swallow the Internet By Charles C Mann

Book Review: More than Hot Dogs and Apple Pie By Paul Levy

By Giriraj Agarwal

Letters to the Editor

Correction: In the March/April 2008 issue, SPAN incorrectly stated in the photo caption for "Windy City 00 with a Warm, Cosmopolitan Heart" that the photograph ~ showed Surendra Kumar with Dev Anand. However, the ~ person shown with Anand is Dr. Harish Bhatt 10

15 . Health: Repairing Wounded Warriors

\~,

By Gerry J. Gilmore

~ ~ http://span.state.gov <9 Contactus editorspan@state.gov Forsubscriptionsoraddresschange:

subscri pti onspan@state.gov Published by the PublicAffairsSection,AmericanCenter,24 KasturbaGandhi

.Exploring New Frontiers Together By Deepanjali Kakati

NASA's New Ride By William Speed Weed

How to Look for Life on Mars By Chris Wilson

Networking: The Death of E-Mail By Chad Lorenz

On the Lighter Side

Marg,NewDelhi 110001(phone:23472000),on behalfof the American Embassy,NewDelhi.Printed at ThomsonPressIndiaLimiled, 18/35, Delhi MathuraRoad,Faridabad,Haryana121007. Opinions expressedin this68-page magazinedo nOInecessarilyreflecttheviewsorpoliciesoftheU.S.Government.

*Articleswitha starmaybereprintedwithpermission. ContactProgramAssistantMadhuriSehgalat 011-23472289or editorspan@stategov

A LETTER FROM

THE

PUBLISHER cross the United States this year, the 50th anniversary of NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is being commemorated with exhibits on the first moon landing, the first orbit of the Earth, the first photographs and data transmitted from ~ other celestial bodies-amazing human and technical feats that have inspired people around the world. Not content to rest on its laurels, NASA successfully landed the Phoenix spacecraft on Mars and is preparing US astronauts for a return to the moon. Americans are looking forward to undertaking new explorations of space with our international partners, including India. Some may remember that we entered the space age together, too. November will mark the 45th anniversary of the first U.S. connection with India's space program, the launch of India's first sounding rocket, which probed atmospheric conditions. It was an American Nike-Apache, launched from Thumba in Kerala. The anticipated launch of the Chandrayaan-l, with two NASA payloads aboard to collect data and map the resources of the moon, is the latest U.S.-India space link, but surely will not be the last. As Deepanjali Kakati writes in our cover story, "Exploring New Frontiers Together," India and the United States share important goals and interests in lunar exploration. The Chandrayaan-l mission has given our scientists and engineers a golden opportunity to work together on a project that promises benefits to both of our countries and to our global neighbors. In this issue of SPAN, we are offering our readers "the moon and the stars," beautiful photos taken by NASA astronauts and instruments. We also hope you will find interesting the articles about how to look for life on Mars, survival on the moon, who owns the moon, NASA's next spacecraft and the work of UFO investigators. Back here on Earth, a second group of articles focuses on what the rapid developments in media and communications mean for us. Thomas B. Edsall explores how these new technologies have changed U.S. politics, Chad Lorenz gives us a peek at what's next after "The Death of E-Mail" and Charles C. Mann warns "How Click Fraud Could Swallow the Internet." Just to provide some moments of refreshment from the summer heat, we've opened this issue of SPAN with a splash: a Webchat with Olympic swimmer Janet Evans in "It's Not All About Winning" and Caroline Hsu's "Shorely, It's Paradise," a travelogue about magnificent Shi Shi Beach on the northwestern tip of the continental United States. This summer, Americans are also thinking about the state of our country and the world as we prepare to vote in our quadrennial national elections. After a long season of primary elections and nominating caucuses, our major political parties have new leadership. During the Democratic and Republican national conventions this summer, Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain will be officially nominated as their respective parties' candidates for President. We have some basic information for you on the candidates, and on the elections for a new U.S. Congress On American Independence Day, July 4, the United States and India signed a revision of our bilateral agreement on educational exchanges, expanding the Fulbright program that has been in place since 1950. The agreement signed by Foreign Secrstary Shivshankar Menon and Ambassador David C. Mulford at Hyderabad House in New Delhi will bring India into full partnership in the prestigious program, doubling the number of Indians and Americans that will benefit each year from the newly named Fulbright-Nehru Scholarships. Expanding our cooperation in education is of great importance to both our countries.

~~AJ.~:>

It's

Olympic star Janet Evans acquired more than medals during her competitive career.

Janet Evans competes in the women's SOD-meter freestyle final at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia.

ith five Olympic medals in her trophy case, American swimmer Janet Evans had a terrific career. At only 17, she won three gold medals in the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, then another gold and a silver in 1992 in Barcelona, Spain. "When 1 statted swimming competitively, 1 wasn't as tall as most of the other kids, so people were always telling me 1 was too

little to be a really competitive swimmer," says Evans. "In my mind, that didn't make any sense. 1 knew 1 had the capabilities, 1 had the desire, and 1 just thought 1 could make it happen." That mindset was with her at her first two Olympics. "I thought that if 1 didn't go to the Olympics to win, then 1 was a failure. 1 never stopped and said, 'Gosh, I'm really honored just to represent my country at the Olympics,' " she says. She was disillusioned

with her silver medal in 1992. "At that time, 1 thought the Olympics was all about winning." When it came to 1996, with the Games scheduled in Atlanta, Georgia, Evans says she was looking at the only chance of her Olympic career to swim for her country, in her country. "I was 24, and at the time that was considered aging in swimming .... Just making the Olympic squad was a greater challenge for me than it had been in the

Janet Evans waves to the crowd after winning the 800meter freestyle swimming competi tion in the 1992 Barcelona Olympics in Spain.

past," she says. Her coach and her parents said to her, "You need to swim in Atlanta not to win. You need to swim in Atlanta to experience the Olympics, to compete in your home country, to realize that life isn't just about winning." But Evans went to Atlanta wanting to win. "Who doesn't want to win? But 1'd put a lot of miles on my shoulders by then. I just didn't have it when I got there, for a variety of reasons," she says. "In Atlanta, I really learned it was okay not to win. It was okay to represent my country, do my best, and be satisfied with the results. And I was." Though she did not win any medals, her participation in

the Games in Atlanta was her third consecutive Olympics-a rare feat in swimming. Evans recently talked about her struggles, new developments in swimming, and life after the Olympics in a USINFO Webchat. I'd like to know how you came to be a swimmer. What influenced you? I became a swimmer because my parents don't know how to swim. When they moved to California we had a pool in our backyard, so they decided that my two older brothers and I needed to be poolsafe. I was put into swimming lessons when I was about 14 months old and could

swim all four strokes by the time I was three. My mom still doesn't know how to swim, so we spend a lot of time teasing her that she can't swim and her daughter is an Olympic champion! My greatest influence was my parents. They supported me in my dreams but never made me feel that swimming was something I had to do. They took my swimming seriously, but not too seriously, which gave me a great perspective. If I fell short of my goals, they encouraged me to keep trying but not to be too disappointed. After all, swimming is just a sport! What is your advice for girls in sports? I think that competing in sports as a girl

For more information: Janet Evans http://www.janetevans.com/ LZR Racer http://speedo80 com/lzr-racer/features/ is incredibly beneficial. As a young girl, I learned that I could compete with the boys and do anything I set my mind to. Athletics gave me determination and confidence, and taught me how to set goals. Even if I hadn't competed at the Olympic level, I believe that competing in sports taught me skills that I need to be successful in everyday life. I encourage every young woman to participate in sports. So, what do you think about the new swimsuit technology? Are the new materials good for the sport? I think the new suits are an interesting development in our sport. The athletes that compete in them talk about how fast they feel and how the suits make them feel buoyant. While some complain that this might not be the best thing for our spOli...they think that suits should just be plain old suits ...! feel that it is simply a technological advancement. By the next Olympics in London, there will be another suit that is better and faster! A lot of people don't know this, but when [nine-time Olympic gold medalist] Mark Spitz competed, they had not yet invented a low profile goggle. So Mark could only train for two or three hours a day without goggles. When goggles were "invented," swimmers could train longer hours, and all of Mark's records were broken. So, once again, it was simply a technological advancement in our sport. It's not always fun for the athletes whose records are broken because of these advancements, but it's just the nature of sport.... What have you done since your last Olympics? Do you still swim in competitions? Since the completion of my swimming career, I have been very blessed in that I am still able to be involved in the Olympic movement. For years, I have worked for Olympic sponsors and traveled the world giving motivational speeches about what the Olympics means to me. I am also the chairman of the Athlete's Committee for

FINA (Federation Internationale de Natation, the goverillng body of worldwide swimming). I don't swim in competitions anymore, but I am still able to be a part of the swimming community. I like to say that I have the best of everything ...! still get to be around the sport, but I don't have to swim 19 kilometers a day to get ready for the next swim meet! As an Olympic medalist are you asked to give motivational talks? Where and on what subjects? Yes, I actually spend a lot of time giving motivational talks. My favorite group to give talks to is young people. I also do a lot of speeches for corporations, particu-

I believe that there is often too much importance placed on winning at the Olympics. As an athlete, the most important thing to do at the Games is to compete at your very best.

larly companies that sponsor the Olympic movement. The reason that I love giving motivational speeches is because I love to share with others what the Olympics mean to me. A lot of us feel that the Olympics are for winning gold medals and for standing on that victory platform listening to your national anthem. While that is an amazing experience, the real point of the Olympics is for athletes from all over the world to come together in the name of sports and to compete fairly and to the best of their ability. I believe that there is often too much importance placed on winning at the Olympics. As an athlete, the most important thing to do at the Games is to compete at your very best. What advice do you have for aspiring swimmers? Swimming can be a very tough sport.

You are out there in a cold pool, swimming all by yourself, while staring at the black line on the bottom. On the flip side, it is an incredible sport for your body and can be very relaxing. For an aspiring young swimmer, I think it is important to have fun! I view workouts as a chance to get better and, competitions, as a chance to be your very best, both mentally and physically. Swimming has so many great benefits. Enjoy the entire process ...from those early morning workouts to the competitions. If you stick with it, you will learn lessons that last a lifetime and you will have a lot of fun along the way! Has the sport of swimming changed since you started? Yes, in so many ways! Where do I begin? First of all, there are the swimsuits. As I previously mentioned, there are technological advancements occurring all the time. From the introduction of lane lines to swim goggles to [Speedo's] new LZR Racer swimsuit, there have always been opportunities to improve your speed in the water. I also see a lot of differences in the popularity of my sport. With the Internet, swimming fans can have access to our sport 24/7, which is great for us! Our fan base has grown because swimmers are able to share our amazing sport with growing audiences from around the world on a daily basis. What have you learned from other cultures at the Olympics? I think that the best part of competing at the Olympics is making friends from all over the world. It is amazing to go to the Games and learn about another athlete's country and culture. After all, you live with 10,000 athletes in the Olympic village, so you are bound to have lunch or dinner in the cafeteria next to someone from another country! Another amazing experience that comes with competing at the international level is being able to travel the world. The first time I left the United States, I was 14 and traveled to Moscow for a competition. It was quite an experience for me, but it opened my eyes to other cultures and traditions. ~ Please share your views on this article. Write to editorspan@ state.gov

ruce, a salty volunteer ranger with a missing finger, comes by to make sure my back country camping permits are in order. When I ask what there is to do on the beach, he glances at the pounding white waves and massive stone spirals rising out of the sea, baffled at a question about what to do in paradise, "Well," he says slowly, as if my tentmate and I are challenged in some way, "you can walk around and make friends ...or," he adds, squinting towards the south end of the beach, "there's a dead sea lion that washed up."

We ponder our options and stifle our laughter. Sitting at the northern-most tip of 100 kilometers of pristine coastline, Shi Shi (pronounced shy-shy) is a true wilderness beach. Huge driftwood logs back the 3.2-kilometer stretch; a misty emerald green spruce forest rises steeply up the banks of the headlands. For years, official access to this legendary Olympic National Park beach, a few hours from Seattle in Washington state, was possible only via a difficult, sometimes dangerous 21-kilometer trek; several hikers have died over the years. Now the beach is open via a new, heavily wooded 4.8-kilometer trail through Makah

Indian reservation land. Most visitors camp at least one night to appreciate the rhythms of the beach: rising and receding tides; morning ocean mists floating into the cedars; bright mid-day sun shining on delicate sea creatures revealed by low tide. It's possible to go swimming, but the surf can be very strong. A surfer trotting by in a slick black wet suit tells us of a campsite in the woods. But we pitch our tent on the beach. Starting a fire is easy with bone-dry driftwood. With a tent and a fire, the beach becomes more than a place to indulge in trashy bestsellers. It starts to feel like home.

On a moonless night, the beach is nearly pitch black. Fires dot the coastline, revealing the shore's gentle curve. Since the sun has set, low tide has extended the beach at least 15 meters. In the dark, it's hard to tell where land ends and ocean begins I wander in the blackness, past where the waterline had been earlier that day, moving toward the sound of the surf and feeling as if I were walking into an abyss. During low tide, the ocean pulls back to reveal slick rocks and sandy shallows teeming with life. At the south end of the beach, rows of shiny blue mussels cover huge boulders. Plump purple

starfish congregate, growing fat feeding on mussels, abalone, barnacles and snails. After hours of peering into the tide pools and exploring shallow caves (wear waterproof hiking boots or high-quality water shoes), we notice that the tide is rapidly returning. Keep track of the water level to avoid being trapped on a rock formation far out at sea. I take a last look at the bizarre twisting sea stacks, some topped with a few lonely trees, relics from when the formations were part of the headlands. I pick up an orange and pink streaked curl of a shell as a memento, but when I turn the

shell around, a shy crustacean quickly folds itself deeper into his tiny home. Gently, I place it back in the shallow waters. This beach should remain exactly as it is.

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Caroline Hsu was a reporter with U.S. News & World Report.

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Papaya Seed Help Indian Farmers? nthe face of soaring global food prices, more and more countries are looking to genetically modified, or GM, crops as the solution to feeding their people. India itself took another step forward in the cultivation of these crops in October 2007: the Missouri-based global seed giant, Monsanto, donated technology to Tamil Nadu Agricultural University, Coimbatore, for developing a papaya resistant to the ringspot virus, which causes India's farmers heavy losses.

The project's aim is to increase papaya production in India by 750 million kilograms. The new papaya, resistant to the ringspot virus, was introduced in Hawaii in the 1990s, and is now successfully cultivated there. Scientists at the Centre for Plant Molecular Biology at Tamil Nadu Agricultural University are working to develop a new papaya variety specifically to resist the virus under Indian conditions.

"Hopefully, the GM papaya will be made available to papaya farmers in about four to five years," says P. Balasubramanian, director of the center. The Government of India has approved the technology transfer. Since the early 1980s, some agricultural scientists and research institutions have seen GM plants as the answer to food shortages and malnutrition. In their view of the coming "Evergreen Revolution," high-yielding, pest-resistant plants will boost the agricultural production of devel-

! Far left: A ripe papaya G> infected with papaya ringspot ~ virus. o

Left: Davao Solo Papaya, resistant to the virus, being grown inside a confined trial screen house in the Philippines.

nder millennia-old conventional plant breeding methods, closely related plants are cross-bred to produce new varieties that are stronger or tastier or yield larger quantities. Genetic engineering provides a more precise way of obtaining the desired traits in a plant, but it goes beyond simple recombination, introducing genes from an entirely different species, usually a bacterium, yeast or virus. This alters a plant's genetic material, or DNA, in a way that is not possible in the wild or by using conventional techniques. In a successful experiment, the

desirable new trait reliably appears in the plant generation after generation. Researchers usually work on improving a plant's shelf-life, salt tolerance, drought resistance, nutrient content, pest resistance or disease resistance. To protect a papaya, a gene coding for the coat protein (the outer layer) of papaya ringspot virus is fired into the papaya's own DNA. The virus may attack the plant but cannot multiply further because its own coat protein gene is locked up by the gene introduced in the plant. The plant is thus resistant to the virus.

