Mars' two-faced riddle 'solved' From BBC
The puzzle of why the northern and southern hemispheres of Mars look so different may now have been solved.
Mars' crust is thicker in the southern hemisphere, and magnetic anomalies are found in the south but not the north.
New studies in Nature magazine suggest that a massive space rock smashing into the planet could have created an abrupt disparity between the two halves.
This asteroid would have been close to the size of Earth's moon and hit Mars' northern regions, scientists say.
According to one group of researchers, the rock struck with an energy equivalent to a quadrillion atomic bombs like the one dropped on Nagasaki in 1945.
Mars' northern hemisphere is an enormous lowland basin which might once have held a mighty ocean.
It's a very old idea, but nobody had done the numerical calculations Francis Nimmo, UCSC
The southern hemisphere, on the other hand, comprises rugged, crater-pitted highlands with an altitude up to 8,000m (26,000ft) greater than the north.
The new research suggests Mars bears the largest impact scar known anywhere in the Solar System.
It challenges an alternative theory which proposes that the "two faces" of Mars are the result of enormous volcanic disruption 3.8 billion years ago.
Deep impact
The scientists on the latest work used data from two Mars-orbiting spacecraft: Reconnaissance Orbiter and Global Surveyor.
Researchers led by Francis Nimmo at the University of California, Santa Cruz, US, carried out computer simulations to show that an impact with particular conditions could produce the present-day appearance of Mars.
These conditions indicate a space rock about one-half to two-thirds the size of Earth's Moon, striking the Red Planet at an angle of 30 to 60 degrees. This would have produced an elliptical crater.
"It's a very old idea, but nobody had done the numerical calculations to see what would happen when a big asteroid hits Mars," said the associate professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UCSC.
The team's findings are corroborated by another study in Nature led by Oded Aharonson, associate professor of planetary science at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), also US.
"The dichotomy is arguably the oldest feature on Mars," Dr Aharonson explained. The feature arose more than four billion years ago, before the rest of the planet's complex geological history was superimposed."
This was about the same time that a much bigger object slammed into the Earth, throwing material into orbit around our infant planet. This material is thought to have coalesced to form the Moon.
Indeed, the coincidence in timing of the formation of our Moon and the Mars dichotomy is probably not coincidental at all.
Tail end
"It happened probably right at the end of the formation of the four terrestrial planets - Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars," said Craig Agnor, a co-author on the Francis Nimmo study.
He told BBC News: "We think the planets formed out of a disc of rocks. As the rocks collide, you get bigger rocks and so on. Eventually, you end up with four planets and a lot of rocks - of various sizes.
"In terms of the process of the planets sweeping up the last bits of debris, this could have been one of the last big bits of debris."
Shock waves from the impact would travel through the planet and disrupt the crust on the other side, causing changes in the magnetic field recorded there.
The predicted changes are consistent with observations of magnetic anomalies in the southern hemisphere, according to Dr Nimmo.
In a third study published in Nature, Jeffrey Andrews-Hanna and Maria Zuber of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, and Bruce Banerdt of Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, provide impact evidence from gravitational and topographical signatures on Mars.

Science
TV Really Might Cause Autism
A Slate exclusive: findings from a new Cornell study.

By Gregg Easterbrook (Oct 2006)
Last month, I speculated in Slate that the mounting incidence of childhood autism may be related to increased television viewing among the very young. The autism rise began around 1980, about the same time cable television and VCRs became common, allowing children to watch television aimed at them any time. Since the brain is organizing during the first years of life and since human beings evolved responding to three-dimensional stimuli, I wondered if exposing toddlers to lots of colorful two-dimensional stimulation could be harmful to brain development. This was sheer speculation, since I knew of no researchers pursuing the question.
Today, Cornell University researchers are reporting what appears to be a statistically significant relationship between autism rates and television watching by children under the age of 3. The researchers studied autism incidence in California, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Washington state. They found that as cable television became common in California and Pennsylvania beginning around 1980, childhood autism rose more in the counties that had cable than in the counties that did not. They further found that in all the Western states, the more time toddlers spent in front of the television, the more likely they were to exhibit symptoms of autism disorders.
