The Pope has reiterated his plea that scientific progress be based on “ethical-moral principles.” The condemnations are sweeping.

According to Reuters, the Pope said: Practices like freezing embryos, suppression of embryos in multiple pregnancies, embryonic stem cell research, the prospect of human cloning and artificial insemination outside the body had “shattered the barriers meant to protect human dignity.” [Full Story]

All scientific endeavors are not created equal, however. Few people are eager to see human cloning, and few reputable scientists have any desire to try it. Yet embryonic stem cell research, as most scientists envision it, is done with cast-off embryos — nobody is stealing a life for the sake of science — and promises to improve and extend lives of millions of miserable suffers of the most debilitating human ills. Tell a sufferer of Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s that this research represents an indignity.

As for test tube babies, perhaps the children born by the method over the past three decades, and their parents and brothers and sisters, should weigh in whether their creation represents an indignity.

If we’re to lump embryonic stem cell research, artificial insemination and human cloning into the same category of moral indignation, then apparently there are no lines and so we need to add everything else that might affect the creation of human life, from aphrodisiacs to Viagra, Caesareans to painkillers. And while you’re at it, toss in a host of techniques, medicines and procedures that science has developed to improve health, extend life or otherwise make the world slightly less miserable than it was a century ago.

Finding love has become a corporate, and scientific, endeavor.

As reported in this New York Times article:

“Once upon a time, finding a mate was considered too important to be entrusted to people under the influence of raging hormones. … But now some social scientists have rediscovered the appeal of adult supervision — provided the adults have doctorates and vast caches of psychometric data. Online matchmaking has become a boom industry as rival scientists test their algorithms for finding love.”

The first company, the article mentions, to breach the “don’t-try-this-yourself” science of online matchmaking, eHarmony, relies on 29 “core traits,” such as emotional temperament, to match people.

As expected on the capitalist playing field, the companies with the help of scientists are duking it out in an effort to draw customers to their match-making sites.

For instance, an anthropologist parlayed her research into the neural chemistry of people in love into the site Chemistry.com, which was set up by Match.com. Another algorithm-based site is Perfectmatch.com.

Just because scientists and equations are involved, does that make for more than a love potion?

Past research, reported here at LiveScience, revealed that online dating suffers from the same pitfalls as meeting up in real life: Finding the perfect match is difficult and can involve “blood, sweat and tears.” Often, online daters are expecting sparks to fly when they come face-to-face with whom they’ve associated with a person’s profile. In fact, about 10 million people (64 percent of online daters) think online dating helps people find a better match because of access to a larger pool of potential dates.

But when they realize the real-life date is exactly that — real — their expectations get deflated.

In the larger picture, looking back at strings of lousy relationships, one has to wonder whether computer or human is better equipped to choose that perfect mate.

Enjoy those banana splits while you can because in 10 years the banana may be no more… or at least may never be the same.

In this Guardian Unlimited article, science correspondent James Meek discusses the potential plight of the yellow fruit in the face of potentially deadly diseases.

Like its fellow fruit the apple, the bananas you buy from the grocery store are a particular genetic mutant of wild bananas discovered by farmers and grown from cuttings, essentially making them something like a clone of the original mutant.

Two fungi, Panama disease and Sigatoka, are threatening the current major variety, the Cavendish. (This variety was more resistant than the earlier Gros Michel, which succumbed to Panama disease in the 1950s.) Because the repeated cuttings have prevented the bananas from reproducing sexually and therefore changing up their genes, they are less resistant to pests.

Other monocultured crops, from grains to cows (which I recently mentioned in an article on animal cloning), can have this problem, so the banana may not be the only food we have to worry about disappearing in the future…

Earth flybys of a rogue asteroid…falling spysats. I’m opening a discount store on used hard hats.

There’s a feeding trough of news circulating about this errant U.S. spy satellite. My email is full of tidbits. Let me share with you a couple of things.

Seems like a consensus that we’re talking about USA-193 that went south. Ground controllers are unable to control the spacecraft. Of course, that’s a story too - why exactly it went nuts. A space debris hit? Bad spacecraft engineering by a contractor?

USA-193, if that’s the one, took off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in December 2006 on a Delta 7920 rocket and on assignment from the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). But according to one secret satellite sleuth, the maximum payload for that kind of rocket, from that location, is no more than 10,000 pounds, perhaps even less than that - not the 10 tons that some stories report.

Even so, a five-ton satellite diving into the Earth’s atmosphere might well lead to debris making it down to home planet.

By the way, this “it’ll burn up” in the Earth’s atmosphere is suspect in my mind.

For one, spacecraft entering the Earth’s atmosphere leave a trail of chemistry of foreign substances in the process, from the top layer of the atmosphere down. I hope somebody out there is thinking about the environmental impact — not just from this wayward satellite — but also the daily dose of human-made detritus that assaults the upper layers of our biosphere on a daily basis.