Dr. Rajinimala (left), Nafisa Banu and Dr. K. Angappan at Tamil Nadu Agricultural University.

oping countries. What Monsanto donated is a lO-year, "royalty-free, non-exclusive license to use the technology to develop, identify, characterize and commercialize" the virus-resistant papaya in India, according to Bhagirath Choudhary, national coordinator of the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA). It is a . U.S.-based nonprofit organization that helps transfer biotechnologies to developing countries so poor farmers can produce more crops. ISAAA's work is funded by charitable institu-

tions and government agencies, with technology and training donated by corporations. According to Choudhary, "This is an important contribution toward alleviation of povetty of small, resource-poor farmers, as papaya ringspot virus is the most devastating disease of papaya." Clive James, a Canadian who chairs the ISAAA Board of Directors and has visited India twice in the past year to promote the development and use of biotechnology, goes even further when describing the benefits. "Our philosophy is that the aim should be to increase

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Biotech Crops AroBnd the World ccording to ISAAA, India is one of 23 countries growing GM crops. In fact, the number of developing countries planting GM crops (12) is slightly higher than the number of industrialized countries planting them (11). Twelve million farmers grow GM crops on 114 million hectares worldwide. Eleven million of those farmers are resource-poor. The United States is the top grower of GM crops, with 23.32 million hectares of GM soybeans and 26.96 million hectares of GM corn, or 73 percent of all U.S. corn grown. Hawaii has long served as the world's largest outdoor biotechnology laboratory, and farmers like Albert Kung (above) are growing genetically modified papayas. At Kamiya Farm in Laie, Hawaii, Kung checks the leaves on a genetically engineered papaya tree.

GLOBAL AREA OF BIOTECH CROPS Million Hectares (1996-2007)

Some 2.5 billion kilograms of papaya are produced annually in India, in Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Bihar, Oujarat, Karnataka, Maharashtra, Manipur, Meghalaya, Orissa, Tamil Nadu, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. It is eaten fresh and cooked and processed into pickles, jams, candies, fruit drinks and juices. Papain, an enzyme purified from papaya latex, is extracted for export. The enzyme is used in the medicine and textile industries, breweries, leather processing and meat tenderizing. In light of the significance of papaya to the Indian economy, the introduction of a OM variety is likely to have a huge impact. Choudhary estimates that the technology promises a potential benefit of Rs. 112.5 million for India's papaya industry. What are the conditions of the Monsanto donation? According to ISAAA's James, it is true that corporations donate a new technology or product to potential customers to build a market, but that is not the case here. The lO-year, royalty-free period for Tamil Nadu Agricultural University "is just a ~ project timeframe. The donation will cone;. tinue. Monsanto will not come back and ~ say, 'You owe us some royalties now that 8 the 10 years is over.'" James feels that fears about allergic reactions from OM foods can be addressed. He cites a case, often pointed. out by opponents of OM foods as an example of what can go wrong with biotechnology, in which a gene from Brazil nut inserted in a variety of corn was found to cause an allergic reaction. James

for more information: Monsanto in India http://www.monsantoindia.com/ ISAAA http://www. isaaa.org/ 1996

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says the case actually shows that the system works, that a gene found to cause an allergy can be identified and removed. While hopes are high that the new papaya will solve one problem related to papaya cultivation, it's important to point out that OM seeds aren't meant to solve all the problems a farmer faces. Plants designed to resist one pest may still be damaged by others. Insects and viruses can evolve to overcome the resistance engineered into the plant. In such cases, farmers growing OM crops still need to spray pesticides. Laws and regulatory committees in India are still grappling with advances in genetic engineering. The Indian Council of Medical Research recently drafted guidelines on the nutritional and safety assessment of OM foods (www. icmr.nic.in). The draft guidelines specify how OM foods should be tested and emphasize that they must be shown to be as non-toxic and non-allergenic as their traditional counterparts, and nutritionally superior to their non-OM equivalents if they are to be approved for commercial production in India. James suggests that the involvement of private companies, philanthropic organizations and government agencies

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n agricultural biotechnology conference' co-sponsored by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, was held in New Delhi in March 2008, bringing together eminent Indian and American scientists and researchers in the field of agricultural biotechnology. The conference on "Harnessing the Benefits of Biotechnology" provided a platform for experts from both countries to discuss their strategies for increased research collaboration and public-private partnerships that will result in the improvement of agricultural crops to benefit farmers and

consumers. Many Indian and American institutions participated in the workshop, including the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, the National Research Centre on Plant Biotechnology, the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, Punjab Agricultural University, the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Washington University and the University of Missouri. For more information: http://www.icar.org.in/ http://www. usda.gov/wps/portal/usdahome

working together to improve crop yields can enhance sustainability. "I think in many developing countries there is often the view that the private sector is a neg-

ative force, rather than a positive one," says James. He argues that government monopolies are no different than corporate ones, and are sometimes worse. "So a better working relationship between the two is ... get the best of the private Sekhar Natarajan, chairman of Monsanto sector, best of the public sector together India (left); Clive James, chairman and founder of ISAAA, and P Balasubramanian, and build new programs where they have director of the Centre for Plant Molecular roles that reflect their comparati ve Biology at Tamil Nadu Agricultural , advantages," This is ISAAA's role, he University, celebrate the virus-resistant says. "The best contribution that they papaya technology transfer in October 2007. [the private sector] can make is technolc ogy, which has cost millions to develop, ~ that can be used for the alleviation of E E poverty and hunger." j Meanwhile, papaya continues to rank ~ high in research objectives. Choudhary ~ says, "Papaya technology is listed as a pri8 ority technology under the Agricultural Knowledge Initiative between the United States and India. The ISAAA is already implementing the rings pot virus-resistant papaya technology donated by Monsanto and improving the shelf life of papaya using a delayed ripening technology donated by Syngenta through the Papaya Biotechnology Network of Southeast Asia." Because of the economic significance of the crop in India, the development of OM papaya is sure to be closely watched

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Please share your views on this article. Write to editorspan@state.gov

=Book R

he Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink, edited by Andrew Smith, comes with an impressive pedigree, being one of several volumes spawned by the late, great Alan Davidson's million-word, bet-settlingly definitive Oxford Companion to Food. So it was with high hopes that I began reading Smith's book, hoping he'd offer a similarly decisive look at American cuisine. Thumbing though the 650-page tome looking for the food tie that binds, I became increasingly convinced that, apart from the obvious regionalism of cuisines that span the United States, the common thread of immigration defines American food. Not SpaghettiOs and chop suey, but the tens of hyphenated cuisines-Italian American, German American-lovingly preserved by immigrants and handed down through generations. The other candidates Smith posits as defining American food-dishes connected with national holidays, such as turkey and apple pie, or fast food, like hamburgers and hot dogs-are too simple and restricted to serve as the core of the national diet. What needs explaining is not Thanksgiving dinner or the Big Mac, but the universal availability of bagels, beer and sushi. And there's no way of understanding America's appetite for pizza and fried chicken unless we look at the hegemony of hyphenated cuisines. Smith realizes the importance of these hybrid foodways, for they are featured in his encyclopedic work, and some boast substantial entries. But while each possesses a good, if necessarily brief, outline of the history of the immigrant group concerned, the book never substantively grapples with the big questions: What, broadly, defines American food and drink, and what is the essential role of immigration in the making of this American cuisine?

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The Italian American pizza (top) and the Jewish American potato knish (above),

AMERICAN FOOD AND DRINK

Successive waves of immigrants have brought their own ingredients to America, each creating a unique place in U.S. culinary history. America's roots in hyphenated cuisine stem from the greatest process in food history-the Columbian Exchange, or the ongoing transfer of goods between Old World and New World that began with Columbus' fIrst voyage, when Europeans brought over goods like wheat, cucumbers, cattle, horses and wine grapes, and took back with them American plants like tomatoes, potatoes and maize. (A Columbian Exchange entry is conspicuously absent from Smith's book, though there is a twopage table explicating it under "Native American Foods.") Successive waves of immigrants generally brought their own ingredients with them, though they sometimes employed tricks to recreate their native food from American foodstuffs. Most immigrants settled in cities, clustering in neighborhoods with others who shared their ethnic background. This made provisioning easier, and it perpetuated the taste of the young for their parents' food, while limiting their exposure to outside food. Because about 1 million people immigrated to America yearly from 1905 until 1914, immigration retained its cultural significance in the United States until the start of World War I. And the steady influx of Jewish Japanese sushi has become very popular _ in the United States. Sushi is cold, cooked rice, dressed with vinegar, and shaped into bite-sized pieces with a garnishing of raw or cooked fish. It can also be made into a roll with fish, egg or vegetables and wrapped in seaweed.

Americans, Italian Americans, and German Americans, in particular, reinforced their importance in the United States' culinary history. Joan Nathan's Jewish American food entry succeeds because it's unified by the concept of kashrut, or Jewish dietary laws, and how American immigrants accepted and then rejected them. Nathan starts by informing the reader that in the half century between 1830 and 1880, the most important center of American-GermanJewish "commerce, culture and cuisine" was Cincinnati, Ohio, the American birthplace of the kashrut-disdaining Reform movement. Baking was the most pJized kitchen skill of its huge German Jewish population, so, she remarks, "[S]urely it was no coincidence that Cincinnati

became the home of Fleischmann's [brand] yeast and Crisco, a vegetable-based [and thus kosher] shOltening." The entry also benefits from Nathan's own curiosity about her subject. In her discussion of crossover foods, for example, we learn how the unlikely knish, [a fried or baked roll with fIlling] has "gone mainstream." Of course, Nathan has it easy in that the consolidating theme of kashrut makes it unnecessary to define "Jewish food." Mark H. Zanger has a harder task with his Italian American food entry, but it is too brief to deal adequately with the

Different types of hot dogs served at the home ballparks of five Major League baseball teams. Eating a hot dog, which resembles many German foods, was once seen as an act of cultural assimilation in America.

United States' most popular cuisine, particularly one that possesses such a complicated history and evolution. Those who made and ate this cuisine were the latest immigrants to arrive in the United States, and many of them didn't identify themselves as Italian, or with what we've come to know as "Italian" food, since, as Zanger points out, Southern Italy and Sicily weren't part of the Kingdom of Italy until 1861. The one-line mention of arugula speaks well to this entry's shortcomings: "arugula-a weed in Italy-only became part of the American gourmet vocabulary in the 1990s." Where is the explanation of how it came to be called arugula, instead of rocket, or one of its cognate Italian names, like ruchetta? And where is Zanger's curiosity about why this peppery leaf has become the symbol of foodie America? Because this book has no headword such as gourmet or foodie, there is nowhere else obvious to look for this discussion, leaving a reader (forgive me) hungry to learn more about how this lowbrow cuisine of spaghetti and meatballs became both popular and cutting-edge. "German American Food," also by Zanger, is a bit more comprehensive, as

For more loformaUoo: American food http://www.sallys-place.com/food/cuisines/us.htm Pizza in America ttp:7/www.amerlcanfieritage.coWartlc es/magaZinelafij 2006/2/2006.130.shtml

befits "the largest American ethnic group." As Zanger acknowledges, we owe much of what we consume to Germanspeaking immigrants, from cream soups to potato salad to cakes and cookies to beer. Zanger gives us a splendid summing-up of the history of Germanophone

"At $12.95, what does the lasagna come out to be per calorie?"

immigration, with a healthy emphasis on the Pennsylvania Dutch. But the various national and regional origins of these people are probably more important than their shared language, as we try to understand the differences of their foodways and their resulting influence on our contemporary cuisine. If we had only this entry to go on, I think we'd conclude that the contribution of German Americans to the national diet was not very important. The ubiquity

of synthetic vanilla in American baked goods is, I'm sure, a bad habit of German origin. The Oxford Companion to American Food and Drink isn't altogether unworthy of the brand name that it carries. It has the large (if nonessential) virtue of an encyclopedia-it's amusing to dip into at random. To take one pertinent example, in one of the crucial (and most elegantly written) entries, "Hot Dogs," Bruce Kraig explains how, although this smoked, cooked sausage on a bun resembles many German foods, it is in fact "America's great democratic food." Its iconic status made eating a hot dog, usually in public and especially in the period between the wars, an act of cultural assimilation. And, if you need to mug up on why the North American Free Trade Agreement is important for food, Robert R. Brower tells you what you need to know in six paragraphs. However, it doesn't quite function as a quick reference book. For instance, the selection of biographies is startlingly eccentric-little-known chef Louis Szathmary is given the same treatment as celebrated food writer Craig Claiborne. And the cross-referencing is hopeless, though there is a decent index. The real failure, though, is conceptual. Here we have an encyclopedia of.. .what? Of course, it's difficult to define something as broad as. American food and drink. But being more rigorous and systematic in the treatment of hyphenated cuisines would offer some cohesion to the whole project. And shouldn't a book like this cause the reader to think, "Now I understand what makes American food and drink American?" When I finally closed it, my first thought was, "I hope they do a sec_o_n_d_e_d_it_io_n_,_an_d_v_e_r_y_s_o_o_n_.'_' ---~ Paul Levy writes on the arts for the Wall Street Journal Europe, co-chairs the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, and edited The Penguin Book of Food and Drink.

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Repairing Wounded Warriors he U,S. Department of Defense has launched a five-year, Army-led effort to use cutting-edge medical technology to assist service members who have suffered severe, disfiguring wounds during wartime. Established in April, the Armed Forces Institute of Regenerative Medicine will serve as the U.S, military's operational agency for the effort, says Dr. S. Ward Casscells, the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs. A key component of the initiative is to harness stem cell research and technology in finding innovative ways to use a patient's natural cellular structure to reconstruct new skin, muscles and tendons, even ears, noses and fingers, Casscells says. More than 900 U.S armed forces members have undergone amputations of some kind due to injuries suffered in wartime service in Afghanistan or Iraq, Casscells says. Other troops have been badly burned or suffered spinal cord injuries or significant vision loss, "Getting these people up to where they are functioning and reintegrated, employed, able to help their families and be fully participating members of society" is the task in which the institute will playa major role, says Casscells,

For more information: Regenerative medicine http://www.defenselink.mil!news/newsarti aspx?id=49610/ Stem cell basics http://stemce lis. n ih.gov/i nfo/basics/

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"The cells that we're talking about actually exist in our bodies today," says Lt, Gen. Eric B. Schoomaker, the Army's surgeon general. "We, even as adults, possess in our bodies small quantities of cells which have the potential, under the right kind of stimulation, to become anyone of a number of different kinds of cells,"

Salamanders can regrow lost tails or limbs. Why can't a mammal do the same thing? For example, Schoomaker says, the human body routinely regenerates bone marrow or liver cells. The institute will have an overall budget of about $250 million for the initial five-year period, of which about $85 million will be provided by the Defense Department, Schoo maker says. Other program funding will be provided by the National Institutes of Health, in Bethesda, Maryland; the Department of Veterans Affairs, and local public and private matching funding, Rutgers University, in New Jersey; Wake Forest University, in North Carolina; and the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania will also participate in the initiative.

"All the parts of your body, tissues and organs, have a natural repository of cells that are ready to replicate when an injury occurs," says Dr. Anthony Alala, a surgeon and director of the Institute for Regenerative Medicine at Wake Forest. Atala's current research focuses on growing human cells and tissue. Medical technicians can now select cells from human donors and, through a series of scientific processes, "regrow" new tissue, Atala says. "Then, you can plant that (regenerated tissue) back into the same patient, thus avoiding rejection," Special techniques are being developed to employ regrown tissue in the fabrication of new muscles and tendons, Alala says, or for the repair and replacement of damaged or missing extremities such as noses, ears and fingers Continued advancement in regenerative medicine would greatly benefit service members and veterans who've been severely scarred by war, Schoo maker says He cites animals like salamanders that can regrow lost tails or limbs. "Why can't a mammal do the same thing?" he asks. The institute will fall under the auspices of the U,S. Army Medical Research and Material Command, based at Fort Detrick, Maryland, and will also work with the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research in San Antonio, Texas. ~ Gerry J. Gilmore is a writer with the American Forces Press Service.