The Cornell study represents a potential bombshell in the autism debate. "We are not saying we have found the cause of autism, we're saying we have found a critical piece of evidence," Cornell researcher Michael Waldman told me. Because autism rates are increasing broadly across the country and across income and ethnic groups, it seems logical that the trigger is something to which children are broadly exposed. Vaccines were a leading suspect, but numerous studies have failed to show any definitive link between autism and vaccines, while the autism rise has continued since worrisome compounds in vaccines were banned. What if the malefactor is not a chemical? Studies suggest that American children now watch about four hours of television daily. Before 1980—the first kids-oriented channel, Nickelodeon, dates to 1979—the figure is believed to have been much lower.
The Cornell study is by Waldman, a professor in the school's Johnson Graduate School of Management, Sean Nicholson, an associate professor in the school's department of policy analysis, and research assistant Nodir Adilov. "Several years ago I began wondering if it was a coincidence that the rise in autism rates and the explosion of television viewing began about the same time," Waldman said. "I asked around and found that medical researchers were not working on this, so accepted that I should research it myself." The Cornell study looks at county-by-county growth in cable television access and autism rates in California and Pennsylvania from 1972 to 1989. The researchers find an overall rise in both cable-TV access and autism, but autism diagnoses rose more rapidly in counties where a high percentage of households received cable than in counties with a low percentage of cable-TV homes. Waldman and Nicholson employ statistical controls to factor out the possibility that the two patterns were simply unrelated events happening simultaneously. (For instance, petroleum use also rose during the period but is unrelated to autism.) Waldman and Nicholson conclude that "roughly 17 percent of the growth in autism in California and Pennsylvania during the 1970s and 1980s was due to the growth in cable television."
But the fact that rising household access to cable television seems to associate with rising autism does not reveal anything about how viewing hours might link to the disorder. The Cornell team searched for some independent measure of increased television viewing. In recent years, leading behavioral economists such as Caroline Hoxby and Steven Levitt* have used weather or geography to test assumptions about behavior. Bureau of Labor Statistics studies have found that when it rains or snows, television viewing by young children rises. So Waldman studied precipitation records for California, Oregon, and Washington state, which, because of climate and geography, experience big swings in precipitation levels both year-by-year and county-by-county. He found what appears to be a dramatic relationship between television viewing and autism onset. In counties or years when rain and snow were unusually high, and hence it is assumed children spent a lot of time watching television, autism rates shot up; in places or years of low precipitation, autism rates were low. Waldman and Nicholson conclude that "just under 40 percent of autism diagnoses in the three states studied is the result of television watching." Thus the study has two separate findings: that having cable television in the home increased autism rates in California and Pennsylvania somewhat, and that more hours of actually watching television increased autism in California, Oregon, and Washington by a lot.
Research has shown that autistic children exhibit abnormal activity in the visual-processing areas of their brains, and these areas are actively developing in the first three years of life. Whether excessive viewing of brightly colored two-dimensional screen images can cause visual-processing abnormalities is unknown. The Cornell study makes no attempt to propose how television might trigger autism; it only seeks to demonstrate a relationship. But Waldman notes that large amounts of money are being spent to search for a cause of autism that is genetic or toxin-based and believes researchers should now turn to scrutinizing a television link.
There are many possible objections to the Cornell study. One is that time indoors, not television, may be the autism trigger. Generally, indoor air quality is much lower than outdoor air quality: Recently the Environmental Protection Agency warned, "Risks to health may be greater due to exposure to air pollution indoors than outdoors." Perhaps if rain and snow cause young children to spend more time indoors, added exposure to indoor air pollution harms them. It may be that families with children at risk for autism disorders are for some reason more likely to move to areas that get lots of rain and snow or to move to areas with high cable-television usage. Some other factor may explain what only appears to be a television-autism relationship.
Everyone complains about television in a general way. But if it turns out television has specific harmful medical effects—in addition to these new findings about autism, some studies have linked television viewing by children younger than 3 to the onset of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder—parents may urgently need to know to keep toddlers away from the TV. Television networks and manufacturers of televisions may need to reassess how their products are marketed to the young. Legal liability may come into play. And we live in a society in which bright images on screens are becoming ever more ubiquitous: television, video games, DVD video players, computers, cell phones. If screen images cause harm to brain development in the young, the proliferation of these TV-like devices may bode ill for the future. The aggressive marketing of Teletubbies, Baby Einstein videos, and similar products intended to encourage television watching by toddlers may turn out to have been a nightmarish mistake.