That said, there’s also a need to be pushing for the release of orbital and spacecraft data particular to this satellite’s fall from grace so that independent analysts can access the potential risk and allow those who might be affected to take the necessary mitigating actions.

My buddies over at the Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Orbital and Reentry Studies advise me that some debris from reentering objects do survive the plunge and can strike the Earth. Certain materials, those with high melting points — such as stainless steel, titanium and glass — are more likely to survive reentry than are materials with low melting points.

Also, for orbit decay reentries, those unplanned and unmanaged, the exact reentry points and location of debris impact on Earth are unpredictable. But experience shows that the discovery of reentered objects is rare because most land in water…and water covers nearly three-fourths of Earth’s surface, or in uninhabited areas.

The Aerospace Corporation experts in this arena point out that nobody has ever been injured by space debris to date. Unless, of course, somebody has been pelted to death in some out-of-the-way remote spot, out of communication. There’s been only one reported case of a person “struck” by debris. This individual, a woman in Oklahoma, was brushed on the shoulder by a lightweight fragment of debris in 1997.

To date, there has been only one instance of hazardous materials surviving reentry and being encountered here on terra firma. In 1978, debris from the former Soviet Union’s Cosmos 954 fell into Canada. Some of the debris was radioactive and was cleaned up after the mishap. No injuries were reported, although Canada issued the Soviet Union a littering ticket.

Meanwhile, for now, heads up!

We humans have a strong tendency to anthropomorphize things. Witness all the stupid talking-pet commercials. But when scientists tread into this arena, expect reaction.

Regarding my story yesterday about a proposal to label the past 200 years as the beginning of the Anthropocene Epoch in geologic time, what with all the changes to this planet humans have wrought, some tidbits from the mailbag:

Shari writes: It seems so….hmmm, “anthrocentric” and shortsighted of us to name an epoch after ourselves while it is (allegedly) occurring. “Scientists of the future will have no trouble deciding if the proposal was timely.” Maybe not, but that doesn’t make it logical for scientists of the present to decide that in advance, does it?

Don writes: The arrogance of humanity in general, and the “scientific” community in particular amazes me. First, that we think the planet needs saving, and second that we think we are capable of doing so. My guess is that if we could see 100,000 years into the future, the planet would be doing just fine. We may not be here, like thousands of other “dominate” species before us. But there will still be life on this planet. So get over it!

[Will we survive?]

John, the most acerbic of all, writes: Endangered dirt??? Oh please, spare us. … Get a life and find some real research, like how to fix something for once. And quit whining for government grants.

Erik has a totally different take on human arrogance. He writes: Somebody writes a story about the earth and what we are doing to cause such damage. Nobody ever suggest how to change human behavior, raping the earth. The French statesman and thinker Chateaubriand once said:

“The forests preceded civilizations, after their demise only deserts and wasteland were left.”

What has changed? The forests left today are being cut as we speak, eventually leaving the whole earth totally denuded.

The people of this earth are too lazy to do the obvious: to replace every tree that has been cut. Some countries actually have laws that require cut trees to be replaced with seedlings within three months after cutting.

The US government gives the lumber companies about ten years to do that. Have you ever seen the soil that has been washed off the mountains of Washington State? After ten years there is no soil left to plant trees in (after clearcutting).

The Sahara desert once was green with trees, bushes, and grass. Did you ever see the resorts in Egypt? The desert there was changed back into little paradises there.

It can be done if the will is there. For that these stories by scientists of new ecological epochs are pure hogwash. 

A futuristic helmet, worn 10 minutes a day, reverses symptoms of Alzheimer’s, its maker claims.

The helmet was built after a study at the University of Sunderland found infrared light can reverse memory loss in mice, according to The Daily Mail.

“Currently all you can do with dementia is to slow down the rate of decay — this new process will not only stop that rate of decay but partially reverse it,” said Gordon Dougal, a director of Virulite, a medical research company based in County Durham.

Those of us who sail catamarans tend to hold a prejudicial belief that “two hulls (like two heads) are better than one”. Apparently, Burt Rutan and the Scaled Composites team think so as well.

But when Space Ship Two / White Knight Two made its debut appearance this week, there was something even more enticing about it. Like the wind driving Humanity’s future in space was about to shift. We began to see how the rest of us might tack our way into the black sky for more than just 6 or 7 minutes of floating fun.

And, for some of my aeronautically knowledgeable friends, it was deja vu all over again. Like: “where have we seen this before?” It was downright ghostly:

Take a look at this design – circa 1979 or so – from the Russian Myasishchev Design Bureau as modeled by aerospace scholar Alex Panchenko:

It’s an extreme makeover of the Russian Air Force’s 3M bomber (aka the “Bison”) which had been in service since 1955. [Anyone who knows more about this, please reply with comments: below.] The plan was to drop a rocket-boosted vehicle, “X-15 style”, in the upper atmosphere - at subsonic but significant velocity - which would then light its candle and transit out of the atmosphere. In other words, a Virgin Galactic lift ticket.