Exploring

alk U.S.-India space links and the first images that come to mind are of Sunita Williams' record breaking voyage on the International Space Station and Kalpana Chawla's tragic flight on the space shuttle Columbia. It is because of people like Chawla and Williams, both NASA astronauts of Indian origin, that space has captured the popular imagination in India. The current buzz, however, is about India's first unmanned moon mission. The Chandrayaan-l, carried into space by the Indian Space Research Organisation's (ISRO) Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle, is

Far right: An enhanced false color scheme shows the diversity of materials across the moon's surface in this composite image. Right: R.K. Murali of ISRO (second from left), and Chandrayaan-l Project Director M. Annadurai, (third from left) with the Moon Mineralogy Mapper team at a design review at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Carle M. Pieters, the team's principal, investigator, is holding the Indian flag.

to orbit the moon and collect data for at least two years. Chandrayaan-l will use 11 scientific instruments-including two from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)-to prepare a three-dimensional atlas of the near and far side of the moon. It will also conduct chemical and mineralogical mapping of the entire lunar surface. This information could help answer questions about "the origin and evolution of the solar system in general and that of the moon in particular," according to the ISRO's moon mission Web site. Future astronauts may use this data map to find

ice and other resources to support hu exploration on the moon's surface. "Both India and the U.S. share impor~ tant goals and interests in lunar exploration and the experience of Chandrayaan has created the working relationships that are the seeds of future cooperation," says Stewart Nozette, principal investigator and chief scientist of the program to develop the Miniature Synthetic Aperture Radar, one of the NASA payloads for the Chandrayaan-l mission. "An analogy is the Apollo Soyuz mission in 1975. It opened the door to U.S.Russian cooperation on the space station

Left: ISRO technicians place the Moon Mineralogy Mapper electronics on a Chandrayaan-l panel. Below: The Chandrayaan-l structure. Bottom: The ground station at the Applied Physics Laboratory of Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, Maryland, which will track Chandrayaan-l when it is out of view of ISRO in Bangalore.

by creating a cadre of people who had experience and relationships, and future cooperation was built upon this base," adds Nozette, who is also president of the nonprofit Alliance for Competitive Technology and a visiting scientist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Texas. In addition to the miniature radar, NASA plans to send a Moon Mineralogy Mapper aboard Chandrayaan-l. Built by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Califomia, and Brown University in Rhode Island, the moon mapper will provide the fIrst map of the entire lunar surface at high resolution. This "allows us to understand the geologic history of different features and regions on the moon. It is also valuable information for identifying regions of possible resources," says Carle M. Pieters, professor at Brown University's department of cL<C geological sciences. Pieters is i also principal investigator of ~ the team that made the moon mapper. ~ The mini radar is aimed at finding water ice up to a depth of a few meters in the permanently shadowed regions of the moon's poles. It was developed by the Applied Physics Laboratory of the Maryland-based Johns Hopkins University and the U.S. Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California. Nozette, who was deputy project manager and chief scientist of the Clementine moon mission of the 1990s, says the ISRO team incorporated many of the lessons learned in the design and execution of Clementine in the design of the Chandrayaan-l mission. "Clementine was the first mISSIOn to ... explore the polar environments in detail. It provided the scientific basis for further exploration, and Chandrayaan-l is doing an excellent job at addressing a number of the questions which arose following analyses of Clementine;so data," says Nozette. . The agreement to carry these instruments . aboard Chandrayaan-l was signed by NASA Administrator Michael Griffin and ISRO Chairman G. Madhavan Nair in Bangalore in May 2006. " ... During the

Apollo 15 mISSIOn... among the special items our astronauts carried with them was the national flag of India .... The Indian people deserve to be tremendously proud that the next time the Indian flag travels to the moon it will be placed on a very impressive spacecraft, Chandrayaan-l," Griffin said. A U.S. connection can be traced to the very beginning of the Indian space program, when India's fIrst sounding rocket, an American Nike-Apache, was launched in

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(From left) Former U.S. Commerce Undersecretary Kenneth Juster, ISRO Chairman G. Madhavan Nair and U.S. Ambassador David C. Mulford at the 2004 U.S.-India Conference on Space Science, Applications and Commerce in Bangalore. November 1963, from Thumbain Kerala. A sounding rocket is designed to probe atmospheric conditions. "One has to recognize that with the exception of the fIrst Indian in space, most of India's 'firsts' in space enjoyed a contribution from the U.S.," says Supriya Chakrabarti, director of the Center for Space Physics at Boston University. "Indeed, of the 190 suborbital flights conducted from Thumba listed in the Encyclopedia Astronautica, [almost] half used U.S. launchers. I think that this is how India's future space scientists, technologists and engineers cut their teeth," Chakrabarti adds. In the mid-l 970s, India conducted one of the largest sociological innovations of the time, the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment. NASA allowed use of one of its Application Technology Satellites over the Indian Ocean for a year. This enabled

direct broadcast of educational programs on agriculture, family planning, health and hygiene to about 2,400 villages in six Indian states where TV sets with dish antennas were distributed. "This, in my mind, was the spark of a revolution in Indian satellite and telecommunication technologies," says Chakrabarti, who experienced the excitement generated by the experiment as an undergraduate student in Kolkata. This experiment was the precursor to the multipurpose INSAT (Indian National Satellite) system of the 1980s, which enabled rapid expansion of India's television, radio, telecommunications and meteorological sectors. India procured all four satellites of the INSAT1 series from the Californiabased Ford Aerospace Corporation and three of them were put into orbit by U.S. launch vehicles. ISRO started building its own satellites from the INSAT-2 series onwards. In the 1970s, India set up a station to receive data from NASA's ~arth Resources Technology Satellite, which was later renamed Landsat. Several joint experimental projects were undertaken using Landsat data and these led to the development of the Indian Remote Sensing Satellite (IRS) System. U.S.-India cooperation continued in the 1980s with Anuradha, an Indian cosmic ray experiment, conducted aboard Spacelab-3. A series of agreements since the late 1990s carried forward the relationship. In 1997, India's Departments of Space and Science and Technology signed

Formore iolormatioo: Indian Space Research Organisation Ihttp:7/www.isro.org/ NASA Ihttp://www.nasa.gov/ Chandrayaan-1 Ihttp://www.isro.org/chandrayaan/htmls/home.htm Clementine moon mission f http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/clementlne.fitml Flights from Thumba fhttp://astronautix.com/sites/thumba.htm

a memorandum of understanding with NASA and the Washington, D.C.-based National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for joint research in earth and atmospheric sciences. The United States also has gained from this relationship, says Boston University's Chakrabarti. "The purchases of ear'ly satellites and launch services helped the business community. The U.S. has been able to use expert Indian scientists and engineers in its space programs. Their counterparts, who

returned to India, eased the participation of U.S. scientists in Indian programs," he says. In 2001, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee and President George W. Bush agreed that their governments would discuss ways to stimulate civil space cooperation. An important follow-up to this was the U.S.-India Conference on Space Science, Applications and Commerce in Bangalore in 2004. "Both countries have a strong commitment to using space for peaceful purposes,

not just for the benefit of their own citizens but for the benefit of all humankind. Both countries have a growing interest in commercializing their national space activities. Out of these shared interests can come significantly expanded cooperation," Lee Morin, a NASA astronaut and then U.S. deputy assistant secretary for health, space and science, said at the conference. It brought together 550 delegates, including about 150 from the United States. A space exhibition was also organ-

Right: An ISRO technician stands next to a working model of a TV set, designed with NASA's helpJor use in the Satellite Instructional Television Experiment. Far right: The NASA satellite used for the television experiment. Below: The Indian National Satellite UNSAT) is about to clear the space shuttle Challenger. ized where 16 American and 21 Indian agencies showcased their space technologies, products and services. For space enthusiasts, a space mission is the ultimate dream, and two astronauts of Indian origin realized it. Haryana-born Kalpana Chawla's first spaceflight was on the Columbia shuttle in 1997. She returned to space again on Columbia in January 2003. But she and her six crewmates perished on February 1 as their craft was reentering Earth's atmosphere. As flight engineer aboard the International Space Station in 2007, Sunita Williams set an endurance record of 195 days for the longest single spaceflight by a woman. "I am half Indian and I've got, I'm sure, a group of Indian people who. are looking forward to seeing this second person of Indian origin flying up in space," she said in a pre-flight interview. On her visit to India last fall, Williams, whose father was born in Gujarat, was greeted like a rock star. She engaged audiences with her simple message that some- . times what seems like failure is actually , an opportunity. In 2004, Bush and Vajpayee announced the Next Steps in Strategic Partnership, which proposed, among other things, greater engagement on civilian space programs. Bush and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh expanded these commit-

Above: Kalpana Chawla records data for an experiment being conducted aboard the space shuttle Columbia. Above right: Sunita Williams at work as the expedition flight engineer in the laboratory of the International Space Station in December 2006. ments in 2005, pledging to build closer ties in space exploration, satellite navigation and launch, and in the commercial space arena through mechanisms such as the U.S.-India Joint Working Group on Civil Space Cooperation. Comprising representatives of government, academic institutions and industries, this group met for the first time in Bangalore in 2005 and in Washington, D.C. last year. "The placing of two NASA instruments ... on Chandrayaan-i was helped by negotiation and dialogue that took place in the working group," says Nikhil Khanna, director for aerospace and defense at the U.S.-India Business Council. The United States and India are working together "on a range of space issues, including the possible deployment on Indian territory of a ground receiving station for data from the U.S. National PolarOrbiting Operational Environmental - Satellite System," says Khanna. "Indian officials are also enlisting U.S. help for satellite-derived products for monitoring floods and wildfires. Cooperation on nat-

ural disaster management and modeling for weather patterns is underway." NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also collaborate with India on aerosol monitoring. Aerosols are tiny paIticles suspended in air, occurring naturally or from human activities like burning of fossil fuels. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration signed an MoU with the Indian Ministry of EaIth Sciences in April for cooperation in EaIth observations. Several U.S. agencies are working with India to develop and operate a Global EaIth Observation System of Systems. It would help mitigate the impact of tsunamis and other disasters, forecast weather months in advance, and more effectively predict climate change, drought and malaria outbreaks. India paIticipates in the international GLOBE (Global Learning and Observations to Benefit the Environment) program of science education, supported by NASA, the Virginia-based National Science Foundation and the U.S. State DepaItment. India and the United States also collab-

orate on programs like the International Charter for Space and Major Disasters. The charter is a joint effort to put space technologies at the disposal of rescue authorities in the case of natural disasters or technological ones like oil spills and industrial accidents. . In February 2008, NASA and ISRO signed a framework agreement, replacing the one signed in 1997, to continue to work together in all avenues of space exploration, including manned spaceflight. One reason why India and the United States will find it useful to work together in space is the superb Indian technical community, says NASA Administrator Griffin. "You have in India wonderful technical schools-scientific, mathematics, engineering; a population that values education in terms of a way to get ahead in life, to improve oneself," he said in an india Abroad interview in April. "I would like to see India, in future years, join us to return people to the moon, among them Indian astronauts-that's what I would like to see. As we are returning to the moon, we will be, I hope, going there in company with the international partners that helped build the space station. I would like to _a_dd_._. _.In_di_路_a_to_th_a_t p_aIt_n_e_rs_hi_路 __ p_.'_' ~ Please share your views on this article. Write to editorspan@state.gov

is planned for 2015]. If the craft proves as capable and cost-effective as Griffin promises, the space agency will outfit it for a 386,242-kilometer flight to the moon. The exploration vehicle is a modular system, so engineers can eventually add expanded lifesupport and crew-living modules for the long trip to Mars-more than 56 million kilometers-sometime after 2020. How does Griffin plan to accomplish all this? With a wildly tame approach: Don't innovate. The Orion revolution is to have no revolution, play it safe, stick to what you know. It will be an amalgam of Apollo's shape, the space shuttle's rockets, and a host of newer components built for unmanned satellites. This is a marked departure for NASA. The shuttle and Apollo were intensely innoyative programs, but the Orion is purposely not, because innovation in spaceflight is the

primary driver of risk and expense. NASA specs out the exploration vehicle at $104 billion over 13 years-or 55 percent of Apollo's cost, adjusted for inflation-and pegs its reliability at a one in 2,000 chance of failure, 10 times as safe as the shuttle. Like a responsible dad, Griffin is buying the [mid-sized family sedan] instead of going for the Porsche. Still, it's a pretty cool [sedan]. This one flies to the moon.

Echoes of 11110110 When our four lunar astronauts launch, ...their command module will be a capsule that old-timers could well confuse with Apollo. "Much of it looks the same," Griffin says, "but that's because the physics of atmospheric entry haven't changed." In an extensive study, NASA looked at all spacecraft designs known to engineering and, Griffin said, "proved

once again how much of it all the Apollo guys got right." The astronauts will find their capsule much roomier than Apollo, and they will have had a major hand in designing the interior. A team of astronauts, scientists and engineers is already experimenting with a rudimentary mock-up of the crew capsule, deciding where to put the doors and windows, the seats and consoles. Just under the conical crew capsule on the launch stack will be the Orion service module, a cylindrical fairing that houses rocket engines and power systems. [A fairing is a wind deflecting structure on the exterior of an aircraft.] NASA wants the service module's rockets to be powered by liquid oxygen and liquid methane, or "lox-methane," because both of these ingredients could

theoretically be extracted from the soil on Mars-allowing astronauts to fly there without having to carry fuel for their return trip. Lifting the crew and service modules into space will be the crew-launch vehicle, a two-stage rocket. The first stage is a

built and is already approved for human transport. Like the shuttle's main engines, the second stage of the crew's launch rocket burns a combination of liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen. Because the Orion and its crew ride on top of the rocket rather than strapped to its

The exploration vehicle lacks the thousands of tiles that protect the shuttle from heat. Rather, its heat shield is tucked inside the service module until reentry, so it isn't exposed to micrometeorite damage while in space. After friction slows the descending spacecraft, the

solid rocket booster borrowed from the space shuttle, which gets its initial lift from a pair of such boosters strapped to each side of its massive, orange, fuel tank. The solid rocket booster is one of the most reliable pieces of space machinery ever

side like the shuttle orbiter, they can't get hit by falling debris. That's one of two reasons NASA expects the vehicle to be so safe. The other reason is the launchabort system, a rocket attached to the nose of the Orion that will fire if the solid booster explodes on liftoff-pulling the exploration vehicle away from the exploding rocket so that it can safely parachute into the ocean. Once in space, the Orion is not a satellite-launching, station-building truck like the shuttle. It is simply a taxi that goes from point A to point B-but a very capable taxi. "It's overqualified for the International Space Station, but it can certainly go there," said Brian Anderson, the crew exploration vehicle's former project manager at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas. It can carry six astronauts or deliver cargo to the station robotically.

vehicle's capsule will fire its parachutes for the final approach ....

Formore inlormalion: Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages! conste Ilation/ ori on/i ndex.htm I How We'll Go Back-and

Stay This Time

http://www.popularmechanics.com/sci air_space/4212906.html

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.Apollo 11 video http://www ,hq. nasa.gov/offi ce/pao/History/ ap11 ann/apolloMusicComp.MOV

The moon, then Mars A trip to the moon will require additional hardware. A few days before the crewlaunch vehicle releases the Orion; a much larger, heavy-lift launch vehicle, also derived from the shuttle, will pre-position a lunar lander and Earth departure stage rocket in low Earth orbit. The Orion will maneuver to dock with these two modules, and then the conjoined spacecraft will use the Earth departure stage's rocket to fly to lunar orbit. All four crew members will then board the lunar lander, detach from the Orion, and descend to the moon's surface. [There is fundamental science to be performed once on the moon. NASA says astronauts will learn more about the art of

exploring the moon. They will learn how to "live off the land" by making oxygen and rocket propellants from local materials. They will also be testing new technologies that will allow astronauts to travel on to Mars and beyond.] Former NASA historian Roger Launius, now at the Smithsonian Institution, envisions outposts similar to Antarctic research stations. Whereas stations at Earth's windy South Pole are concrete, those on the windless moon could be built with inflatable materials and powered by nuclear generators. The Orion "allows us, but does not require us, to establish a permanent human presence on the moon," Griffin says. He clearly wants to [build in] flexibility for the next guy: If the moon is interesting to the NASA administrator in 2020, Orion will allow him to build a base. If he's itching to get on to Mars, it could fit the bill. Of course, there's a lot of engineering that will be required before a Mars shot can happen, especially in the areas of life support and radiation protection. A trip to Mars isn't likely until well past 2020, and at that point the Orion will already be more than 10 years old. But NASA and its aerospace contractors say the vehicle won't suffer the problems of obsolescence that have plagued the shuttle. The Orion is more a set of technical designs than an actual fleet. That makes it easier for later iterations of the vehicle to incorporate updated technology. Some enthusiasts would prefer to skip the moon and go straight to Mars. Others ache

to push the limits of technology and invent something new. But it's hard to argue with reliability, and many long-suffering space buffs have conceded that Griffin's [moderate] approach is the best way to get off the ground on NASA's fixed income. That doesn't mean it'll be easy to get out of the garage. The transition from the shuttle to the Orion is fraught with budgetary difficulties. NASA intends to retire the shuttle in 201O...before the first orbital Orion mission-a gap that could result in many lost jobs at the space agency. But the shuttle is a voracious consumer of NASA's budget, and every dollar spent on the shuttle is a dollar not spent on the Orion. Already, the U.S. Congress sees a $5 billion shortfall in NASA's proposed budget for human spaceflight programs over the next [few] years. Unless the White House and Congress pony up more money, that shortfall will mean a delay of several years in the rollout of the exploration vehicle. Even if the Orion does launch on schedule, NASA does not yet have money budgeted for moon missions. Still, the program is under way. The plans are the most realistic the space agency has ever had for human exploration. Whether our four astronauts get to the moon in 2017 or 2020 is, in the end, a small matter.