If television viewing by toddlers is a factor in autism, the parents of afflicted children should not reproach themselves, as there was no warning of this risk. Now there is: The American Academy of Pediatrics currently recommends against any TV for children under the age of 2. Waldman thinks that until more is known about what triggers autism, families with children under the age of 3 should get them away from the television and keep them away.
Researchers might also turn new attention to study of the Amish. Autism is rare in Amish society, and the standing assumption has been that this is because most Amish refuse to vaccinate children. The Amish also do not watch television.

The Frog Theory

If you drop a frog in boiling water he will leap right out. If you slowly heat the water he will be content until it’s too late to get out. That is exactly how history works. It moves slowly and we never really see any danger until it’s too late.
Remember how suppressed workers were before unions came along? The unions leveled the playing field. Unfortunately, over a long period of time the pendulum swung too far. Slowly, businesses and factories closed and jobs left the country. We were comfortable and didn’t see the change coming. We blamed everyone except ourselves for what happened. We weren’t alert to how slow things change over time.
World War II, and the Korean War, demonstrated how powerful a united nation could be. Our nation, and our families, were united. The father was the head of the family and the President was the head of the nation. Both were highly respected. We were content and happy.
We were good at fighting a hot war but we were unprepared to fight a cold war with the communists in the 50’s. They knew they couldn’t change us but they didn’t care. Their philosophy was to wait it out and capture the minds of our children. They loaded our colleges with many of their professors and waited. It didn’t take long to see the results.
The 60′’s ushered in the radicals, drug culture, student protesters, and the Vietnam War. The aim of the cold war was to divide and conquer. They divided our families and the nation. The secret to defeating a polite and respectful people is to scream. The louder and longer you scream the better your chance of winning. Radicals are masters at this form of attack. They know if you constantly scream and repeat a lie it will eventually become the truth.
The media, and Hollywood, hammered us with hate America themes and stories. Our service men, and women, were jeered, cursed, and spit on. Even the people, who latter wanted to become their President, thrashed them. We lost our first War in history. There was no hero’s homecoming for our fighting men and women.
The Reverend King, who was raised in the old school, peacefully changed the race issue and united the people. When he died the new breed of leaders like the Jesse Jackson’s, Lewis Farakon,’s Al Sharpton’s, and Rev. Wright’s put a lid on his efforts and turned racism into a money making machine.
Corporations were green-mailed by threats of protests, product boycotts, or endless lawsuits. Every issue, large or small, became a race issue. The public recoiled in fear of being called a racist. Their voices were silenced because one word could cost you a career, get you fired, or get you sued.
Even politicians buckled under to the pressure. The Florida legislature issued a formal apology for having slavery 200 years ago. They were thanked by being asked for compensation. There is no end in sight for this kind of nonsense. America didn’t capture slaves and bring them to America. Their own people sold them to slave traders from several nations. This knowledge doesn’t stop the screamers. History is what it is and you can’t change it. There have been many tragic events in history. You acknowledge them and move on.
They divided our nation into two separate Americas. We now have Americans, and African-Americans, although Africa has nothing to do with being an American. You can be one or the other but not both. You are what you were born to be. You do not subordinate our country to any foreign nation. It’s equivalent to flying the African flag above the Stars and Stripes. If you hyphenate two countries America always comes first.
This election year could be the turning point in our history because the frog theory has come into play. It’s time to step back and look at how the country has slowly changed since the cold war started. Don’t get caught up in all the hype.
George McGovern was the first Presidential candidate to test the waters with college students. The Clinton’s played a big role in his campaign. It was the worst campaign ever run. He was crushed in the election.
Step two was to infiltrate all the information vehicles such as radio, newspapers, magazines, TV and movies. They were quite successful at that. Jimmy Carter was the first President to demonstrate the leadership skills of the far left. Weak military, high taxes, runaway inflation, 19% mortgage rates, and plain incompetence ended his career in Washington. Iran, a small country at the time, took American hostages and kicked sand in our face. By negotiating from weakness Carter could not get the hostages released.
