FlashbacK : 50 Years Ago: The First Dog in Orbit

It's today :Research on space is showing the unlimited fortune of creation ,

Just a month after the Soviet Union stunned the world by putting the first artificial satellite into orbit, it boasted a new victory - a much bigger satellite carrying a mongrel dog called Laika.

The mission, 50 years ago Saturday, ended sadly for Laika but helped pave the way for human flight.

As with other episodes of the Soviet space program, Laika's mission was hidden under a veil of secrecy, and only after the collapse of the Soviet Union could the participants tell the real story behind it.

The satellite that carried Laika into orbit was built in less than a month in what was perhaps the world's fastest-prepared space mission ever.

Excited by the international uproar over the launch of Sputnik on Oct. 4, 1957, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev summoned Sergei Korolyov, the father of the Soviet space program, and ordered him to come up with "something new" to celebrate the Nov. 7 anniversary of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution.

Khrushchev's demand was a shock even for Korolyov, whose team had managed to put together the first Sputnik in less than three months, said Georgy Grechko, a cosmonaut who started his career as a space engineer.

"We didn't believe that you would outpace the Americans with your satellite, but you did it. Now you should launch something new by Nov. 7," Korolyov quoted Khrushchev telling him, according to Grechko.

Boris Chertok, Korolyov's right-hand man, said the short notice made it impossible to design a principally new spacecraft, but there was also little sense in simply repeating the Sputnik launch.

"Korolyov rightly feared that this holiday gift could end up in an accident that would spoil a hard-won victory," Chertok wrote in his memoirs. But they couldn't argue with Khrushchev, and the decision to conduct the launch was made on Oct. 12.

When someone on Korolyov's team suggested putting a dog into orbit, he jumped at the idea.

Little was known about the impact of space flight on living things, and some believed they would be unable to survive the launch or the conditions of outer space.

The Soviet Union had experimented with launching dogs on short suborbital missions during ballistic missile tests, and some of them survived several such missions. All of them were stray mongrel dogs - doctors believed they were able to adapt quicker to harsh conditions - and all were small so they could fit into the tiny capsules.

Just nine days before the launch, Doctor Vladimir Yazdovsky chose one of them - 2-year-old Laika - for the mission.

Stories about how she was chosen vary. Some say Laika was chosen for her good looks - a Soviet space pioneer had to be photogenic. Others say space doctors simply had a soft spot for Laika's main rival and didn't want to see her die: Since there was no way to design a re-entry vehicle in time for the launch, the glory of making space history also meant a certain death.

"Laika was quiet and charming," Yazdovsky wrote in his book chronicling the story of Soviet space medicine. He recalled that before heading to the launchpad, he took the dog home to play with his children.

"I wanted to do something nice for her: She had so little time left to live," Yazdovsky said.

Working round-the-clock, Korolyov and his team combined a capsule that would carry the dog with basic life-support systems and elements of the first Sputnik. To simplify the design, they decided not to separate the satellite from the booster's second stage.

They worked without blueprints at a pace that was breathtaking even at the time of the space race and seems utterly impossible by today's standards.

"Now when we have computers, sophisticated industrial equipment, lasers and other things, no one is capable of making a new satellite in just one month," Grechko said in an interview. "Now it would take a month just to start doing the paperwork. Korolyov told us later that it was the happiest month of his life."

As a result of some last-minute technical problems, Laika had to wait for the launch in the cabin for three days. The temperatures were low, and workers put a hose connected to a heater into the cockpit to keep her warm.

On Nov. 3, Laika blasted off into space in Sputnik 2, which weighed 1,118 pounds - a show of Soviet ability to take big payloads into space.

Sputnik 1 weighed just 184 pounds. The first U.S. satellite, Explorer 1, launched on Jan. 31, 1958, weighed about 31 pounds.

When Laika reached orbit, doctors found with relief that her pulse, which had risen on launch, and her blood pressure were normal. She ate specially prepared food from a container.

According to official Soviet reports, the dog was euthanized after a week. Laika's mission drew a wave of protests from animal protection activists in the West.

It wasn't until after the Soviet collapse, that some participants in the project told the true story: Laika indeed was to be euthanized with a programmed injection, but she apparently died of overheating after only a few hours in orbit. There was no information to indicate when exactly she died.

"It was impossible to build reliable life-support and thermal-control systems in such a short time," Chertok said in his memoirs.