-------*-*-*-*-*------~ William Speed Weed is a Popular Science contributing editor.

hen Neil Armstrong took "one giant leap for mankind" onto the sUlface of the moon in 1969, his booted foot sank into a layer of fine gray dust, leaving an imprint that would become the subject of one of the most famous photographs in history. Scientists called the dust lunar regolith, from the Greek rhegos for blanket and lithos for stone. Back then, scientists regarded the regolith as simply part of the landscape, little more than the backdrop for the planting of the American flag. No more. Lunar scientists have learned a lot about the moon since then. They've found that one of the biggest challenges to lunar settlement-as vexing as new rocketry or radiation-is how to live with regolith that covers virtually the entire lunar surface from a depth of two meters to perhaps 30.meters or more. It includes everythjng from liuge boulders to particles only a few

nanometers in diameter, but most of it is a puree created by uncountable high-speed micrometeorites that have been crashing into the moon unimpeded by atmosphere for more than 3 bi1ljon years. A handful of regolith consists of bits of stone, minerals, particles of glass created by the heat from the tiny impacts, and accretions of glass, minerals and stone welded together. Eons of melting, cooling and agglomerating have transformed the glass pmticles in the regolith into a jagged edged, abrasive powder that clings to anything it touches and packs together so densely that it becomes extremely hard to work on at any depth below 10 centimeters. For those who would explore the moon-whether to train for exploring Mars, to mine resources, or to instalJ high-precision observatories-regolith is a potentially crippling liability, an allpervasive, pernicious threat to machinery and human tissue. (Continued

on page 32)

After just three days of moon walks, regolith threatened to grind the joints of the Apollo astronauts' spacesuits to a halt, the same way rust crippled Dorothy's Tin Man [in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz]. Special sample cases built to hold the Apollo moon rocks lost their vacuum seals because of rims corrupted by dust. For a permanent lunar base, such mechanical failures could spell disaster. Regolith can play havoc with hydraulics, freeze on-off switches, and turn ball be31ings into Grape Nuts, [a gritty breakfast cereal]. When moondust is disturbed, small particles float about, land and glue themselves to everything. Regolith does not brush off easily, and breathing it can cause pulmonary fibrosis, the lunar equivalent of black lung. There is nothing like it on E31th. "Here you have geological processes that tend to sort and separate," says geologist Douglas Rickman of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. "On the moon you have meteorite impacts that mix everything together." But space planners also see a brighter side to the story. Forty-two percent of regolith is oxygen by weight. Extract that and it will help make breathable air, rocket fuel, and, when mixed with hydrogen,

next person to step on the moon again will be taking humanity where it has never gone before, because that person will be settling in to stay-and that will be extremely hard to do. NASA's current plans call for a series of "precursor" robotic lunar missions to test technologies and gather infonnation. [These are scheduled for launch in late 2008,] long before NASA's new Orion spaceship is ready to loft its four-astronaut crew moon ward. By the time that happens, ...planners hope to have resolved some key unknowns: whether there are ice deposits at one of the lunar poles, whether a spacesuit can be made that can survive multiple journeys across the dust-ridden landscape, and whether the human body can survive dust, lengthy stays in reduced gravity, and prolonged exposure to cosmic radiation. The first trips will be Apollo-like sorties, brief visits to test techniques and equipment and to begin building the outpost. Eventually the base will include ljving quarters, a launchpad, a storage facility for fuel and supplies, and a power plant. By 2024, NASA experts expect to have enough infrastructure to support a permanent human

Above left: Members of NASA's Desert Research and Technology Studies team-the Desert RATS-simulate collecting lunar soil during a 2005 field test in Arizona. Above: Desert RATS members Dean Eppler and Keith Splawn in Arizona take a ride in a futuristic lunar vehicle known as SCOUT (Science Crew Operations and Utility Testbed). Left: A Centaur robot (jar left), a spacesuit, a K-IO robot with threedimensional vision, the SCOUT and other interplanetary gear are tested in Arizona's high desert in 2006. water. Heat up regolith and it will harden into pavement, bricks, ceramic or even solar panels to provide electricity. Cloak a living area in a thick enough blanket of it and it will enable astronauts to live radiation-free. If regolith is the curse of lunar exploration, it may also prove to be a blessing. These issues lay dormant for three decades until January 2004, when President George W. Bush announced his Vision for Space Exploration and gave NASA a new mandate: Return humans to the moon by 2020 and eventually send them on to Mars. More details of this plan emerged in December 2006 at a meeting of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in Houston, Texas. Scientists are now thinkihlg about what is needed to make the vision a reality. Whjle there is debate about the political will to sustain lunar exploration, the technjcal hurdles are beyond dispute. The

presence with four astronauts rotating every six months, the same length of stay as on the International Space Station. Setting up a permanent outpost on the moon would, in many respects, be more daunting than putting an outpost on Mars. Like Earth, Mars has an atmosphere, weather and seasons, and its gravity is one-third of Earth's. The moon has one-sixth of Earth's gravity, no atmosphere, and a merciless and unending barrage of radiation and micrometeorites. Some scientists argue that if going to Mars is the ultimate goal, there's no point in going to the moon. But if the goal is leallling about long-term stays in space, going to the moon provides excellent instruction. Space station astronauts are in low Earth orbit, only 360 kilometers from safety. Moon astronauts will be three days from help, and Mars astronauts will, at best, be months away-virtually alone after liftoff. The explorers will not

=--==--==--=The $100 Billion Question:

ASA has been silent on the cost of a moon base, but plausible estimates surpass $100 billion. To justify that expense, the agency has generated a list of 200 reasons to return to the moon. Some are purely scientific: Radio telescopes sited on the lunar far side, for instance, would operate unimpeded by atmosphere and shielded from Earth-based radio noise. Such telescopes could also track potentially dangerous nearEarth asteroids undetectable from observatories on Earth. Other potential benefits have a more far out, commercial cast. Future astronauts might mine rare helium-3 for use in nuclear fusion reactors back home.

Wh Go Back?

Or lunar residents might host entertainment events like [micro gravity] human sports or a lunar rover race. Many reasons, however, are tautological NASA notes that the moon is a good place to test how prolonged isolation and exposure to radiation and microgravity affect the human body But why bother unless humankind plans to explore the moon and Mars in the first place? NASA Administrator Michael Griffin adds a patriotic spin: "Space will be explored and exploited by humans," he said in a 2005 speech. "The question is, which humans, from where, and what language will they speak? It is my goal that Americans will be always among them." -G.G.

only have to learn to live in reduced gravity in cramped spaces for announced in December 2006 that it would build its outpost near prolonged periods, as in the carefully calibrated indoor environment one of the lunar poles. The CUlTentfavorite spot is the edge of of the space station, but they must also work outside for extended Shackleton Crater at the moon's south pole, which is expected to periods in potentially lethal environments they cannot controL They feature "moderate" temperatures, between minus 40 degrees must make consumables like oxygen, recycle them, and recycle Celsius and 10 degrees Celsius. Shackleton also has the important waste. They must be able to maintain their equipment, knowing that advantage of being in sunlight-albeit weak sunlight-for up to 80 not only their scientific mission but their very lives may depend on percent of the year. Abundant light will be crucial for generating their repairs. And they must be able to cope with sickness, set bro- electricity. If the base were built at the lunar equator, it would be in ken bones, perform emergency appendectomies, and, in the worst darkness for half of every month. During that time, solar-collectof circumstances, watch a comrade die from injury or blood loss, ing alTays would be useless. knowing that he or she could easily have survived with timely treatAnother important attraction of the moon's poles is the possible ment at a terrestrial hospitaL presence of useful na~ural resources. Lunar orbiters in the 1990s Coping with these challenges will require an attitude adjustment detected concentrations of hydrogen, a potential resource for rockand a lot of practice, and [mistakes] are better handled closer to et fueL Currently no one knows how much there is or what form it home. Former astronaut and U.S. Senator Harrison Schmitt, [one of takes. Some scientists suspect that a comet may have sideswiped the 12 men who have walked the moon], told delegates at a NASAthe moon long ago, leaving water ice buried in permanently shadsponsored moon conference that humanity needed to "redevelop a owed craters. Identifying the source of the hydrogen is a key goal deep space operational structure and discipline." Others describe for the robotic missions that will precede the next landing by the situation more bluntly. NASA, grown skittish because of the humans. The downside of a polar landing is that the landscape there losses of space shuttles Challenger and Columbia, has become too is craggier and more forbidding than at the moon's midline, which risk-averse. makes landings more challenging. Nonetheless, NASA officials 'There are things we have to decide," says University of believe the advantages at the south pole outweigh the risks. Tennessee geochemist Lawrence Taylor, a leading moon scientist. No matter where the base is sited, astronauts on a prolonged "There's going to be a hazard, and if we think it's dangerous to go to lunar mission must contend with low gravity and radiation. the moon, what about Mars? You just can't bailout and go home." Although the muscle- and bone-weakening effects of low gravity The abrasive regolith is just one aspect of the moon's harsh enviwon't be a problem during the brief initial moon missions, shieldronment. The equator promises relatively happy landings on relaing astronauts from damaging radiation exposure will be an immetively smooth surfaces, but it also guarantees temperatures that diate concern. exceed 121 degrees Celsius during the day and plummet below One idea is to wrap the lunar habitat in an envelope filled with minus 151 degrees Celsius during the m~··~· ~._~-••••••""",,,,,,,,~~,,,,,,,,,,....~~~,,,,,,,,,...,.---....~,,,,,,,,radiation-absorbing water. Another is to night-and both day and night last 14 Earth days. The Apollo astronauts did most of what they did during the lunar equivalent of early morning and forenoon-light enough to see but not as hot. Climate is the main reason NASA

Moondust is a hazard to , , astronauts and their eqUipment, b t I 'd b 'Id' U may a so pravi e UI mg material for a lunar outpost.

rig an artificial magnetic field to deflect the worst rays. The easiest solution, however, will probably be to put the regolith to work: Simply place the habitat modules in a crater and bury them under a thick layer of moon dust. How much regolith is necessary?

Nobody knows. It is conceivable that radiation will cause chain suck up all the astronauts' free time doing maintenance." reactions below the surface of the lunar soil, producing fission prodSpace engineers are still debating whether to have astronauts don ucts from secondary reactions that are even more harmful to human overalls for dirty work or to build a "dust porch" where astronauts tissue than unshielded bombardment. Taylor suspects that it would can clean up before entering their living quarters. They are also take three meters of soil or more to insulate the astronauts. grappling with how to make a suit that will not easily cut or abrade So astronauts will have to dig into the regolith, and this will not yet will weigh no more than 91 kilograms on Earth-IS kilograms be as easy as it sounds. First there is the challenge of getting heavy on the moon. "It's fairly challenging," Ross acknowledges. equipment into space. "We can't afford to send a 90,700-kilogram Despite all its hazards, regolith may hold the answer, not just for bulldozer to the moon," says Middle Tennessee State University blocking out radiation but also for providing building material for a civii engineer Walter Wesley Boles, a longtime student of lunar con- self-sustaining outpost on the moon. The key lies in particles of struction. "And even if we did, it would perform very poorly." glass and metallic iron in the lunar soil. In the 1990s the University Engineers will have to think small. A lunar regolith mover will be of Tennessee's Lawrence Taylor showed that finer samples of "about the size of a riding lawn mower," Boles says. NASA held a regolith contain enough of this material to make it useful. "One regolith-digging contest in 2007, offering a $250,000 prize to the night I go downstairs and stick some of it [the regolith] in the team whose robot could dig the most regolith in 30 minutes-but microwave," he recalls. "I had no reason to do it. It had been tried the excavator had to weigh less than 40 kilograms. [Unfortunately, years ago and never worked. This time it just went zap!" nobody won.] Taylor found he could melt a pile of lunar soil in 10 to 20 secThen there are even more fundamental physics problems. Heavy onds. Then he focused a single magnetron on another sample: "With machinery on Earth depends on friction and gravity to provide a sta- 50 watts of energy I took a one-centimeter block of lunar soil to ble underpinning while the machine's business end cuts, pushes, 1,700 degrees Celsius in 10 seconds," he says. pulls, digs, scrapes or pounds. On the moon, inertia is the sameThis result has tremendous implications. By microwaving lunar nudge something and it will move with the same vector it has on soil, astronauts could weld, or sinter, the particles together to form Earth-but gravity is different. Jab too hard and the machine will a serviceable foundation. If they raise the temperature, the top layjump. Twist too hard and the machine tips over. ers would melt and tum into a tough glass. Not only would the One solution is to build a bin on the back of the bulldozer and fill explorers have an instant highway, they would also mitigate the it with regolith to make a counterworst of the dust clouds. Regolith does weight before serious digging begins. not blow around by itself on the moon. Another is to outfit the bulldozer with Human feet or tire treads have to stir it augers, so it can screw itself into the up, and if they are traveling on pavelunar surface. Boles suggests getting ment, the dust stops. rid of the blade altogether and mountTaylor envisions a lunar microwave machine akin to a Zamboni [resurfacing ing a brush or a construction sweeper that would use less force and skim the machine] that smooths the ice at a hockregolith one thin layer at a time. ey game. "I can sinter the soil to a foot As they excavate the moon, astrodeep with the first set of magnetrons, nauts can count on being enveloped in then have a second set that melts the top clouds of dust, especially if they use a two inches into glass," he says. sweeper. The effects of man-made Even more important, perhaps, is a regolith dust storms on tools and equipplant being built by Larry Clark of ment have been known since the backLockheed Martin that is designed to wash from Apollo 12's engines sand- The moon's Crater 308 viewed from orbit. extract oxygen from regolith. Its signifblasted the derelict -old Surveyor 3 icance is obvious to any space engispacecraft lying nearby. "They found moondust in every nook and neer. Liquid oxygen makes up 75 to 80 percent of a spacecraft's fuel cranny," says William Larson of the Kennedy Space Center, a lead mass. If there is no need to bring spare oxygen from Earth, launch scientist and program manager in NASA's efforts to develop tech- vehicles can be far lighter and cheaper to fly or can carry much more niques for using lunar resources. Every artist's rendering of an imag- payload. "NASA wants us to look at making eight metric tons of ined lunar outpost features regolith mounds that would screen vital oxygen per year," Clark says. ''That's 44 kilograms per day during equipment and habitat from rocket-induced dust clouds on the daylight. We could refuel two ascent vehicles per year." launchpad. Clark pondered factories in space 15 years ago and kept his ideas Moondust is also a major unresolved issue for NASA's next-gen- alive for years on a shoestring research budget. Things are different eration spacesuit. During the Apollo missions, three days of abbre- now. What he is doing in Lockheed's labs south of Denver, Colorado, viated moon walks was about the limit before zippers balked, joints "is not an experiment," he says. "We're taking it to the next level." stiffened, and connectors began to clog. The new astronaut explorOf the many ways to make oxygen from lunar soil, Clark has ers must have a solution that will enable them to work there. chosen hydrogen reduction. It operates at relatively cool temperaJohnson Space Center advanced spacesuit engineer Amy Ross says: tures, 704 to 815 degrees Celsius. The disadvantage is that it "We're going to have to maintain ball bearings [in the joints] and obtains oxygen almost exclusively from iron oxides, which make replace seals. We can't have zero tolerance, but we don't want to up just about 10 percent of the regolith. Other, hotter processes get

much higher yields. Still, Clark calculates that 84 square meters of regolith excavated to a depth of only five centimeters will produce 300 kilograms of oxygen, enough to sustain a four-member explorer team for 75 days. Clark's lab, with its gleaming tile floors and gentle sunlight, does not look like the moon, but his machinery is the real thing. The robot excavator is about the size of a power lawn mower, and it has steel drums with scoops mounted on them-like a steamroller with cups. When technicians punch the start button, the robot glides across the floor to a sandbox about six meters away. The drums lower and begin to rotate. The cups scoop up sand and feed it into a hopper on the back of the robot's platform. When the hopper is full, the robot trundles over to a "lunar lander" and dumps the sand into a plastic receptacle. Leave it alone and the robot will dig and dump all day. In the finished product, when the excavator has filled the reservoir next to the spacecraft, an elevator will lift the soil to the reactor, which will measure only 51 centimeters long and be shaped like a cement mixer. There the regolith will-be heated and rotated under

pressure while the hydrogen percolates through it. Above 704 degrees Celsius, the iron oxides will begin to crack, and the oxygen will combine with the hydrogen, flashing off as water vapor. If the astronauts needed water, the process would stop at that point. If not, the vapor would enter a second chamber for electrolysis. The oxygen would be siphoned off to the lunar habitat or to fuel storage tanks, while the hydrogen would return to the reactor for reuse. Clark hopes to test his system in a few years aboard an unmanned lunar precursor mission. He has made each piece of his factory work and is in the process of integrating the parts into a seamless wholea bona fide oxygen plant that could largely free future moon explorers from their ties to supply ships from Earth. "Every year the mission planners come around and say, 'It's real nice, but [the entire process] has never been done before,''' Clark says. "The next time yh_e_r_e_it_i_s._' _I_w_a_n_t _to_b_e_a_b_l_e_to_sa_ _,w,_e_lI_, _, _" ~ Guy Gugliotta covered space and science for The Washington Post and is co-author with Jeff Leen of Kings of Cocaine.