The big benefit of the Carter years is that they were followed by the Reagan years. The nation got a clear look at the difference between a weak nation and a strong nation. Every student should know this difference. When Ronald Reagan took over the hostages were quickly released, taxes were lowered, inflation dropped, mortgage rates dropped, and the military was strengthened. Russia quickly waved the white flag and waited for another Democrat term.
Clinton took over Carters uncompleted social programs. He weakened the military and tried to pass large government programs. An Intern derailed his Presidency. While he was tied up with his personal problems his lawyers ran the country. He passed up three opportunities to take out Osama Bin Laden. This eventually cost us the loss of our Twin Towers, thousands of American lives, and got us involved in a war with Iraq.
By the end of his term the left had captured a large share of the media and it flexed its muscle in 2000. The hate Bush campaign got off to a roaring start. The brainwashing theory of repeating the same story over and over again was launched.
There were endless stories about our evil nation and its President. Top-secret plans were leaked to the press and printed for the entire world to see. Hollywood cranked out documentaries about the evil Bush administration and our evil military. They laid the groundwork for the next election. The ACLU flooded the courts with lawsuits and the Democrat party became a law firm. Almost every incumbent, or his or her spouse, is a lawyer.
They now have the perfect candidate because they can squash criticism by playing the race card. If you don’t like Obama, or criticize him, you are a racist. They can hide his inexperience and background by turning him into a rock star and singing change and hope. They don’t tell us what kind of change, or how it will be done, only that you should hope for the best. By keeping the hype going they don’t have to put anything of substance on the table.
The only thing we really know about Obama is that his wife has never been proud to be an American. They want us to believe that his liberal college professors, Rev. Pfleger, his ties to radicals Bill Ayer and Lewis Farakon, and listening to the Rev. Wright’s hate talks for 20 years, had no influence on his thinking. If they didn’t, then who did? He wasn’t in business and didn’t see fit to serve his country. These people launched his political career and their organizations received earmarks in return for their campaign donations and political help. They must have had some influence. Rev. Wright’s church received over $15 million. That’s only one small local church. Think on a national scale.
The change being promoted is a change back to the Carter years. It started in 2006 when the lawyer party took over. There have been endless lawsuits and investigations in retaliation for the Clinton years. It keeps the lawyers busy but does nothing for the economy. The economy has been in a downward spiral since they took over.
Returning to the Carter years of high taxes, high inflation, and a weak military is not the change we are looking for. We cannot cower to a bunch of crazies whose only goal in life is to kill us.
The old sage’s (over 50) will have to play a big role in this election. The young people simply don’t know what the aged know. The advantage of aging is the knowledge you accumulated. You know what United States means. You know what the seldom-heard word respect means. You know how wonderful freedom and independence is. You know the difference between a strong and a weak nation; and you know what it takes to keep it strong. You know history because you have lived it.
Although the old guard is dying off, and getting to tired to fight, they have to muster one more charge. If they don’t, our children, and grandchildren, will never know the joy and freedom that is the bedrock of our country. The heat is slowly being turned up and the water is getting hot. The old frogs better start jumping before it’s too late.

You Are How You Camped!

What your enjoyment of sleep-away camp, or lack of same, says about your character.

By Timothy Noah (Slate)
It's the dog days of summer, and thousands of kids across the country are off at sleep-away camp. In 2006, Timothy Noah noticed that the degree to which you enjoy summer camp as a kid informs the personality you adopt as an adult. The article is reprinted below.
If there's a more reliable

Rorschach than sleep-away camp, I'd like to see it. How you responded to being shipped off (often at an appallingly tender age) to a cluster of cedar cabins beside a mountain lake; to being taught Native American crafts, chants, and songs of dubious authenticity; and to being subjected to various painful hazing rituals—many of them involving underwear—reveals an awful lot about your fundamental character. If, as the Duke of Wellington claimed, the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, then the psychotherapy bills of our own great nation were run up on the tetherball courts of Camp Weecheewachee (or whatever the hell your summer camp was called).
