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February 16, 2006

"Allow me to introduce myself. My name is August Christopher. I was named for St. Augustine, who coined my favorite phrase, 'Give me chastity and give me constancy, but do not give it yet.'"

The device is essentially a tabletop particle accelerator. At its heart are two opposing "pyroelectric" crystals that create a strong electric field when heated or cooled. The device is filled with deuterium gas -- a more massive cousin of hydrogen with an extra neutron in its nucleus. The electric field rips electrons from the gas, creating deuterium ions and accelerating them into a deuterium target on one of the crystals. When the particles smash into the target, neutrons are emitted, which is the telltale sign that nuclear fusion has occurred, according to Danon.
Now open your fridge after 17, 18, 21 days of neglect, and you will find the pre-sliced modern apple abiding: a bag of pristine white crescents, still smiling. In short, these are the most utilitarian apples mankind has ever built.
Crunch Pak was one of the first companies that labored to bring the new apple on line. Each found early on that what can be done casually at home — slicing an apple and squeezing lemon juice on it — is maddeningly difficult to pull off in a factory. The anti-browning bath is only one movement in a grand symphony of technologies at work. For nearly two decades, teams of food scientists, engineers and can-do businessmen struggled to pin down the apple, while the apple skirted and ducked them at every turn. They zigged, the apple zagged. Clearing one hurdle only brought more into view, and even now the particulars of production must be reassessed and rejiggered daily. The apple, Freytag told me when we first met, "is a moving target."
As soon as you slice into an apple, the apple mobilizes against you, swiftly and on many fronts. Chemical signals are broadcast, ramping up its production of the hormone ethylene, which encourages ripening, and increasing the rate at which the apple absorbs oxygen and gives off carbon dioxide — just as a human's breath will quicken when a person is injured.

The knife edge has meanwhile ruptured the architecture of countless cells. Substances normally compartmentalized within the fruit suddenly spill out and intermingle. Freed enzymes seep into cell walls, softening them. Little by little, like moisture in the walls of a house, this enfeebles the entire apple. Phytochemicals called phenols, the wealth of which make apples so good for us, are also loosed. So is an enzyme called polyphenol oxidase. Inevitably the two meet. Their reaction begets others, producing a chain of acids that clump together and coagulate into other acids called polyphenols. The polyphenols are brown and unappetizing. Rapidly, they occupy more and more of the flesh. The apple, left absent-mindedly on the counter when the phone rang or the baby started crying, has now efficiently disfigured itself. It is spectacularly good at this.
"We studied this at the Apple Commission in the 80's," says Steve Lutz, a second-generation apple man who headed the Washington Apple Commission until 2000. "At the time, it was sort of like the Holy Grail: if we could just figure out how to slice these goddarn things."
Over the years, Crunch Pak has been building a sweeping apple database. As the company constantly monitors and tweaks everything in the slicing room — the anti-browning treatments, water temperature, air temperature — it correlates those variables to the condition of the slices churned out. Entering any bag's 11-digit code gives a snapshot of how the processing floor was configured at the time it was sealed. The company is laboring, like a cryptographer, to decode the apple and predict with greater and greater confidence how any given one will react.

"It's all part of the equation," Freytag told me, shouting over the din of rushing water and the machinery's thwacks. "We look at the apples and have to figure out, what are the physiological issues inside that apple? And what are we going to have to do to sustain and accommodate them?" Among other things, an apple's specific chemistry dictates the optimal concentration of NatureSeal, the blend of vitamin C and calcium that finally made the nonbrowning apple slice a practicable proposition.