The first article on the subject, "High Altitude Flight and National Sovereignty," was written by he moon has been in plain view for all of Princeton University legal scholar John Cobb human history, but it's only within the Cooper in 1951. Various theoretical discussions past few decades that it's been possible followed, with some scholars arguing that the to travel there. And for just about as long moon had to be treated differently than earthbound as the moon has been within reach, peo- properties and others claiming that property laws ple have been arguing about lunar property rights: in space shouldn't differ from those on Earth. Can astronauts claim the moon for king and counWith the space race in full flower, though, the try, as in the Age of Discovery? Are corporations real worry was national sovereignty. Both the United allowed to expropriate its natural resources, and States and the Soviet Union wanted to reach the moon first but, in fact, each was more worried about individuals to own its real estate?

what would happen if they arrived second. Fears that the competition might trigger World War III led to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty,which was eventually ratified by 62 countries. According to Article II of the treaty, "Outer Space, including the moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means." So national appropriation was out, along with fortifications, weapons and military installations. But what about private property rights, personal and corporate? Some scholars argue that property

rights can exist only under a nation's dominion, but most believe that property rights and sovereignty can be distinct. In something of an admission that this is the case, nations that thought the Outer Space Treaty didn't go far enough proposed a new agreement, the Moon Treaty,in 1979. It explicitly barred private property rights on the moon, It also provided that any development, extraction and management of resources would take place under the supervision of an international authority that would divert a share of the profits, if any, to developing countries [President Jimmy Carter's] administration liked the Moon Treaty,but space activists, fearful that the sharing requirement would subjugate American mineral claims to international partners, pressured the U.S. Senate, ensuring that the United States didn't ratify it. Although the Moon Treatyhas entered into force among its 13 signatories, none of those nations is a space power. So property rights on the moon are still the subject of international discussion. But would anyone buy lunar land? And what would it take to establish good title? The answer to the first question is clearly "yes." Lots of people would buy'lunar landand, in fact, lots of people have, sort of. Dennis Hope, owner of Lunar Embassy [which "sells"

property on celestial bodies], says he's sold 200 million lunar hectares as "novelties." Each parcel is about the size of a football field and costs $16 to $20. Buyers choose the location-except for the Sea of Tranquility and the Apo//o landing sites, which Hope has placed off limits. To convey good title, Hope essentially wrote the United Nations to say he was going to begin selling lunar property, When the U.N. didn't respond with an objection, he asserted that this allowed him to proceed. Although I regard his claim to good title as dubious, his customers have created a constituency to recognize his position. If he sells enough lunar property, it may become a self-fulfilling prophecy. So there's demand, even for iffy titles. But what would it take to establish title, rather than Hope's approximation? That's not so clear. In maritime salvage law, which also deals with property rights beyond national territory, actually being there is key: Those who reach a wreck first and secure the property are generally entitled to a percentage of what they recover. There's even some case law allowing that presence to be robotic rather than human. Traditionally, claims to unclaimed property require long-term presence, effective control and some degree of improvement. Those aren't bad rules for lunar property, either. But who would recognize such titles?

Individual nations might. In the 1980 Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act, the United States recognized deep-sea mining rights outside its own territory without claiming sovereignty over the seabed. There's nothing to stop the U.S. Congress from passing a similar law relating to the moon. For that matter, there's nothing to stop other nations from doing the same. Ideally, title would be recognized by an international agreement that all nations would endorse. The 1979 Moon Treaty was a flop, but there's no reason the space powers couldn't agree on a new treaty that recognizes properly rights and encourages investment. After all, the international climate has warmed to property rights and capitalism over the past 30 years. I'd like to see something along these lines. Properly rights attract private capital and, with government space programs stagnating, a lunar land rush may be just what we need to get things going again. I'll take a nice parcel near one of the lunar poles, please, with a peak high enough to get year-round sunlight and some crater bottoms deep enough to hold ice. Come visit me sometime! ~ Glenn Harlan Reynolds is a law professor at the University of Tennessee and the author (with Robert P Merges) of Outer Space: Problems of Law and Policy.

n ergroun Peter Davenport runs the nonprofit National UFO Reporting Center from an abandoned missile complex in Washington state. He is passionate that there is something out there.

hat door," he says with dramatic pause. "That door weighs 4,000 pounds [1,815 kilograms]. It's been reinforced to withstand a nuclear blast." Peter DavenpOli has a radio voice, the kind of exaggerated baritone that cuts through walls and most doors, but not this one. This is solid steel and a foot thick. It is Davenport's door, which opens into a tunnel leading below ground to what was once a nuclear missile complex here in the desert of eastern Washington state. The U.S. Air Force decommissioned the site in the mid-1960s and it sat empty for most of the time since. Davenport, longtime director of the National UFO Reporting Center, a nonprofit clearinghouse and 24-hour hotline for Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) sightings, bought it for $100,000 in 2006 to turn into his new headquarters. [A clearinghouse is an informal channel for distributing infom1ation or assistance.] Why does a man buy an old, windowless missile complex deep underground, only to

spend his days tracking unidentified objects flying through the sky? - Davenport doesn't have an answer. Furthermore, he doesn't need one. As a fulltime UFO investigator and possessor of one of the world's most comprehensive, though unofficial, UFO databases, his life already runs counter to convention. The center, in continuous operation since 1970, is known worldwide among those interested in UFOs: scientists as well as people surfing the Web. The hotline is posted on various UFO Web sites, and calls-as

________________

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Peter Davenport at his UFO center.

many as 20,000 in a yearcome from people who believe they have seen or experienced something beyond the ordinary, potentially involving extraterrestrials. If the case seems compelling and is a short flight away, Davenport will investigate in person. He takes written reports, records testimony and consults experts in specialty areas. Davenport, 60, is a passionate, cerebral man with a haughty disdain for the media. "I do not countenance fools," he says. "The work of studying UFOs is of immense consequence to every living thing on this planet. If I sense you are wasting my time, I will be blunt." His life revolves around a question, namely: "Are we alone in the universe or are we not?" He believes there are clues behind the monstrous door that he now faces. He picks up a shovel. He has not been to his missile site in weeks, and a meter of snow blocks the doorway. He breaks up chunks and shovels them to the side. It is [1 degree Celsius] on a late March aftemoon, the sun just beginning to set over this patch of land 80 kilometers west of Spokane. Not a single house can be seenonly snow and mounds of barren ten'ain and the occasional frozen tumbleweed, like rolled-up cobwebs in the distance. A wrenching sound breaks the silence. Davenport has pried open the door. He tilts his head, then squeezes through sideways before disappearing into darkness. "He's not the normal guy on the street, but crazy? No. He's not crazy," Robert B. Frost says of Davenport, whom he's known for most of the last two decades. The former chief engineer for Boeing's portion of the B-2 bomber project, Frost met Davenport, a fellow techie, in Seattle, Washington. "The guy's brilliant," Frost says. "Personally, I think he's going to prevail on this thing." By that, Frost means time will prove Davenport correct on his hunch that UFOs represent a real phenomenon. Although mainstream science tends to dismiss the subject, along with Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster"a number of prominent scientists and much of the [American] public-as many as 60 per-

cent, according to polls-believe UFOs exist and should be studied. As a corollary, a large number of astronomers believe life in other parts of the universe is not only possible but likely. Among the famous, former President Jimmy Carter, anthropologist Margaret Mead, psychiatrist Carl lung and astronaut Gordon Cooper reported seeing a UFO or proclaimed a belief in UFOs as representing visitations from extraterrestrials. In 2007, Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, at the time running for the Democratic presidential nomination, made headlines by admitting he had seen, in the 1980s, a strange "triangular craft" hovering above a rural area of Washington state. In a way, Davenport's destiny was sealed, by his own reckoning, at age 6. In 1954, while sitting in a car with his mother and brother at a drive-in theater in St. Louis, Missouri, he looked out the window and, there in the sky, a bright red disc hovered, then-whoosh---disappeared into the horizon. "Ifthere was a seminal moment," Davenport had said earlier, "that would be it." He read and eventually wrote widely on the subject as a sideline to his education, which included earning degrees in biology and Russian at Stanford University in California and graduate degrees in genetics and the biochemistry of fish at the

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University of Washington. He became founding president of a Seattle-area biotechnology company, BioSyn Inc., and nine years later, in 1994, sold his stock and made a small fortune. That same year, he got a phone call from Robert Gribble, a retired firefighter in mVt/J.f)( Seattle, who for two decades had acted as a one-man clearinghouse for UFO information and as the operator of a 24/7 national UFO hotline (206-722-3000). Gribble wanted to pass the torch. DavenpOli accepted and has been director of the National UFO Reporting Center since, keeping the same hotline and funding the operation out of his own pocket. Costs can range from $500 to $5,000 a month, depending on travel. Davenport has few other expenses. He never married, never had kids. He drove old cars. [Davenport is a candidate in the August 19,2008, election for the Washington State House of Representatives.] For a dozen years he ran the center out of a rented home near Seattle's University District. Then he got the notion that he wanted his own missile site. 'There was an allure to the idea," he says he told friends. Davenport, who had long been interested in aircraft and rocketry, had heard of missile silos for sale in eastern Washington. [A silo is an underground vertical container for storing and launching intercontinental ballistic missiles.] One in particular was going for a bargain price; Atlas Missile Site No.6, in which the previous owner had killed and dismembered a visitor. Long-haul truck driver Ralph Benson was convicted of murder in 2003 and was suspected in at least one other murder when he died in prison. Davenport bought the site from Benson's sons. "I don't know about the kind of people who buy these things," Davenport says, his voice trailing off in the darkness. He leaves the steel door propped open, and fumbles for lights. A series of clicks and the room turns pale yellow. He stands in an entryway, all concrete and steel, and dank like a cave. On each side is a tunnel. He takes the tunnel to the right, clomps

But the site needed more work than He believes that clues lie buried in these expected. The place leaks. The ventilation hill-sized mounds of paper that he has isn't good, and there's a little bat problem. meticulously cataloged, if only the govemFor now, the center's phone and ment or a university would do the research. answering machine will stay at Davenport's "I'm willing to share data," he says. Hanington apartment, a few kilometers "I'm willing to throw all of it to anyone away, until Missile Site No.6 is fixed up. who wants to know." Davenport is doing most of the fixing up There have been few takers. himself. Someday, he says, a UFO event could Shadows flicker as he shines his flash- take place that would prove inefutable, light around. He walks to the nearest cab- and then people would be forced to make inet, opens a drawer and randomly pulls a leap in consciousness as big as stoneout a thick sheaf of files. Call logs. A file agers into cyberspace. If that happens, the for every month. A sampling of entries: files in this underground castle could take Jan 6, 1995. 0:15. Warm Beach, on new significance. Or not. Washington. Two women observe a Either scenario comes with a burden. strange "rope of light," with a bright Arthur C. Clarke, author of the classic sphere attached. novel 2001 : A Space Odyssey, who died in Jan 6, 1995. 17:30. Glendo, Wyoming. March in Sri Lanka, once said: "Either we Mother and son witness large glowing are alone in the universe or we are not. craft maneuver into cloud. Pursued by Both are equally tenifying." military aircraft. Davenport slams the drawer shut. He Jan 7, 1995. 5:00. Makapuu Point, sighs. Hawaii. Man and wife observe bizarre Outside, the sun has set and the evening hump-backed triangular object over sea. sky has darkened enough for celestial Opaque windows. bodies to become visible. The constellaDavenport says that of the vast majori- tion Orion appears in the southern sky, ty of UFO sightings, up to 90 percent are and Mars twinkles, too. explainable: weather balloons, military "Not many people would waste their aircraft, satellites and the like. Many more lives pursuing such an elusive subject," prove to be hoaxes. Davenport says on the drive home. His car But then there's the tiny percentage, maybe . is an l8-year-old gray Crown Victoria only a handful each year, where something with more than 400,000 kilometers. The was defmitely seen-often by multiple windshield is cracked. "Sometimes I don't reliable sources-and that defy explanation. know why I do it." Then he remembers Elger Berg of Seattle. Berg was a carpenter and mechanic. He had waited 64 years to tell the story of Left: A digital scan of a full frame from an original Apollo 16 video film showing a questionable object something he had seen outside a small vil(cen ter) and its position relative to the moon. lage in Alaska when he was a young man: Reflections in the spacecraft window are also visible. a cigar-shaped craft with blue-green lights NASA had scientists investigate. that flew over his head and disappeared Dual Protruding E'/~ments into the mountains. After hearing Davenport on the radio, Berg sought him out to tell him about the UFO. Four months later, in early 2001, Berg died at 84. His story, which Davenport captured on cassette, is the only record of the incident. If someone, anyone, ever wants to look into it for whatever reason, the tape and accompanying notes await in a safe place, in a city of file cabinets, under the

down a metal tube about 46 meters long. It is large enough for him to walk through without bending. The tube leads to a cave about the size of a basketball court. Piles of debris can be seen in the semi-darkness. "Launch control room," he says with his radio voice. Davenport offers up specs (conoborated by military documents): The ceilings are five meters high, the walls 46 centimeters thick. The complex, made of3 million tons of concrete, can withstand a blast 50 times the power of the Hiroshima bomb at a distance of 2.5 kilometers. He returns to the vestibule and enters the other tunnel, similarly constructed, which opens into another cavernous space: the missile room. The complex was known as a "coffin launcher." This is where the Atlas missile rested flat. Above, the ceiling was a sliding metal door, which opened as hydraulics raised the rocket for launching. Towards the back of the missile room, shrouded in darkness, sits Davenport's life work: a collection of tens of thousands of reports on UFO sightings from all over the world. He has files from long before the television show The X-Files brought the paranonnal to prime time. The infOlmation is meticulously labeled and filed in a long row of mismatched metal file cabinets. They fom1 the shape of a miniature city skyline. The plan was to live and work in here.

Above: The scientists found that the object was part of the spacecraft. This enhanced Apollo 16 image (left) compares with features of the EVA floodlight/boom from the perspective of a Command Service Module window (right).

_d_es_e_rt_.