Let's begin with the people who didn't like camp
I was one such person. The first camp I got sent to was Camp Lenox, an establishment in the Berkshires that is still in business. During my summer there, in 1966, it was run by and for males who thrived on athletic competition. I did not. My older brother was an enthusiastic jock, and it was his love for the place that landed me there. I don't remember seeing much of him after we got off the bus—he was seven years my senior—but he'd occasionally appear in the distance, wearing the black beret that marked him as my enemy in Color War. I was assigned to the orange team; our symbol was a baton. To this day I shake my head in disbelief that a responsible camp director would set brother against brother in the name of competitive sport. Perhaps you find my thinking on this point a little rigid. Well, I'm sorry, but I'm not the sort of person who can alter his loyalties so easily, even within such a character-building realm. (I would have made a terrible Kennedy.)
Observing my perplexity with mild concern, my parents shipped me off to a different camp the following summer. This was Camp Arcady, in the Adirondacks. Now defunct, it was co-ed and less single-mindedly dedicated to sports than Camp Lenox had been. Arcady had other advantages over its predecessor, the most memorable being a waterfront counselor named Doreen who had once been a Mouseketeer on The Mickey Mouse Club. Visions of Doreen (who in the decade since her TV stardom had filled out quite satisfactorily) haunted my prepubescent dreams. Even now, in my mind's eye, I see Doreen emerging, like Botticelli's Venus, from a clamshell perched on the shores of Lake George, a whistle nestled chastely in her cleavage. It was probably because of Doreen that I learned to water-ski. Water-skiing is the only camp sport I remember enjoying. Otherwise, I was pretty miserable. For the evidence, click here (center row, fifth from the left).
People (like myself) who didn't enjoy camp tend to have a problem engaging in organized activities of all kinds. Later in life we often become criminals or sociopaths. The more respectable among us often become journalists. If we're extremely bright or creative (or aspire to be), we may become writers or scholars or artists. The common thread is an outsider mentality. A self-flattering analysis, I know, but such is my privilege as author of this article.
Some people hated camp so much that they made their parents bring them home. These people should not be confused with the outlaws described above. There is nothing outré about not being able to endure summer camp. The come-and-get-me set grow up to be neurotic and needy. These are people who can often be heard on C-SPAN's early-morning call-in program Washington Journal, filibustering from a time zone still blanketed in predawn darkness, until the host says, "Please state your question."
Some people enjoy camp. These people grow up to be normal. My own two children, I'm pleased to report, belong to this category, assuming the blasé letters I'm receiving ("Pringles would taste pretty good right about now") reflect sincere contentment.
Some people really, really enjoy camp. I wish I could tell you that these people grow up to be really, really normal, but they don't. You know who I'm talking about. These are the ones who wept uncontrollably when the papiermâché numbers spelling out 1967 were set ablaze on a little raft that a camp counselor, under cover of darkness, towed stealthily to the middle of Lake Weecheewachee on the evening of the last group sing. These are the people for whom childhood represented the zenith of human existence and everything that followed an anticlimax. The women—they're mostly women—usually end up in abusive relationships with pathologically angry men who eventually abandon them and pay child support erratically, if at all. If the person who really, really enjoyed camp is a man, then he is unlikely ever to develop an intimate relationship and on occasion may be spotted in the back of a police cruiser speeding away from a grade-school playground.
The final category is people who really, really, really enjoy camp. These are the camp cultists. You probably expect me to say that these campers grow up to be utterly incapable of functioning in a noncamp environment, and end up sleeping on the streets in cardboard boxes. In fact, the opposite is true. Camp cultists grow up to be chief executive officers of major corporations, name partners in Wall Street banking firms, Cabinet secretaries, governors, and presidents of prestigious foundations. Their universities invite them to serve on their boards. Their home towns name schools after them. They are the Establishment. Longtime Disney CEO Michael Eisner is a camp cultist, having published, in 2005, Camp, a memoir of his bygone days at Vermont's Keewaydin Canoe Camp, which bills itself as the nation's oldest continually operating summer camp (it was founded in 1893), and whose Web site invites alumni to donate securities to something called the Keewaydin Foundation. I haven't read Eisner's book, but according to Amazon.com, its "statistically improbable phrases" include "winds ceremony" and "Indian circle."
For camp cultists, summer camp is an experience that lasts a lifetime. When they're too old to be campers, they come back as counselors. When they're too old to be counselors, they send their children in their stead. When their children eventually succeed (on the third or fourth try) in getting themselves thrown out of Camp Weecheewachee, for infractions too ghastly to contemplate, camp cultists send money. Lots and lots of money. If it weren't for camp cultists, half the summer camps in the United States would be forced to close their doors, depriving today's campers of this essential early exercise in psychological sorting.