Several other dogs died in failed launches before the successful space flight - and safe return to Earth - of Belka and Strelka in August 1960. After a few other flights with dogs, the Soviet Union put the world's first human - Yuri Gagarin - into space on April 12, 1961.

Gagarin is said to have joked: "I still don't understand who I am: the first human or the last dog in space."

Technorati : First Dog in Orbit, creation, research, space

Nanotechnology :MIT works toward 'smart' optical microchips

Light-powered micro-machines could advance telecommunications,

Rings, one millionth of a meter in size, are the moving parts of a 'smart' micromachine that could be powered and controlled by light on an optical chip. The rings move around and adapt to the color of light that is traveling through the bar, right.

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A new theory developed at MIT could lead to "smart" optical microchips that adapt to different wavelengths of light, potentially advancing telecommunications, spectroscopy and remote sensing.

Postdocs Peter Rakich, left, and Milos Popovic of MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics stand in front of a monitor that shows a demonstration of the way they propose to control microchips with light.

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Drawn by the promise of superior system performance, researchers have been exploring the concept of microchips that manipulate light instead of electricity. In their new theory, the MIT team has shown how such chips could feature tiny machines with moving parts powered and controlled by the very light they manipulate, giving rise to fundamentally new functionality.

"There are thousands of complex functions we could make happen by tinkering with this idea," said Peter Rakich, an MIT postdoctoral associate who invented the theoretical concept along with postdoc Milos Popovic. The work was described in the cover story of the November issue of Nature Photonics.

For example, such chips could one day be used to remotely adjust the amount of bandwidth available in an optical network, or to automatically process signals flowing through fiber-optic networks, without using any electrical power, Rakich said.

Coauthors on the paper were Marin Soljacic, assistant professor of physics; and Erich Ippen, the Elihu Thomson Professor of Electrical Engineering and professor of physics.

"The idea that opto-nanomechanical devices can be designed to self-adapt to all-optical control--i.e., by self-aligning their resonances to optical control frequencies and by permitting all-optical tuning and dimension control--is new and exciting," said Ippen.

Earlier this year an MIT team composed of many of the same researchers showed that photonic circuitry could be integrated on a silicon chip by polarizing all of the light to the same orientation. The current work shows how tiny mobile machines can be built on such chips, taking advantage of the substantial pressures exerted by photons as they strike the walls of a cavity.

In the macroscopic world, light waves do not exert significant forces, but in the unique world of the microscopic, coupled with ultrapure laser light, photons bouncing off the walls of a cavity can build up a measurable force called radiation pressure. This is similar to the pressure exerted by gas molecules trapped in an aerosol can.

To take advantage of this radiation pressure, the researchers propose machines built from ring-shaped cavities only millionths of a meter in size located on the chip surface. When pressure on the cavity walls is high enough, the cavity is forced to move. This movement forms a critical part of an optical micromachine, which adjusts its configuration to respond to light in a predesigned way.

A unique application of this concept involves processing data that travels in fiber-optic networks. Today resonators employed in fiber-optic networks have to be synchronized with the incident light to ring at its frequency, in the same way an opera singer has to tune the pitch of her voice to make a wine glass ring.

Remarkably, a "smart" resonator based on the MIT concept could chase the frequency (color) of the laser light incident upon it. As the frequency of the laser beam changes, the frequency of the resonator will always follow it, no matter where it goes.

In other words, this new, unique resonator is like a wine glass that self-adjusts to the pitch of the singer's voice and follows it along throughout a song, Rakich said. He noted that physical systems that adapt to driving light and behave like these nanomachines do not exist elsewhere in nature.

By coupling the resonating cavities with nano-scale cantilevers, optical devices analogous to microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) devices can be created.

Although the researchers focused on ring-shaped cavities, their model could be applied to other structures as well.

"Our objective now is to develop a variety of light-powered micro- and nanomachines with unique capabilities enabled by this technology," explained Popovic. "But the first step will be to demonstrate the concept in practice."

The research was funded in part by the Army Research Office through MIT's Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies.

Technorati : MIT Research, Nanotechnology, new chips, smart' optical microchips

TECH Market and economy : Silicon Valley economy despite uncertainty nationwide

Technology companies are prospering while Wall Street continues to deliver shocks like Merrill Lynch's $7.8 billion write-down due to a collapsing mortgage market and the reported looming departure of Citigroup Chief Executive Charles Prince. Adding to the woes, oil prices have topped $90 a barrel.