Tomas Alex Tizan is a staff writer with the Los Angeles Times.

Hlw

:::

Could Pay-per-click advertising is big, big, big business. So are bogus hits on Internet ads. It's search giants versus scam artists in an arms race that could crash the entire online economy.

tuart Cauff launched a charter-jet service in Miami Beach, Florida, back in 2002. Being a 21st-century business, letNetwork advertised on the Internet, especially on search engines. Anyone who Googled, say, "air charter Miami" would be greeted with the familiar list of search results and, in a separate place, a plain box of text with a blue hyperlink to letNetwork's Web site. Search ads were perfect for Cauff's business. His potential customers-a diverse group of celeblities, photojournalists, medical evacuees, and people who just needed to get away from or to Miami in a hurry-were scattered across the United States. To reach this audience with traditional advertising, he would have had to buy time on scores of television and radio stations and space in just as many newspa-

pers and magazines, something that only wealthy, established companies could afford. Even if Cauff could pay for the ads, the vast majority of people exposed to them wouldn't care about chatter jets, so most of his money would be wasted. But with seat'ch-based ads, letNetwork's name would appear, at least in theory, only before people who were actually interested in Miami charter flights. Still, the ads were expensive. This kind of advertising is known as pay-per-click, because advertisers shell out money to a search engine every time a surfer clicks on their links, The price and placement depend mainly on how much the advertiser wants to bid for the search termalso known as the keyword in ad jargon. As other air chatter companies began [pay-per-click] advertising, the cost of a

click on a top-ranked ad rose to about $lO-in some cases as high as $30-and there could be hundreds of clicks a month, Which is why Cauff was infuriated when he discovered that up to "40 percent, maybe more" of the clicks on his keyword ads apparently came not from potential customers around the nation but from a single Internet address, one that belonged to a rival based in New York City. "If we get clicked fraudulently, it uses up our ad budget," he says. Advertisers usually set limits on how much they will spend, and search engines drop ads once they hit that limit.

Major pay-per-click firms have found themselves caught in a game of cat and mouse with click scammers.

As a result, fraudulent clicking "literally pushes us off the page," Cauff explains. "And then our competition buys in at a lower price when we're not there." Cauff was a victim of "click fraud," the illicit manipulation of keyword-based advertising. In this case, the scam appeared straightforward--one company clicked on a rival's search engine ads to drive up its costs. More complex is a second type of bogus ad click that exploits a second form of pay-per-click advertising: ads fed to Web sites-anything from personal blogs to the sites of major corporations-by search providers like Google, Yahoo!, LookSmart, and soon, MSN. The search engine indexes the content of the Web site and matches it with a group of relevant ads. (The most familiar form is Google's AdSense program-the sets of links labeled Ads by Google that show up on pages across the Internet. The advertisements that appear on Google itself are part of a separate but related program called AdWords.) Thus, bloggers who write about their air travel experiences and choose to host such ads may find links on their pages for JetNetworks and its brethren. If a blog visitor clicks on the ad, the search engine splits its fee with the blogger. Although these "affiliate" ads have been hugely successful for advertisers, search engines a!1d the host Web sites, the system creates an incentive for affiliates to cheat. "All you have to do to make some money is find a way to click the ad sent by Google or Yahoo! to your own Web page," says search marketing consultant Joseph Holcomb. "Click/-there's 10 bucks. Click/-there's 10 bucks. It goes on all the time." Pay-per-click is the fastest-growing segment of all advertising, reports the Interactive Advertising Bureau. In 2005, Yahoo! alone ran more than 250 million individual listings, according to Michael Egan, the company's [former] search-marketing director of content strategy. Yahoo!

doesn't break out pay-per-click earnings separately in its financial statements, but Goldman Sachs analyst Anthony Noto believes that keyword advertising accounted for about half of the company's estimated $3.7 billion in revenue for 2005. Payper-click is even more lucrative for Google. [Google's worldwide gross revenue is projected to be $11.8 billion in 2007.] ...All of which is to say that little blue text links, a type of advertising that barely existed seven years ago, are poised to become the single most important form of marketing in the United States-unless click fraud ruins it. If that occurs, the consequences will be felt throughout the Net. By splitting revenue with the sites that host the ads, search engines have become, in effect, the Internet's venture capitalists, funding the content that attracts people to the computer screen. Unlike the venture capitalists who backed the boom-era Internet, search engines now provide revenue to thousands of wildly diverse sites at little up-front cost to them-pay-per-click advertising is one of the few income sources available to bloggers, for instance. If rampant click fraud overwhelms the system, it will muffle the Internet's fabulous cacophony of voices. The amount of click fraud is difficult to quantify; estimates of the proportion of fake clicks run from as low as one in 10 to as high as one in two. In a widely cited 2005 study, MarketingExperiments.com, an online marketing research outfit, reported that "as much as 29.5 percent" of the clicks in three experimental pay-per-click campaigns on Google were fraudulent. Whatever the exact figure, click fraud has become pervasive, and Google, Yahoo!, and the other major pay-per-click firms have found themselves caught in a game of cat and mouse with its perpetrators. Even as the search engines shore up their defenses, click scammers are becoming more sophisticated, increasingly deploying complex software to disguise the origins of clicks. For now, the search companies and many of their clients maintain that the problem on their networks is under control. But some observers, like Holcomb, believe that click fraud is "a billion-dollar mess" that "has the potential of destroying the entire industry." In 2005, Boris Elpiner noticed something odd about the Web traffic coming to his company from its pay-per-click ads.

As vice president of marketing for RingCentral, an online telecommunications firm in San Mateo, California, Elpiner is in charge of its affiliate ad program, which hired Yahoo! to distribute RingCentral's ads onto Web sites with compatible content. Poring over his records, he discovered that a keyword term ("fax software download") that had previously generated almost no clicks was suddenly pulling them in. The total cost to RingCentral for the clicks$2,500 over about four weeks-"was significant, but not immediately noticeable." Puzzled by the sudden change, Elpiner investigated further. When users visit a Web site, the site server notes the URLs from which they came, the visitors' IP [Internet Protocol] addresses and other data. Cauff, the charter-jet executive, had used such information to conclude that a competitor was clicking repeatedly on his ads. In this case, Elpiner didn't see an obvious pattern. At the same time, the URLs and IP addresses associated with the suspect clicks "didn't make any sense," he says. "Some of the URLs were error 404 messages, and a lot of the addresses didn't exist." Elpiner took the matter to Yahoo!, whose analysts "figured it all out quickly," he says. One or more Yahoo! affiliates may have generated deceptive clicks on ads served to their sites, using special software to disguise the source. The scammers, he says, "were clever enough not to take a whole lot from [the ads on] one site, but must have been trying to siphon off a little from many advertisers." Yahoo! gave Elpiner full credit. But it did not, as far as he could tell, try to identify the perpetrators. Instead, Yahoo! and other pay-per-click companies are responding to click fraud by deploying new antifraud technologies. For example, Yahoo! analysts have created click fraud filters-algorithmic screens that sift through the sea of incoming clicks to find patterns suggesting fraud and then discard phony clicks without regard to source or motive. Although Google and Yahoo! will not, for security reasons, discuss their methods in detail, the advertisements themselves offer some clues. When affiliates sign up for a box of, say, Google ads, they are

g ~ ~ ~ essentially hosting within their own Web page a small, separate page with its own, very long URL. According to Joseph Tierney, an Internet marketer in central Florida who describes himself as a repentant click frauder, that URL is embedded with a string of information including the time, in milliseconds; the last time the host Web page was updated, also in milliseconds; and other data used to track customer behavior. Analysts could use this material to match the various time stamps against one another, as well as other information provided by server logs.

"If someone from such-and-such IP address clicks on the same ad four times in a second," says Elias Levy, a [former] security architect at Symantec, "you can know that at least three of those clicks don't mean anything. It's inconceivable that Google wouldn't be looking at this." The company won't confirm it, though. "We don't discuss our techniques," says Shuman Ghosemajumder, a Google business product safety manager. Nor will Google disclose whether invalid clicks are common or whether it has "a lot" or "just a few" researchers working on click fraud.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Top: John Thys, (left), director of Internet marketing of Radiator.com, an auto supply Web site, with CEO Mike Rippey at the company's headquarters in Benicia, California. In 2006, Radiator.com opted out of a $90 million settlement of a class action suit against Coogle over click fraud. The refunds to thousands of advertisers were to compensate Coogle's customers for undetected click fraud. Radiator. com felt the Internet search engine should have refunded a lot more. Above: Applications developer James Butler (left) checks a client's Web site log with Jessie Stricchiola, president of Alchemist Media, which helps businesses detect problems and negotiate refunds from search engines. "We have recognized invalid clicks as a serious problem from the beginning," Ghosemajumder says. "We've done a good job at being effective with these issues in the past, and we believe we will be effective in the future." In his view, pay-per-click companies shou!d be judged not by whether they have succeeded in stamping out click fraud but by whether

ny would tell him. All they'd reveal was how many clicks he'd paid for-not which ones or where they originated. Feeling stonewalled, he had his lawyer send a letter demanding refunds from both. "I have the strong suspicion," he says, "that we Â§ spent more than a quarter of a million dola: ~ lars over a couple years on invalid clicks." According to McKelvey, the two companies have refused to refund his money or divulge further information [although both companies sent him refunds in 2004 in another apparent click fraud case]. .. Pay-per-click companies may have to become more transparent to retain cusCL tomer confidence, because click fraud has ~ mutated into new, more complex forms. ~ Responding to the demand for fake clicks, ~ shady films in India created click farms, ~ facilities in which marginally employed ÂŤ g people click on advertisements round the ~ clock (these seem to have diminished in ~ number or gone underground since 2004, when The Times of India revealed their existence). Companies also have begun attacking rivals with "impression fraud"repeatedly reloading a search engine page where the rival's ad appears, without clicking on it, in order to eliminate it. (Google and Yahoo! routinely take steps to drop nonperforming ads.) In 2004, a programmer named Michael Bradley allegedly their advertisers are satisfied. wrote click fraud software that disguised By that standard, Google and company clicks' origins. He was arrested by the seem largely successful, at least for now. Secret Service and charged with attemptGoogle is "very good at detecting multi- ing to extort $100,000 from Google by ple clicks from the same computer," says threatening to release the software on the Ash Nallawalla, a former search engine Internet. The action did not eliminate this advertising consultant in Melbourne, kind of software-it is now readily availAustralia. "I am not likely to be charged able on the Net. for any of those clicks, not even the first Other enterprising scammers manipuone." (Marketers contacted by Wired say late the affiliate system by creating phony much the same about Yahoo!) blogs-spam blogs, or splogs-that autoNot every customer comes away satis- matically generate content by continually fied, though. In 2005, Nathan McKelvey, copying bits from other Web sites, mixing president of the rent-a-jet firm Charter in popular keywords, then signing up the Auction.com in Quincy, Massachusetts, dis- resulting melange as a Google or Yahoo! covered an old server in his office with affiliate. By using software to link themrecords of every visitor to his company's selves repeatedly to well-known real Web site since 2002. Many of the visits blogs, splogs trick search engines into listcame through Google's and Yahoo!'s pay- ing them high on their results list, thus per-click programs. But a substantial num- generating traffic, which in turn generates ber of those cl icks came from Denmark, a ad clicks. When unsuspecting Internet country where CharterAuction did "exact- searchers visit splogs, they end up clicking ly zero" of its business. When McKelvey the ad links in a frustrated attempt to find asked Google and Yahoo! precisely which some coherent text. Thousands of splogs clicks he'd been billed for, neither compa- exist, snarling the blogosphere-and the

per-click back in the late '90s when he presided over the startup incubator Idealab, has argued that, despite the cleverness of the vatious methods used to fight it, click fraud will continue to cast a shadow over pay-per-click advertising. Ultimately, he believes, advertisers will switch to another model, which he caJ]s cost-per-action (others use terms like cost-per-transaction or cost-per-acquisition). Whatever the natne, though, advertisers pay only when a click results in a specified action, such as a sale or a Web site registration. Gross started a cost-per-action search engine, Snap.com, in late 2004. [It was he menace of click fraud is not going away relaunched in 2006]. When customers enter anytime soon, say industry experts, the term "airline tickets" on the site, ads for According to Click Forensics, an Austin, airlines appear. But those airlines don't pay Texas-basedfirm that analyzes Web traffic and Snap a penny until someone who clicks the offers prevention solutions to online advertisad actually buys a ticket. Even if scammers ers, click fraud originating from botnets used zombie networks, the system would increased from 9 percent to 23.5 percent over ignore them, because it charges only for the last year, Botnets are rogue computers clicks that lead to an action. [Snap says it generally associated with spam. reaches 9 percent of the U.S. audience and The click fraud rate for the pay-per-click 35 million global users each month.] industry in the first quarter of 2008 also rose Yahoo! is not looking into cost-permore than 10 percent over the same period in 2007 with the overall average click fraud rate action, Egan says, because such a system at 16.3 percent in 2008. The click fraud rate of requires businesses to share sensitive cost pay-per-click advertising appearing on search data with their advertising partners. "We engine networks, including Google Adsense start having to ask how much they've sold and Yahoo Publisher Network, was 27.8 perand what their margins are," he says. "And cent in the first quarter of 2008. .if we carry ads for their competitors, we In March, Yahoo! announced a partnership know about them, too. This is not informawith Click Forensics to combat fraudulent tion that businesses like to share with third clicks that target search engine marketing advertisers. This makes Yahoo! the first search patties, and for good reason." For the near future, he says, "I don't believe pay-perengine to enter into a deal for additional feedclick is going to be supplanted, which is back on click fraud, -RV one reason we take click spam"tedious task of examining internal logs for Yahoo!'s preferred term-"so seriously." fraud. Among those trying to do more is ...Nobody thinks that these measures will eliminate click fraud. Keyword Visitlab, in Santa Cruz, California. According to CEO Vikas Kedia, Visitlab's advertising-especially on affiliatesclients channel incoming clicks through will continue to grow, making it an ever his company, which screens them with more inviting target to the Net's legion of software tailored for each customer. The bad actors. All the while, pay-per-click software, now in beta, consists of modules will continue to be vulnerable to attacks that look for telltale behavior-the use of by black hats who want to disrupt the sysa proxy server, say, or clicks coming from tem as a whole, rather than defraud the geographic areas that are unlikely to have individual companies that use it. In consecustomers. By amassing data on click quence, pay-per-click providers seem behavior and constantly adjusting the soft- doomed, at least for the near future, to an For more informaUOD: ware, Kedia believes, it should eventually endless race against the scammers, spamClick fraud prevention be possible to detect even a single fraudu- mers and network jammers.... ~ http://www.clickforensics.coml?clkfrnid = 1867380203cf lent click. "Go ogle could do all this," he Charles C. Mann is a contributing editor at Why Third-Party Click Fraud Estimates Don't'Add Up says. "But nobody is sure whether to trust Wired and author 0/1491: New Revelations them. We're a third party." of the Americas Before Columbus http://shumans.com/articles/000048, php Bill Gross, the man who invented pay- (www.charlesmann.org). search engines that index it-in spam. Splogs are too profitable to be readily discouraged. According to RSS to Blog, a Brooklyn-based firm that sells automaticblog software, sploggers can earn tens of thousands of doJ]ars a month in pay-perclick income, aJ] without any human effort. Probably the most worrisome emerging threat is zombie networks-hordes of linked machines controlled by rogue software. Without their owners' knowledge, these boxes continuously send spam, transmit worn1S and viruses, participate in denial-of-service attacks, and execute a host of other antisocial tasks. These zombie networks can be enormous. In 2005, Dutch police charged three young men with controlling an incredible 1.5 million computers. Owners of zombie networks have begun turning to click fraud-with "very effective" results, according to Tierney, the former click frauder. The robot machines create clicks from all around the world at apparently random intervals, making them difficult to identify. But even if zombie click fraud becomes common, the damage can probably be contained as long as its targets are limited to individual advertisers. As Symantec's Levy points out, pay-per-click firms can always give the victims their month's service free-reducing click fraud to a type of overhead, a cost of doing business. But the impact would be much larger, he notes, if someone decided to attack not single companies but the pay-per-click system itself. "It would not be difficult to construct a worm that would go through the Net, clicking on every Google or Yahoo! affiliate ad that it saw," Levy says. "If enough of these were loose, you'd swamp the entire system in noise-millions or even billions of extra clicks. It would be very hard to defend against." Type "click fraud" into a search box and you get links to more than 30 million Web sites and ads for the dozens of companies that have sprung up to help victims track the practice ...Stoking advertisers' fears by claiming that the system is

drowning in click fraud, these outfits nonetheless solicit clients with ... keyword ads on Yahoo! and Google. Indeed, a recent Google search for "click fraud" turned up more than 30 companies. (One outfit, Click Defense, has matched its actions to its words; it sued Google in 2005, claiming it was getting click-frauded on its "click fraud" keyword ads.) Most of these firms simply provide ways for advertisers to outsource the