Though it may sound like glorified lemon juice, NatureSeal is the product of a decade of U.S.D.A. and private research. It's a flavorless white powder that, mixed with water, penetrates a few millimeters beneath the surface of a cut apple. (According to Crunch Pak, the sliced apples don't lose any nutritional value and in fact NatureSeal ends up fortifying each apple with 200 percent of the daily requirement of Vitamin C.) The ascorbic acid in NatureSeal searches out and bonds to the loose phenols, blocking them off from the polyphenol oxidase enzyme and interrupting the browning reaction. The calcium salts work like cement to stiffen the fruit's softening cell walls. All of this happens inside the apple, so the solution leaves no perceptible layer or shell on the surface — unlike, say, the high-sheen shellac on Goobers, or the substrate on time-released pain relievers, both of which NatureSeal's producer, Mantrose-Haueser, also makes.
A pair of court decisions in the last few weeks shows that judges are split on whether this is legal. One federal magistrate judge in Wisconsin on Jan. 17 ruled it was unlawful, but another nine days later in Louisiana decided that it was perfectly OK.

This is an unfortunate outcome, not least because it shows that some judges are reluctant to hold federal agents and prosecutors to the letter of the law.

It's also unfortunate because it demonstrates that the FBI swore never to use a 1994 surveillance law to track cellular phones--but then, secretly, went ahead and did it, anyway.

When lobbying for that law, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, then-FBI Director Louis Freeh assured the U.S. Senate that location surveillance would never take place unless there was evidence of wrongdoing.

"It does not include any information which might disclose the general location of a mobile facility or service, beyond that associated with the area code or exchange of the facility or service," Freeh testified. "There is no intent whatsoever, with reference to this term, to acquire anything that could properly be called 'tracking' information."

So much for promises from politicians.
In 1943, the U.S. command, concerned about the movement’s growth, sent the USS Echo to Tanna with Maj. Samuel Patten on board. His mission was to convince John Frum followers that, as his report put it, “the American forces had no connection with Jonfrum.” He failed. At war’s end, the U.S. military unwittingly enhanced the legend of their endless supply of cargo when they bulldozed tons of equipment—trucks, jeeps, aircraft engines, supplies—off the coast of Espíritu Santo. During six decades in the shallows, coral and sand have obscured much of the watery grave of war surplus, but snorkelers can still see tires, bulldozers and even full Coke bottles. The locals wryly named the place Million Dollar Point.

After the war, when they returned home from Port-Vila to their huts, the Tanna men were convinced that John Frum would soon join them, and hacked a primitive airstrip out of the jungle in the island’s north to tempt the expected American planes from the skies. Across the South Pacific, thousands of other cargo cult followers began devising similar plans—even building bamboo control towers strung with rope and bamboo aerials to guide in the planes. In 1964, one cargo cult on New Hanover Island in Papua New Guinea offered the U.S. government $1,000 for Lyndon Johnson to come and be their paramount chief.

In the new study, babies listened either to two or three women simultaneously saying the word 'look'.

At the same time, the infants could choose between video images of two or three women saying the word.

As they had found with the monkeys, the researchers say the babies spent significantly more time looking at the video image that matched the number of women talking.

"As a result of our experiments, we conclude that the babies are showing an internal representation of 'two-ness' or three-ness' that is separate from sensory modalities and thus reflects an abstract internal process," writes researcher Dr Elizabeth Brannon, an assistant professor in psychological and brain sciences.

"These results support the idea that there is a shared system between preverbal infants and nonverbal animals for representing numbers," she says.

"What we do know is that somehow, very quickly, [the babies] acquire this ability to perceive number and divorce it from the sensory information."
Gimzewski discovered cell sounds using a device called an atomic force microscope. But he says the name is a misnomer.

"It's not a microscope that you look through a lens to see something … [I]t's kind of a paradigm shift in a way, from looking at things to a form of feeling them," he said.

The device has a very sharp tip that is attached to a spring, like the needle on a record player.

When Gimzewski and his colleagues rested the needle on a yeast cell, they discovered the cell wall moved up and down at an audible frequency. When they fed the movement through a computer loudspeaker, they could hear it.

Posted by Jon Rubin at February 16, 2006 04:44 PM

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