Here’s another amazing Panchenko model-photo of the Bison space-launcher beast. It was called the 3M-2 concept. Bison bombers were made-over pretty often in that period. One of them even got puffed up (Super-Guppy style) to carry large parts for the Soviet Buran space shuttle and its Energia booster.

Apparently, the 3M-2 was to have had multiple permutations for various roles: It would have made a dandy crew delivery vehicle. Yes, also a handy satellite killer. And ambitious commanders, no doubt, dreamed of delivering squads of elite Soviet troops anywhere on Earth in a couple of hours (even as our USMC’s SUSTAIN program concept seeks to do in the coming years).

Alex Panchenko’s photos are postcards from the future as well as the past. Please remember, the first word in Scaled Composites is “scaled”. The rampant speculation, of course, is that Rutan has sold Sir Richard’s team on the idea that Scaled’s Level Two design will easily and inexpensively scale to an orbital Level Three configuration.

No surprise: that’s precisely the mission for which the Myasishchev group was designing the 3M-2 back in the late 1970s / early 1980’s.

Composer Igor Stravinsky (stealing from artist Pablo Picasso) supposedly once said: “the merely good composer borrows; the great composer steals!” Aerodynamic artist Burt Rutan would likely agree. His Space Ship Three / White Knight Three design, in Virgin livery colors, may just steal the entire orbital people-mover market by dropping the price to levels mere mortals can maybe afford.

So perhaps we’ll be sailing - sooner rather than later - into the space industrial revolution on twin keels.

“Ready about!?”

Those flybys of cosmic flotsam this month within our little niche of astro turf — Asteroid 2007 TU24 and Asteroid 2007 WD5 — are a swift kick in the planetary defense pants. That is, there are some lessons learned left in the wake of their passage. Both are newly discovered Near Earth Objects (NEOs).

“The end of January twofer with NEOs flying by both Earth and Mars is wonderful!,” observed former Apollo astronaut, Russell Schweickart, now chairman of the B612 Foundation.

“Once again we’ve had an opportunity, prompted by nature, to think through the questions of what we would know and how we might react, were these objects actually headed for an impact…or even a very close call,” Schweickart told me.

Schweickart pointed out that WD5, in particular, being a small (Tunguska-sized) object, typifies the most frequent NEOs we will have to deal with.

“Deflection will often be out of the question due to the paucity of data we’ll have on them. Therefore, our actions will frequently be limited to providing short-term warning,” Schweickart added.

WD5 has generated some very useful discussions, Schweickart said. That particular space rock blasts by Mars on January 30.

“TU24, regrettably, has been more of a target of opportunity for scare mongers!,” Schweickart noted.

TU24 is on a freight train path, slipping by Earth on January 29. Its closest distance to Earth — roughly 334,000 miles (537,500 kilometers) — will be at 12:33 a.m. Pacific Time (3:33 a.m. Eastern time) in the United States. That’s close enough that the object should be observable that night by amateur astronomers glued to the eyepieces of modest-sized telescopes.

I also asked Donald Yeomans, an asteroid expert and Supervisor of the Solar System Dynamics Group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, about WD5’s orbit after it zips by the red planet.

“WD5’s orbit will be perturbed by the Mars close approach,” Yeomans said. “And while the nominal (most likely) orbit is not affected very much by the encounter, it will be difficult to follow thereafter because of the uncertainties introduced by the Mars perturbation,” he told me.

“WD5 is a near-Earth object and so will remain on our short list of objects that we monitor. Assuming we can get the necessary observations, we can track it years into the future,” Yeomans concluded.

For those of you still scratching your science-curious heads about whom to vote for in the presidential primaries, Physics Today has come to the rescue. You might not be a regular reader of the flagship publication of The American Institute of Physics or know that “it’s the most influential and closely followed physics magazine in the world, informing readers about science and its place in the world with authoritative features, full news coverage and analysis, and fresh perspectives on technological advances and ground-breaking research.”

In any case, check out their handy “click on the mugshot” overview on the candidates’ positions on science education, teaching evolution, nuclear weapons, science investment, energy policy and climate change. Someone went to a lot of trouble to assemble all this information.

And if you’re looking for a broader-issue, quicker answer, you might try out the 14-question “Select a Candidate 2008 quiz“ put out by WQAD-TV (Davenport, Bettendorf, Rock Island, Moline — Illinois, of course). You might be shocked by the candidate that the software assigns as your best match. I was. It wasn’t Kucinich and it wasn’t Giuliani. That’s all I’m saying.