UPDATE

The Battle Continues

The Death 01

Teenagers

are abandoning their Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts. Do the rest of us have to?

y 2002, everyone in my family had become an Internet convert. For the technophobic older generation, signing up for an e-mail account was a concession to us youngsters-if the kids don't call home, they thought, we'll just reach them through the computer. Everyone was especially eager to send messages to my niece, a kid who wasn't all that chatty on the phone but was almost always glued to her PC [personal computer]. But while the rest of us happily exchanged forwards and life updates, she almost never piped up. Eventually, I sussed out the truth: She was too busy sending IMs [instant messages] and text messages to bother with e-mail. That's when I realized that my agility with e-mail no longer marked me as a tech-savvy young adult. It made me a lame old fogey. Those of us older than 25 can't imagine a life without e-mail. For the Facebook generation, it's hard to imagine a life of only e-mail, much less a life before it. I can still remember the proud moment in 1996 when I sent my first e-mail from the college computer lab. It felt like sending a postcard from the future. I was getting a glimpse of how the Internet would change

everything-nothing could be faster and easier than e-mail. Ten years later, e-mail is looking obsolete. According to a 2005 Pew [Interne:t & American Life Project] study, almost half of Web-using teenagers prefer to chat with friends via instant messaging rather than email. In 2006, internet marketing research company comScore repOlted that teen email use was down 8 percent, compared with a 6 percent increase in e-mailing for users of all ages. As mobile phones and sites like Twitter and Facebook have become more popular, those old Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts increasingly lie dormant. How have we reached this point? Not so long ago, e-mail networks formed the basic latticework of the Internet. In just a few years, electronic mail dramatically altered the way we communicate with friends, relatives and colleagues. Sitting down and composing messages became a daily ritual, the primary way that hundreds of millions of people kept in touch. You could chalk up the decline of email to kids following the newest tech fads. You're not cool if you're not on Facebook or MySpace, and everyone wants the latest tricked-out cell phone.

I've come around to the idea, though, that all of this other stuff is catching on because e-mail isn't perfect. Instant-messaging, mobile text-messaging, blogging, micro-blogging and social-networking profiles all help compensate for e-mail's shortcomings. Let's think about this from a teenager's perspective. First, you'd never send an email to 200 friends saying, "It's Friday and I'm ready to party!!!" But with a Twitter tweet or a Facebook status update, you can broadcast such a message to all of your buddies without seeming like a total dweeb [nerd]. Need to make your party plans for Friday night? You'd be a fool to send an e-mail and twiddle your thumbs waiting for responses; it's speedier to exchange IMs with your friends. If you then need to tell those friends how awesome they are for joining you, post a message on their Facebook or MySpace page so the world can see. And mobile phones take instant-and constant-contact into a whole other realm. You can argue with your girlfriend all night without having to leave the party. Then, the next morning, you can change your Facebook relationship status to "single." And there you have

it-a whole weekend of social drama lived and publicized without a single e-mail. Is any of this surprising? It's just teenagers doing what teenagers do: gabbing, hanging out, goofing around. More so than e-mail, all of these methods of instant communication mimic the interactions that kids would otherwise have in basements and dorm rooms. E-mail.by comparison, can feel stilted and plodding. Writing is methodical and time-consuming, a closer relative to letter writing than to conversation. Even the delivery speed of e-mail-sure, it takes only a few seconds-is now considered frightfully slow. My niece and other teenagers I talked to-I mean, Facebooked and IMed with-told me that, on average, their cell phones log 50 messages each day. They all confessed to sending a text message while IMing with someone else, and they all said they are signed in to 1M or Facebook from the time they get home from classes until they turn out the lights. When everyone's online, kids never have to leave the company of their pals. If you're not constantly plugged in, they say, you start to feel left out. The sense of loss I feel about the decline of e-mail has less to do with how we communicate than with what we communicate. The means by which we deliver a message affects its content. While the rise of the BlackBerry has proven that e-mail can be adapted for fast-burst communiques, the medium is best-suited for longer musings. As opposed to instant messaging, e-mail provides the breathing room to contemplate what we're writing and express nuanced thoughts. A welltended e-mail inbox and outbox can serve as a sort of diary, an evolving record of your curiosities, obsessions, introspections, apologies and hear1to-hearts. Instant messages, on - the other hand, are like Post-it notes, handy for a few minutes but hardly worth saving. While IMs and text messages have a

throwaway quality, e-mail is for the For more information: sentimental. I still have some of the Social networking sites: A parent's guide first flirtatious e-mails I exchanged http://onguardonline.gov/socialnetworki ng. htm I with my wife in college. I have Yahoo and Google to turn e-mail into a social network thoughtful monologues from friends in the midst of clises. I have e-mails http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/11/13/inbox-20-yahoofrom my parents that I envision show- and-goog Ie-to- turn-e-mai 1-into-a- sociaI-network/ ing to my children someday. Aw. Social networking sites in it for the long haul Thinking more practically, there's http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/octl18/facebook now a generation gap between fIrstgeneration and second-generation Internet gates to oldsters this year, parents are comusers. Colleges are fInding that students ing in and setting up camp a safe viewing increasingly ignore or never receive cam- distance from their kids. I, too, have pus-wide e-mail announcements. All those become a Facebook believer, and most of clever forwards from Grandpa are going my friends are joining the church. There's no better way to follow the goings-on-both major and trivial-of your group of friends than skimming the Facebook news feed. It may seem unfortunate that right when senior citizens became comfortable with e-mail, a host of new technologies are making their habits archaic. But transitioning beyond e-mail doesn't have to be as painful as transitioning to it. While its popularity may wane, it's hard to see e-mail vanishing completely-we'll always need some way to send each other long-form messages. Besides, we're already unread. And no matter what dominates in seeing technology that makes it simpler the dorm room, e-mail still rules in the for everyone to communicate across all of workplace. Office-bound graduates will be these various channels. Gmail elegantly forced to make Microsoft Outlook-not melds 1M and e-mail, making it easy to AIM [AOL Instant Messenger] or Face- chat with your contacts and file away book-their fIrst sign-on of the day. Some instant-message conversations alongside may fInd it a vexing challenge to remediate your mail. You can now send and receive their sloppy 1M habits into professional- every kind of message-texts, IMs, esounding e-mail prose. mails and Facebook posts-with most So, is the solution to browbeat these lit- new mobile phones. It's not har'd to imagtle rebels back in line and enforce manda- ine a future communications command tory e-mail usage? Good luck. Chances center where, on a single screen, you'll be are, as usual, that the able to choose between sending an e-mail, grown-ups will be the instant message, status note or blog ones who are forced post-or sending all of them at once-and to adapt. Colleges then have all those bits of text neatly and have already thrown up securely archived. Once that happens, their hands and created nostalgic e-mailers like me won't have to Facebook and MySpace t_e_e_I_Ii_k_e_d_i_no_s_a_u_r_s. ~ pages to stay in touch with students. Since Chad Lorenz, now in his early 30s, is a copy Facebook opened its editor with Slate.

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New technologies and their savviest users are leaving their stamp on many U.S. election campaignsexposing candidate gaffes, boosting fundraising and reshaping the news cycle.

Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton, for example, used a Web video to announce the formation of her presidential exploratory committee-a major news eventusing footage of herself sitting on a couch in her living room in Chappaqua, New York. "Let's talk. Let's chat. Let's start a dialogue about your ideas and mine," Clinton told viewers. "And while I can't visit everyone's living room, I can try. And with a little help from modern technology, I'll be holding live online video chats this week, starting Monday. So let the conversation begin." The advantages for the candidate are substantial. Unlike a public event, with the press asking questions, a Web announcement is completely under the control of the campaign; it can be filmed over and over again until it is flawless, at the same time conveying a sense of intimacy and spontaneity.

Pidalls and possibilities Many of the other technological advances that underpin the new media are not so advantageous to campaigns. Indeed, they have created a whole new set of potential pitfalls. Whenever they appear in any public venue, candidates are now subject to constant observation by the staff and supporters of their opponents, equipped with small, easyto-use digital cameras and tape recorders. In 2006, Republican Senator George Allen of Virginia, who was heavily favored to be reelected, ultimately lost to Democrat James Webb. Allen's campaign was irreparably damaged after he ridiculed a Webb staffer of Indian origin filming him: "This fellow here, over here with the yellow shirt, macaca, or whatever his name is. He's with my opponent. He's following us around everywhere .... Let's give a welcome to macaca, here. Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia." In some European cultures, macaca is a derogatory term used against African immigrants. The so-called macaca footage became a major campaign event, viewed hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube, the publicly accessible video Web site, and played repeatedly on local and national television. One presidential candidate who benefited in a big way from the new Web technology is Republican Representative Ron Paul of Texas. While a long shot at best in his bid for the 2008 Republican nomination for President, Paul's libertarian principles won him a large following on the Web, where he was highly popular at such sites as MySpace and YouTube. For Paul, the Web paid off handsomely, helping him to raise $5.3 million in the third quarter of 2007, almost as much as Senator John McCain, now the Republican nominee, who collected $5.7 million during the same period. Three other unprecedented uses of the new media have already affected the 2008 presidential election. In one, an aide to the campaign of Democratic nomine'e Senator Barack Obama-working unofficially-took an Apple Computer advertisement that likened the dominant role of Microsoft to the dictatorial government

Internet bloggers post updates for their readers during the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston, Massachusetts.

described in George Orwell's novel 1984 and converted that ad into one portraying Hillary Clinton as an all-powerful dictator. The Obama campaign disassociated itself from the ad and the aide resigned, but the pseudo-commercial was viewed close to a million times on YouTube, much to Clinton's discomfort. Obama, in turn, was embarrassed by an independently made video, posted on YouTube, known as Obama Girl. In it, actressmodel Amber Lee Ettinger lip-synched a song, 1 Got a Crush ... on Obama, as she danced seductively. The video did far less damage to the Obama campaign than a secretly taped film sequence-also put up on YouTube-of Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards getting made up before a television appearance. To the music and lyrics of a song from the musical West Side Story, Edwards is shown

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repeatedly combing and fluffing his hair. The lyrics to the song used as background music are, "[feel pretty, oh so pretty, oh so pretty and witty tonight ... " The broad Internet distribution of such film footage was not technologically feasible in 2004.

Lower-profile effects At the same time, there have been a series of more subtle and less visible developments stemming from the expansion of new media capabilities. These include: • The Internet has become the vehicle for the mobilization of the antiwar left as an influential Democratic interest group that all candidates and congressional leaders now must treat with respect and special deference. • Such Web sites as OpenLeft, Eschaton and DailyKos, along with a host of bloggers who file reports to these and other sites, make up a " constituency that Democratic candidates seek not to offend. Instead, many of the candidates and their top staffers hold regular conference calls with the left blogosphere community and seek as favorable coverage as possible. • Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean's success in 2004 in raising large sums of money from small donors through Web-based credit card links has now been replicated by all the major 2008 Democratic candidates and, to a lesser but still significant extent, by the Republican candidates. One consequence has been to vastly enlarge the number of small donors and to lower the average size of contributions. For Obama, particularly, this trend made a long-shot candidacy viable by a relative newcomer to national politics. • For Democrats, and Democratic Party comrruttees, the surge in small Web-based donors contributed significantly to the leveling of the financial playing field in 2004 and even more gains in the current (2007-2008) cycle. For the first time in at least three decades, Democrats generally maintained a substantial financial advantage over the Republicans, the party that traditionally has been able to tap deeper financial resources for campaign funding. • Web-based political sites are corrung of age and, in many respects, becorrung as or more important than newspapers. Politico, The Huffington Post, Salon and Slate have, in just a few years, become key players in the coverage of elections and of policy making. • The Huffington Post, as an example-where I am currently participating in the development of political coverage-in many respects replicates the full range of content that printed newspapers offer, with a national and foreign news "front page," as well as a political page, a media page and entertainment and living sections. An advantage of online media entities is the new technological .capacity to searnlessly hyperlink to literally thousands of other news sources, ranging from the online versions of "old media" resources-such as The New York 1iimes (www.nytimes.com). The Washington Post (www.washingtonpost.com). the Los Angeles Times (www.latimes.com). and so forth-as well as to large num-

bel'S of conservative and progressive "blogrolls" that, in turn, connect viewers to politically varied sites, such as RealClearPolitics, TalkingPointsMemo, Instapundit, Taegan Goddard's Political Wire and the Drudge Report . • In 2000, campaigns dealt with a consistent news cycle geared to television news shows aired from 6 to 7 p.m. and newspaper deadlines between 9 and 11 p.m. Now, managers of Web sites are on constant lookout for new developments, and a major political event at 2 p.m. has, by the time of the evening television news, already produced multiple rounds of Internet reaction and criticism from competitors and analysts. • The emergence of left, right and neutral Web sites has created an instant sounding board for widespread reaction to the shifting fortunes of political campaigns. At presidential debates, for

From their perch in Central Park, New York City, Margie Lempert (left) and Jennifer Warren try to motivate registered Democrats in Ohio, 900 kilometers away, to vote. example, campaign staffers are constantly searching for comments posted on the Internet praising the performance of their candidate and criticizing that of others. Those comments, in turn, are immediately e-mailed out as news releases to both mainstream, or old, media online, or to new media journalists and other commentators covering the debate. The speed of change in the current political environment, resulting from ground-breaking communications and information technologies, is, if past trends are a guide, going to accelerate, suggesting that the 2008 campaign innovations are a modest precursor to radical transformation in 2012 and 2016. Thomas B. Edsall is a journalism professor at Columbia University in New York City. He is also a correspondent for the New Republic, a contributing editor at the National Journal, and the political editor of the Huffington Post.

hile Americans and others around the world are vote separately for the President/Vice President team; for a excited about who will become the next U.S, member of the Senate; and for a member of the House of President, voters are also, on the same day, electing Representatives. All of these contests appear on the same ballot, the new U.S. Congress, the two-house national leg- and it is possible for a voter to choose candidates from two or islature that in many ways is just as important as the more different parties, or to select independents, man who will occupy the White House, "Members of Congress ... are not dependent on party leaders In the system of government established by the U,S. for re-election and often express that independence by voting for Constitution, the executive and legislative branches share in the interests of their constituents, even when they differ from decision-making, while also serving as a check and balance for party positions," says Maisel. However, they may also lose the each other, explains L. Sandy Maisel, professor of government influence in Congress that they need to help their constituents if at Colby College in Maine. they are too rebellious against party policy. For exanlple: "The American legislature, which is called the Congress, is The Senate, the upper house of Congress, must give its very dynamic and representative and is more autonomous than approval for any treaties the President wants to sign; most of the legislatures in India," says M. Saleem Kidwai, proor for appointments such as ambassadors, federal judges, fessor at lawaharlal Nehru University's School of International Cabinet members; Studies in New Delhi. "The Congress plays an important role in the President cannot declare war without approval of two- policymaking in the U.S. So this election is of great importance thirds of the 100-member Senate; to countries like India that have close and strategic relations with the President cannot even introduce laws, only sign those the U.S. that are bound to increase." introduced and passed by the Congress; This year 470 seats in Congress are to be filled in the November 4 general election. That includes the entire 435-memand though the President can veto laws, members of Congress can overrule him and pass them anyway if they can get ber House of Representatives where the Democrats hold 236 enough votes. seats, or a 54,2 percent majority, and Republicans hold 199 The judicial branch provides yet a third way to control abuse seats. Incumbents usually fare well in U.S. congression-~" _" • of power, a principal consideration for the rl,J./ ,,-- c " founders of the American Republic who -~,j#.'~ •. Elections for had just won independence from the 35 of the 100 seats authoritarian British king when they Currently were writing the Constitution. 49 Republicans Unlike a parliamentary system, 49 Democrats where the chief executive is 2 independents selected by the majority in , the legislature, Americans Senate seats up for election: " III Two Republican incumbents • Democratic incumbent Republican incumbent 0 No election o Retiring Republican I II. r '1'!llljmw----...-,--~lIl11,'unurmn\l"l1'