A week of turmoil in the financial industry and stock market has left technology stocks and Silicon Valley largely unscathed, reflecting trends that are making the region an economic star.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite index finished slightly higher over the past week, while the Dow Jones industrial average and Standard & Poor's 500 index had significant drops.

Apple had a surprisingly strong quarter, and Google stock passed $700 a share as the Mountain View Internet search company joined eBay, Yahoo, Intel, Seagate Technology and Genentech in reporting strong revenues. Microsoft revenue was up more than 23 percent from the same quarter in the previous year.

The strength extends to the broader Silicon Valley economy. A forecast by Spectrum Economics, released last month, reports that the region "unleashed itself from a faltering U.S. economy" during the past two years.

"Silicon Valley soared while the U.S. economy swooned," said the September 2007 update to the study, done for the San Jose Redevelopment Agency.

The United States may have lost its global competitive advantage in many areas, bua clear advantage, said Sung W. Sohn, Hanmi Bank's chief executive and president.

The housing market's troubles haven't affected the valley's overall economy, Spectrum said, while rising energy costs benefit high tech and green tech, one a valley staple and the other an emerging growth area.

"If you want to save energy, you have to use more electronics," Spectrum's chairman, Richard Carlson, said in an interview.

Venture capital is making a comeback in the wake of the mortgage bubble. "Compared to those screwball collateralized mortgage obligations, high tech looks simple," Carlson said.

Exports are buoying up the regional economy, too, as the declining dollar makes U.S. products a bargain to foreign buyers.

American technology companies "are huge exporters," Carlson said.

Though there was a drop of almost 2,200 in valley jobs in September over the month before, the numbers were skewed by a decline in public-sector hiring. That may be due to a late start for the school year, he said. Computer manufacturers added 1,800 jobs in September compared with a year earlier, but posted small losses from the previous month.

"The nation's economic problems will continue, but not at a level that is likely to threaten Silicon Valley's growth," the Spectrum study concluded.

The valley's job growth may slow somewhat but should outpace the nation's, according to Stephen Levy of the Center for Continuing Study of the California Economy.

"We'll be affected by housing, but less so because we didn't have a surge in home building or subprime loans," Levy said.

"We have the strongest new exciting sector in the world of opportunities around clean tech and the new funding for it," Levy said. "We are alive on the venture capital side and the Internet side. Nothing that's happened has threatened the resurgence of our economic base."

While the U.S. Commerce Department reported that the national economy turned in a solid 3.9 percent third-quarter growth in gross domestic product, economists worry that it may be the last encouraging quarterly number for a while.

That's because while consumer spending has remained strong, economists puzzle over where consumers were getting their spending money. The refinancing boom is over, and that was believed to have propelled consumer spending over the past two or more years.

"The 'Energizer Bunny' of the U.S. economy is the consumer," Carlson said. "The consumer has been taking some pretty serious hits, but it just keeps going."

t technology is one where it retains .

Technorati : economy control, silicon valley, technology market

EARTH QUAkE : Living on a fault: Homeowners shake off quake risk

Earth quake :

While only a few people in the east foothills experienced the shaking so near the epicenter, the Sabins are hardly alone living close to danger. There are at least 369,000 more people living near three major faults - the San Andreas, the Hayward and the Calaveras - than during the 1989 Loma Prieta quake. That 6.9 temblor, centered in the Santa Cruz Mountains, killed 62 people and caused $6 billion in destruction.

The newer population .

estimate comes from a 24hoursNews review of U.S. Geological Survey fault maps and data collected in 1990 and 2007 by the U.S. Census Bureau and the California Department of Finance. It is almost certainly low.

It does not include the populations of unincorporated areas of Santa Clara, Alameda, Contra Costa and San Mateo counties. And it does not include the growth of cities such as San Jose and Palo Alto, only parts of which are within five miles of one of the faults.

But for perspective, those 369,000 people represent more than 40 percent of the total population growth in those four counties since 1990.

The most growth - more than 200,000 people - has been along the Hayward Fault, particularly in Milpitas, Fremont and Hayward - an area seismologists say could be primed for another big shake.

A tour of fault country, days after the Bay Area's strongest quake since Loma Prieta, took a reporter from the redwood-clad billionaire estates of Woodside to the sunny suburban hillsides of Fremont to the rural hills above San Jose, where somebody like Kathy Sabin can still have enough land to keep 47 animals near the nation's 10th-most-populous city.