Lot of buzz regarding a recent Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine story about shooting off astronauts to an asteroid - presented as an “alternate vision” for the next president - perhaps altering the trajectory of NASA’s return of footprints on the Moon. An upcoming conference is to thrash out the idea in greater detail, noted the story.

This morning I emailed the NASA folks for any reaction - and got this response authored by the chief of NASA, Mike Griffin, in response to the Aviation Week & Space Technology story.

“I have noted on many occasions that, at present NASA funding levels, our budget is sufficient to support a variety of excellent space programs, but that it cannot support all of them. Balanced choices must be made. But they cannot be continually remade if there is to be progress,” Griffin explained.

“Those who are organizing this conference have long favored choices other than those put forth in the Vision for Space Exploration and subsequently authorized by the Congress. Their rejection of the Moon as an important destination for mankind, their emphasis on the early use of the Lagrange Points in a new space architecture, and their advocacy for early missions to the near-Earth asteroids (NEO) and to Mars are well known and long standing. These views were summarized in a report issued by the International Academy of Astronautics in July 2004. Their opposition to the International Space Station continues unremitting. One struggles to understand how the future international and commercial partnerships they advocate will come to pass if existing treaty-level commitments are not kept,” Griffin said.

“What is not mentioned in the Aviation Week article is that the questions to be raised at this conference have been asked and answered. The organizer’s views, and many others, were amply considered and thoroughly debated in the two years that elapsed between President Bush’s announcement of the Vision for Space Exploration in January 2004, and the strongly bipartisan ratification of the goals of the Vision in the NASA Authorization Act of December, 2005. As goes without saying, NASA will execute the law of the land. Until and unless the Congress provides new and different authorization for NASA, the law of the land specifies that we will complete the International Space Station, retire the Shuttle, design and build a new spaceflight architecture, return to the Moon in a manner supporting a ’sustained presence’, and prepare the way for Mars,” Griffin explained.

“We are doing those things as quickly and efficiently as our appropriated funding allows. System designs for the early elements have been completed, contracts have been let, and consistently solid progress is being made with a minimum of unexpected difficulty. True, the available budget is less than what was once promised, and progress is therefore slower than all of us would prefer. But applying resources in the right direction, irrespective of pace, is always productive, and we are doing that. Ares and Orion as they are presently taking form are the building blocks for any human future beyond low Earth orbit (LEO),” the NASA chief pointed out.

“As I have often stated, human missions to NEOs have no stronger advocate than I, and I hope that a future Congress will add such authorization to future guidance for NASA, without altering other goals. But in other respects, I believe that the 2005 Authorization Act for NASA remains the finest policy framework for U.S. civil space activities that I have seen in forty years. In particular, I believe that to venture into deep space beyond the Moon with what will be our first step beyond LEO in more than fifty years, whether to an asteroid or to Mars, is riskier than it needs to be. Returning to the Moon and consolidating the gains to be made thereby is properly on the path toward NEOs and Mars. We should stay the present course as laid out in the Act,” Griffin said.

“The conference organizers have assigned sole responsibility for our new civil space exploration strategy to President Bush, ignoring the hugely bipartisan — actually non-partisan — support it has received in Congress. In fact, the principal features of the Vision for Space Exploration, and the subsequent 2005 Authorization Act, are directly traceable to the recommendations of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board [CAIB]. President Bush acted on those recommendations in his proposal to Congress. No such far-reaching proposal should be adopted without debate. That debate was had, in 2003, ‘04, and ‘05, and it was fulsome. From it came a unifying plan for civil space, and the best legislative guidance NASA has ever had,” Griffin stated.

“No plan can fully satisfy all the many constituencies we have in what I wish were a true ’space community’. but as the CAIB noted, it would be far worse to continue the prior multi-decade lack of any strategic plan, to continue dithering and debating and inevitably widening the gap between shuttle retirement and the availability of new systems. The 2005 Authorization Act codifies a great strategic plan for civil space exploration. Now is the time for space advocacy groups to come together in support of it,” Griffin concluded.

Meanwhile, conference organizers of the workshop have notified Aviation Week & Space Technology that the recent story created a misperception - that the workshop to be held at Stanford University had already decided upon a new path for the human and robotic exploration of space, one that might call for pushing the Ctrl-Alt-Delete button on a NASA Moon base.

Not so, explains Scott Hubbard of Stanford University and Louis Friedman of The Planetary Society.

“We wish to make it clear that the purpose of the workshop is to examine critically the Vision for Space Exploration in order to prepare for future space policy considerations in a new Administration and new Congress,” states the letter to the magazine provided to SPACE.com.

“We have deliberately included a wide range of participants with disparate views, including those who would maintain the status quo. We personally do not know what the conclusions of the workshop will be - or even if there will be a definitive consensus,” the clarifying letter notes in part, underscoring the point that the workshop has “no predetermined conclusions.”