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al elections. So the races to watch are those control one or both branches of the Congress," The U.S.Congress notes Maisel. This means Presidents and Congin which the office-holder is retiring, or in Consists of Two Houses which a candidate was recently appointed to ressional leaders often reach a consensus to the seat to fill a vacancy caused by death or enact new laws or take major decisions. For The Senate, some other reason. the most part, this provides stability to called the upper house The Senate election could provide edgeAmerican policy over the long run. • 100 members, two for each state of-the-seat election night excitement. The " ... Without bipartisan support in Congress, • Six-year terms Senate is split 49-49 between Democrats and no President can succeed," says Kidwai, "The • One-third face election every Republicans, plus two independents who President needs cooperation of the two houstwo years es, whether it is (John) McCain or (Barack) vote with the Democrats. The control of the The House of Representatives, Obama." upper house could swing either way, called the lower house although Republicans have more to lose: 23 In order to effectively apply oversight, • 435 voting members, serve Republican-held seats are up for election, Congress delegates responsibilities to congresdistricts of mostly equal population sional committees-legislative SUb-organizaversus 12 seats held by Democrats. • Two-year terms tions that specialize in knowledge of a single The writers of the Constitution intended • All face election every two years matter important to the American people. members of the House of Representatives to be close to their constituents. Therefore, they One of these is the U.S. Senate Committee designed the body to be relatively large, with members repre- on Foreign Relations, cUlTently led by Chairman Joseph R. Biden, senting districts of similar-size populations, grouped by state. Jr., a Democrat. It is one of the oldest Senate committees and Alaska, for example, has few residents, and therefore holds only plays a crucial role in shaping U.S. foreign policy. It oversees the one seat in the House. California is the most populous, and holds Department of State, the U.S. Agency for International Deve53 seats. That gives the Golden State a lot of power. lopment, the Millennium Challenge Corporation and the Peace But, in the Senate, California has two votes, just like tiny Corps. This committee approved President George W. Bush's Rhode Island. The founders-fearing that more populous states nomination of U.S. Ambassador to India David C. Mulford. might impose policies against the interests of smaller onesOn May 30, Senator Russ Feingold, a prominent Democrat wanted each state to have an equal voice in the upper house. Also, from Wisconsin, visited India on behalf of the Foreign Relations the Senators were given longer terms, with the view that they Committee. Other members, Senator Biden, Senator John Kerry, could take a more dispassionate look at issues, and Senator Chuck Hagel, were in India earliand be less swayed by the immediate concerns er this year. The committee deals with such of the day. topics as the fight against telTorism, economic "It is not only possible, but common, advancement, and the sharing of nuclear techfor one political party to control the nology . ~ ~ , , ,\ White House and the other party to Members of the executive branch of govern• ment, such as Secretary of State Condoleezza "~'.'.\( .•.... "<. """':.:~ ,,11 . Rice, must report to Congress and answer questions when House of Representatives requested. The Constitution requires even the President to give '1-"-'''';' _ . Elections for all 435 seats an annual report to the combined House and Senate, in the State

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McCain vs. Obama

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Representing the state of Arizona as a Republican, John McCain has served in the Senate, the upper house of the U.S. Congress, since 1986. He spent 22 years in the Navy and credits military experience with shaping his understanding of national security and foreign policy ,

Top left: McCain hands boxes of pizza to firefighter Leonard Sieli in New York during a campaign visit. Top right: President Richard M. Nixon and other Americans welcomed McCain as a hero when he was released from a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp in 1973. Above left: McCain greets visitors at the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee, after an event to mark the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King, fr.'s assassination.

Above center: Members of the Gee's Bend Quilters Collective sing along with McCain aboard his campaign bus during a stop in Camden, Alabama. Above right: McCain toured the country with his book Faith of My Fathers in 1999 during his first campaign for the presidency. McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, on August 29, 1936, when his father was serving in the Navy in the then U.S territory.

After six months of primary voting, each of the largest American political parties has settled on a candidate who will make history if elected President of the United States in November. Senators Barack Obama of Illinois and John McCain of Arizona remain the presumptive Democratic and Republican candidates until their party conventions confirm their nominations in late August and September, If McCain wins, he would be the oldest person elected President of the United States, Obama would be the first African American President if he is victorious,

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in the Senate since 2004, Barack Obama introduced legislation that allows Americans to learn online how their tax dollars are spent. He also serves on the Veterans' Affairs Committee, which helps oversee the care of soldiers returning from IrcIq and Afghanistan

Above left: Obama works with Quincy, Illinois Mayor John Spring to fill sandbags used to halt flooding, during his campaign for the Democratic Party presidential nomination. Previously, Obama served eight years in the Illinois State Senate. Top right: Obama comforts student Marilyn Pace as they discuss her financial aid needs to remain enrolled at Wayne County Community

College in Michigan state in June 2008. Above center: Obama became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review in 1990. In this photo from his days at Harvard Law School, he holds a copy of the prestigious journal. Above right: Obama' s book The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, was published in 2006.

Above left: Obama was born August 4, 1961, in Hawaii. He is shown here with his mother, Ann Dunham, from Kansas, in the 1960s. Top center: Obama was 2 when his father left the family, returning only once, when this photo was taken. Obama was 10 and wrote poignantly about the visit years later in his memoiJ~ Dreams from My Father.

Above center: Obama, 9, with his Indonesian stepfather, Lola Soetoro; his mother, and his year-old half-sister, Maya, in Jakarta, Indonesia. Above right: Obama, his wife, Michelle, and daughters Malia and Sasha in Chicago, their hometown, in 2004.

Far left: McCain with his father, John S. McCain, Jr. The candidate is the son and grandson of Navy admirals. Left: McCain with his wife, Cindy, and their children (from left) Meghan, Bridget, Jimmy' and Jack. McCain also has three children from his first marriage. Bridget was adopted from the Mother Teresa orphanage in Bangladesh.

Ma..!iunatri Briandary

arely 24 hours before the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, Manjunath Bhandary was engaged in discussions with officials of the U.S National Security Council at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. The topic? How frequent acts of terrorism were tearing apart India's social and emotional fabric. Bhandary, who is general secretary of the Karnataka Pradesh Congress Committee, was beginning a stint with the American Council of Young Political Leaders, an international exchange program for politicians to increase crosscultural understanding. For the next two weeks, as he traveled across the American heartland, he "saw a rare display of oneness in their sorrow... despite coming from different ethnic and racial backgrounds." A globe-trotting politician who traces his roots to a farming village in southern India, Bhandary, 46, says the experience moved and inspired him. In addition to his political activ-

ities, Bhandary now funds and sponsors major initiatives to ~ spread awareness about HIV/AIDS ~ and drug abuse through the Bhandary Foundation. His involve- .~ ment with HIV/AIDS came after his ~ participation in the 2002 World ~ AIDS Conference in Barcelona, 0 \. Spain. "World leaders like Bill From left: Actress Ameesha Patel, ManJlmath Bhandary and d actress Poonam Dhillon at the 26th annual IndIa Independence CI'Int on and Ne Ison Mand e Ia hadd F . I h Id' N v k C'f . "006

mOist eyes after heanng the story of a woman who lost six of her children to the disease. It was then that I decided to do something about this constructively," he says. Bhandary's formative years were spent studying in a thatched cowshed that was transformed into a makeshift school every morning. "First-graders occupied the first row and others sat behind them according to their ages. We had only one teacher till the seventh standard, as there was no other school for miles. The roof was our only protection from the sun and rain," Bhandary says of his humble beginnings in Agasanahalli village in Karnataka's Shimoga district. For more informalion: By the time he shifted American Council of Young Political Leaders to Mangalore for further studies, the leadership bug had already bitten Eisenhower Fellowship him and he contested http://eisenhowerfe Ilowships,org/

Day Para e an. estlva. e In ew lor Bhandary was a guest of honor at the event.

student body elections at his college and university. In 1980, Bhandary began his formal political career with the Indian National Congress. His job included motivating young political workers and campaigning for his party at the grassroots level. After traveling to nearly 50 countries on goodwill and leadership missions, Bhandary still finds time to pursue his academic interests. A bachelor of engineering and an avid sports enthusiast, he is completing his M. Phil in political science from Madurai Kamaraj University in Tamil Nadu. Bhandary was also awarded the Eisenhower Fellowship in 2004, which allowed him to make a two-month tour of the United States, visiting state and municipal representatives in 22 states, including Maryland, Nevada, Mississippi,

111 L

Pennsylvania and Washington. "The fellowship provided a firsthand experience to examine the ways by which U.S. political leaders lead their staff, respond to their constituents and raise funds," he says Since 2004, Bhandary has attended four network programs of the Pennsylvania-basedEisenhower Fellowship in Singapore, Sri Lanka, China and Turkey. Besides broadening his perspective' the program gave him an opportunity to explore interests such as the higher education system, health care and rural agriculture. He says he was "amazed at the level of mechanization in the U.S. agricultural sector and the technological advances that have been made in farming eqUiPm~ Please share your views on this article. Write to editorspan@state.gov

Making a DiDerence An Indian American teenager, Anjali Bhatia, shows students they don't need to wait until they grow up to change their world for the better.

an a teenager really do something to change the world? Yes, if she is highly motivated, not bogged down by stereotypes and can convince her peers to channel their energies for a just cause. And Anjali Bhatia, 19, is showing how it can be done. She is the founder of Discover Worlds, a student-run nonprofit j'! which encourages young people to raise awareness and take action ~ on global issues such as poverty. Bhatia, who grew up in Kinnelon, f New Jersey, started the organization three years ago and since then ~ has established 57 chapters across the United States. ~ With bases in North Carolina and New Jersey, these chapters ~ focus on inspiring students to take the lead in bringing about ~ change in their communities. "The chapter leaders get initial is:: training from the experienced team members and then work Anjali Bhatia with students of Delhi Public School in Pune, independently on any issue of their choice. These chapters are Maharashtra, in 2004. helping in spreading awareness about issues like HIV/AIDS, her India trip t,o "strengthen their programs of micro lending to eradication of poverty, human trafficking," says Bhatia. women in the villages by working on implementing various Currently in India, Bhatia is setting up chapters of Discover Worlds in Kolkata. She is visiting high schools and making pre- programs that will better train the leaders of their self-help groups." sentations about the difference students can make. This September, Bhatia will be studying in Bangalore through "I am also contacting various NGOs in Kolkata and finding the International Honors Program: Cities in the 21st Century. "I out what volunteer positions they need and then encouraging high school students to get involved with local hospitals ... and will be studying rapidly developing cities and looking at the more," she says. political, environmental and other effects," she says. Her father, Moti Bhatia, from Surat, Gujarat, immigrated to In the future, she hopes to set up chapters in New Delhi, Mumbai, Pune and Surat. Bhatia believes that young Indians have the United States in 1982. Her mother, Radha, joined him in the "potential to be the strongest advocates and leaders in ending 1985. During her childhood visits to her grandparents in Surat and Agra, Bhatia remembers seeing children of her own age poverty. I am simply trying to encourage and motivate them." begging on the streets and poor patients In February, Bhatia's efforts were recogFor more informaUon: waiting for long hours in overcrowded clinnized by the Iowa-based U.S. Center for ics. At that time she resolved to do someCitizen Diplomacy, which gave her its first Discover Worlds thing to help the underprivileged. Bhatia National Award for Citizen Diplomacy. http://www .discoverwo rlds. 0 rg/ organized a fundraiser in her school when She was the youngest of the six awardees. she was just 9 and also collected clothes and Bhatia is a student of neuro-economics U.S. Center for Citizen Diplomacy computer games to bring to India. at Duke University in North Carolina. http://www .uscenterforcitizend iplomacy.org/ Bhatia accepts that she is not unique in Neuro-economics applies brain science her desire to help others but says that she and psychology to concepts like game themight be better informed than many of her ory and altruism to better understand http://www. ihp.edu/programs/c21 c/ peers. "Oftentimes, students are characterhuman behavior in the marketplace. Bengal Rural Welfare Service ized as being apathetic," she told Voice of As part of the university's Robertson America in an interview in March. "But in Scholars Program, Bhatia is working with actuality, students just don't know much the Bengal Rural Welfare Service during

Left: Anjali Bhatia (left) receiving the National Award for Citizen Diplomacy from Harriet Mayor Fulbright, board member of the U.S. Center for Citizen Diplomacy and president of the J. William & Harriet Fulbright Center. Below left: Bhatia learns basketweaving during a 2007 trip to Rwanda.

about these issues and they don't have a way to get involved." Last summer, Bhatia went to Rwanda to help children orphaned by the 1994 genocide or by HIV /AIDS. "Our programs in Rwanda are working to end poverty through relationships .. .instead of just donations." Through its University Scholarship Program, Discover Worlds helps selected Rwandan s~dents fmd U.S. sponsors who will fund their education in -Rwanda and thus help them rise out of poverty. The group's Sponsor an Orphan program helps find people or organizations who will provide money for children's education and health care. A sister school program emphasizes cultural exchange and

building friendships between American and Rwandan students through letters. Students in the United States can raise funds for their sister school and have Discover Worlds buy resources such as desks, chalk, pens. One pen is often shared by two or three students in some Rwandan schools. Bhatia feels that it is becoming more common for Indian students to get involved in community service. "Since this is so widespread in the U.S., I want to be able to show students in India that they can truly change the problems they see all around them using their. . .intelligence," she says. The Discover Worlds executive board serves as an umbrella for all the chapters and coordinates and monitors their efforts. "Any student can start a chapter if they have an interest in making a difference. All they need to do is contact someone in Discover Worlds to start the process," she says. How does Discover Worlds remain viable? "As we are all students, we do not have any specific worker who gets a specific salary, unlike the vast majority of NGOs. However, we have been operating on donations from those who believe in our mission," she says. Bhatia says her biggest strength has been her parents' belief that children can be leaders. "Most people believe that children must wait to be adults to make a huge change in the world. I never grew up with this concept." Her advice to Indians of her age: "Go beyond the daily life of academics and the occasional community service. Create the solution instead of waiting until you are adults."

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Minister of External Affairs Pranab Mukherjee (1) was among those celebrating America's Independence Day on July 4 at Roosevelt House, the residence of Ambassador David C. Mulford. In Kolkata, Consul General Henry V. Jardine hosted 400 guests, including painter Subhaprasanna (2) at the Hyatt Regency Hotel on July 3. The fun at the American Center in New Delhi (3) included Srishtee Sahni and other guests posing with cutouts of the U.S. Presidential candidates and "Uncle Sam," played by John Toole. Guests at the home of David T Hopper, Consul General in Chennai (4), played with American-style July 4th "sparklers," handheld fireworks that twinkle and smoke but don't explode! A choir from the Happy Home School for the Blind (5) sang at the July 4 celebration at the Mumbai Grand Hyatt, the last official engagement for departing Consul

General Michael S. Owen. On July 3, Mumbai's Terence Lewis Contemporary Dance Company (6) premiered Light Traces, which was choreographed by U.S. Department of State CultureConnect Envoy Marin Leggat, at St. Andrews Auditorium.

How the Asian honey bee resists Varroa mite infesta-

Sana Raoof, 17, from Muttontown, New York, won a $50,000 scholarship from the Intel Foundation, one of the top awards at the world's largest student science fair in Atlanta, Georgia, in May. Raoof, whose parents emigrated from New Delhi and Kashmir, was rewarded for her research in mathematical knot theory, which could help resolve classic biochemical problems, such as the knotting of proteins and DNA.

tion, one of the biggest threats to beekeeping in the United States, has been the focus of studies in India this past year by Fulbright scholar Jessica Burtness, a Ph.D student from the University of Minnesota who is affiliated with Raghavendra Gadagkar at the Centre for Ecological Sciences in Bangalore. She also visited the Central Bee Research and Training Institute in Pune, ~ Maharashtra. ~ UJ