Or perhaps not. Montana Miller, a folklorist who teaches a class called "Summer Camp Ethnography" at Ohio's Bowling Green State University, insists that even children who don't attend summer camp subject themselves to the same psychological sorting process by imagining that they did. In an e-mail to me, she elaborated:
There have been so many movies and books and TV shows—not to mention the stories told by friends who return from camp—that kids internalize whether or not they went to camp themselves. … I had [my students] do an in-class writing assignment in which they recounted an anecdote from camp—presenting it as a personal-experience narrative, but not necessarily real. It could be fictional or something that happened to someone they knew. They read their anecdotes out loud to the class and we tried to guess whether these were real experiences they had had themselves, or constructions from their imaginations and their pop culture educations. You know what? In almost every case, it was impossible to tell.
The summer-camp ink blot, then, is universal. You are how you camped, even if you never went.

Ore. man completes flight of fancy - in lawn chair
By KEITH RIDLER – 10 hours ago
CAMBRIDGE, Idaho (AP) — Using his trusty BB gun to help him return to Earth, a 48-year-old gas station owner flew a lawn chair rigged with helium-filled balloons more than 200 miles across the Oregon desert Saturday, landing in a field in Idaho.
Kent Couch created a sensation in this tiny farming community, where he touched down safely in a pasture after lifting off from Bend, Ore., and was soon greeted by dozens of people who gave him drinks of water, local plumber Mark Hetz said.
"My wife works at the City Market," Hetz said. "She called and said, 'The balloon guy in the lawn chair just flew by the market, and if you look out the door you can see him.
"We go outside to look, and lo and behold, there he is. He's flying by probably 100 to 200 feet off the ground.
"He takes his BB gun and shoots some balloons to lower himself to the ground. When he hit the ground he released all the little tiny balloons. People were racing down the road with cameras. They were all talking and laughing."
Couch covered about 235 miles in about nine hours after lifting off at dawn from his gas station riding in a green lawn chair rigged with an array of more than 150 giant party balloons.
Sandi Barton, 58, who has lived her whole life in this town of about 300, said she and her brother-in-law were the first ones to reach Couch and shook his hand.
"Not much happens in Cambridge," she said, adding that about half the town turned out.
"He came right over our pea field," she said. "He was coming down pretty fast."
She said Couch gave some of his balloons to local children.
It was not clear where Couch went after he landed.
It began after Couch, clutching a big mug of coffee, kissed his wife and kids goodbye, then patted their shivering Chihuahua, Isabella, on the head.
After spilling off some cherry-flavored Kool-Aid that served as ballast, Couch got a push from the ground crew so he could clear light poles and soared over a coffee cart and across U.S. Highway 20 into a bright blue sky.
"If I had the time and money and people, I'd do this every weekend," Couch said before getting into the chair. "Things just look different from up there. You've moving so slowly. The best thing is the peace, the serenity.
"Originally, I wanted to do it because of boyhood dreams. I don't know about girls, but I think most guys look up in the sky and wish they could ride on a cloud."
Couch's wife, Susan, called him crazy: "It's never been a dull moment since I married him."
This was Couch's third balloon flight. He realized it would be possible after watching a TV show about the 1982 lawn chair flight over Los Angeles of truck driver Larry Walters, who gained folk hero fame but was fined $1,500 for violating air traffic rules.
In 2006, Couch had to parachute out after popping too many balloons. And last year he flew 193 miles to the sagebrush of northeastern Oregon, short of his goal.
"I'm not stopping till I get out of state," he said.
To that end, he ordered more balloons. Dozens of volunteers wearing fluorescent green T-shirts that said "Dream Big" filled latex balloons 5 feet in diameter, attached them to strings and tied clusters of six balloons each to a tiny carabiner clip.
Each balloon gives four pounds of lift. The chair was about 400 pounds, and Couch and his parachute 200 more.
"I'd go to 30,000 feet if I didn't shoot a balloon down periodically," Couch said.