Homeowner after homeowner, when asked why they moved so close to a known fault, said accepting earthquake danger is part of the bargain you strike in exchange for the incredible views, weather, culture and outdoor life of the Bay Area. None of them intends to move. And there is also a subtle psychological adjustment: It's not so much a discounting of earthquake danger, but a sense that other natural disasters elsewhere are somehow worse.

As a California native, "I'm kind of used to earthquakes," said Kathy Sabin. "I would be more afraid of a tornado or a hurricane."

If the East Coast and the Gulf Coast have their hurricanes and blizzards, and the Midwest its tornadoes and floods, earthquakes are "our" natural disaster. Even as they threaten us, they also seem to define who we are.

San Andreas Fault

Loaded with plywood building materials, the truck wound its way through the rural groves of Woodside, past gated estates, past women on horseback, past an aptly named "Why Worry Lane."

The center of Woodside is less than a mile from the San Andreas Fault, but there's a lot of construction. Town records say the value of building permits for new construction, additions and alterations is up 35 percent in 2007 over the same period last year.

Real estate agents can recount multimillion-dollar sales falling through because of a mountain lion in the back yard, but hardly ever due to the nearby fault.

Though people are aware of the fault, it has not hurt real estate values, said Jayne Williams, an agent with Coldwell Banker. She was speaking with a friend - Pam McReynolds of La Honda - in the Woodside center, across the street from where Williams had been during the Loma Prieta quake.

"We've grown up with it," Williams, a Woodside native, said of the fault.

Of course, Williams' sister moved to Cape Cod to escape earthquakes. But Williams and McReynolds said they wouldn't trade natural disasters with her.

Farther south along the San Andreas - even on Loma Prieta Way in the mountains above Los Gatos, where a wag might say you're asking for trouble - new homes are being built.

But asked for the most earthquake-safe place to build a house in the Bay Area, USGS seismologist Tom Brocher only chuckles.

"As a rule of thumb, if you're within five miles, you are going to be strongly shaken," he said.

"If I told you to live in San Ramon, you're living on the Calaveras Fault, or close to it. In Pacifica, you're on the San Andreas Fault. Almost all of us live within five miles or so of one of the major faults."

Brocher said people should consider the earthquake hazard zone disclosures amid the stack of papers they sign when they buy a home.

"All you want to do is sign and take ownership of the house," he said. "We would like people to pay attention to that. They should definitely be aware of the risk."

And where in the Bay Area does a USGS seismologist live?

Brocher said he chose his home in Millbrae as much for its flat lot - safe from earthquake-triggered landslides - and its distance from soil liquefaction hazards around San Francisco Bay, as for its relative proximity to a fault line. He's just 1.5 miles from the San Andreas.

"I told my wife, 'Look you're not going to have any view of the bay,' " he said.

Hayward Fault

A good chunk of the Bay Area's population wasn't living here during the Loma Prieta quake. Many weren't even alive. About 29 percent of the population of Santa Clara County is under 21 - too young to remember Loma Prieta even if they had been born in 1989.

So for many, the Alum Rock quake was a first. But not for Sandy Movahed. The Fremont resident definitely remembers 1989: The Loma Prieta quake demolished her office in San Francisco. And yet she bought a home with her husband a few hundred yards from the Hayward Fault. A court reporter who transcribed lengthy state hearings on earthquakes, Movahed knows plenty about the phenomenon. She is confident the Bay Area's strict building codes will provide some protection.

"Bottom line," she says, "nobody knows when there's going to be an earthquake."

And one more thing: Her sunny neighborhood under the grassy hills, which overlooks the silver sweep of San Francisco Bay, has "probably the most perfect weather in the world."

Calaveras Fault

At the epicenter of Tuesday's quake, nobody seemed too concerned about future quakes.

Don and Joann Reed said the Loma Prieta quake caused a mini-tsunami that washed right out of their swimming pool. This quake did nothing like that.

"We're on fractured rock here, and I hear tell that fractured rock is better for you than solid rock," Joann Reed said.

Living on the Calaveras Fault for 32 years, the retired couple dismissed the thought of moving to escape a quake.

"Earthquakes don't happen as often as the hurricanes, and the tornadoes and the floods and those bad electrical storms and the awful heat with the humidity in the summertime and the just intolerable cold in the wintertime," Joann Reed said of the troubled life elsewhere. "Here it's an occasional earthquake and the rest of the time it's just like heaven."

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Technorati : Calaveras, Hayward, San Andreas, earth quake