For that job, he carried a Red Ryder BB gun and a blow gun equipped with steel darts. He also had a pole with a hook for pulling in balloons, a parachute in case anything went wrong, a handheld Global Positioning System device with altimeter, a satellite phone, and two GPS tracking devices. One was one for him, the other for the chair, which got away in the wind as he landed last year.
For food he carried some boiled eggs, jerky and chocolate.
Couch flew hang gliders and skydived before taking up lawn-chair flights. He estimated the rig cost about $6,000, mostly for helium. Costs were defrayed by corporate sponsors.
Associated Press writer Jeff Barnard contributed to this story from Bend, Ore.
On the Net:
Kent Couch's flight: http://www.couchballoons.com
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Copyright © 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

New Map IDs The Core Of The Human Brain
The first complete high-resolution map of the human cerebral cortex identifies a single network core that could be key to the workings of both hemispheres of the brain. (Credit: Indiana University)
ScienceDaily (July 1, 2008) — An international team of researchers has created the first complete high-resolution map of how millions of neural fibers in the human cerebral cortex -- the outer layer of the brain responsible for higher level thinking -- connect and communicate. Their groundbreaking work identified a single network core, or hub, that may be key to the workings of both hemispheres of the brain.
The work by the researchers from Indiana University, University of Lausanne, Switzerland, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, and Harvard Medical School marks a major step in understanding the most complicated and mysterious organ in the human body. It not only provides a comprehensive map of brain connections (the brain "connectome"), but also describes a novel application of a non-invasive technique that can be used by other scientists to continue mapping the trillions of neural connections in the brain at even greater resolution, which is becoming a new field of science termed "connectomics."
"This is one of the first steps necessary for building large-scale computational models of the human brain to help us understand processes that are difficult to observe, such as disease states and recovery processes to injuries," said Olaf Sporns, co-author of the study and neuroscientist at Indiana University.
Until now, scientists have mostly used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology to measure brain activity -- locating which parts of the brain become active during perception or cognition -- but there has been little understanding of the role of the underlying anatomy in generating this activity. What is known of neural fiber connections and pathways has largely been learned from animal studies, and so far, no complete map of brain connections in the human brain exists.
In this new study, a team of neuroimaging researchers led by Hagmann used state-of-the-art diffusion MRI technology, which is a non-invasive scanning technique that estimates fiber connection trajectories based on gradient maps of the diffusion of water molecules through brain tissue. A highly sensitive variant of the method, called diffusion spectrum imaging (DSI), can depict the orientation of multiple fibers that cross a single location. The study applies this technique to the entire human cortex, resulting in maps of millions of neural fibers running throughout this highly furrowed part of the brain.
Sporns then carried out a computational analysis trying to identify regions of the brain that played a more central role in the connectivity, serving as hubs in the cortical network. Surprisingly, these analyses revealed a single highly and densely connected structural core in the brain of all participants.
"We found that the core, the most central part of the brain, is in the medial posterior portion of the cortex, and it straddles both hemispheres," Sporns said. "This wasn't known before. Researchers have been interested in this part of the brain for other reasons. For example, when you're at rest, this area uses up a lot of metabolic energy, but until now it hasn't been clear why."
The researchers then asked whether the structural connections of the brain in fact shape its dynamic activity, Sporns said. The study examined the brains of five human participants who were imaged using both fMRI and DSI techniques to compare how closely the brain activity observed in the fMRI mapped to the underlying fiber networks.
"It turns out they're quite closely related," Sporns said. "We can measure a significant correlation between brain anatomy and brain dynamics. This means that if we know how the brain is connected we can predict what the brain will do."
Sporns said he and Hagmann plan to look at more brains soon, to map brain connectivity as brains develop and age, and as they change in the course of disease and dysfunction.
The study was supported in part by the J.S. McDonnell Foundation, the University of Lausanne, Center for Biomedical Imaging (CIBM) of the Geneva-Lausanne Universities, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and the National Institutes of Health.
Journal reference:
Hagmann et al. Mapping the Structural Core of Human Cerebral Cortex. PLoS Biology, 2008; 6 (7): e159 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.0060159
Adapted from materials provided by Indiana University, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.
Need to cite this story in your essay, paper, or report? Indiana University (2008, July 1). New Map IDs The Core Of The Human Brain. ScienceDaily. Retrieved July 2, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com­