When my laptop goes kaput, my first instinct is to chuck it out the window, but astronauts in space don’t have such luxuries.

Consider this: Yuri Malenchenko, a veteran cosmonaut and flight engineer aboard the International Space Station, had the unenviable job this week of wrestling with a glitchy computer laptop in the outpost’s Russian segment.

While I can call tech support, my computer programmer brother-in-law, or just pay someone to take it out of my sight until it’s fixed, Yuri and his Expedition 16 crewmates have to keep those space laptops running or the $100 billion station doesn’t work.

“It says software license warning,” Yuri told Mission Control in Korolev, Russia, just outside of Moscow on Wednesday during NASA’s daily hour of live video from the space station.

Cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko works with communication equipment on the ISS.

Flight controllers and engineers there were talking Yuri, who has commanded the station in the past, through the steps to reinstall programs from a software DVD. They were speaking Russian, with a handy English translator, but frustration knows no language.

“[It says] the computer cannot copy the file, and data error,” said Yuri, as he and Mission Control hammered through their troubleshooting.

I may not be a spaceman, but I know how it feels to have that blue screen of death standing between me and my files. At least I only have to face off against one computer at a time, but it’s a different story for station astronauts.

According to the folks at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas - home of the U.S. astronaut corps and shuttle/space station Mission Controls - there are no less than 69 laptop computers watching over the International Space Station right this minute. Here’s a breakdown:

• 50 computers govern all NASA core functions on the station, including operations and many of the payloads.
• 5 of those 50 NASA machines are directly linked to the station’s core avionics computers to send commands and receive telemetry
• 12 laptop computers support all of the station’s Russian core functions, operations and payloads
• 7 new laptops watch over the new, European-built Columbus laboratory for the European Space Agency.

And there’s more coming, I’m sure. On March 11, NASA’s shuttle Endeavour will launch with the first segment of Japan’s massive Kibo laboratory - the station’s largest research module - along with a Canadian-built, two-armed robot called Dextre that will be mounted outside. Kibo will likely need its own laptop computers.

Luckily, flight controllers in Russia and the U.S. have extensive - if not altogether desired - experience working through minor and major computer glitches aboard the ISS. Just last summer, the station’s primary Russian command and navigation computers crashed due to a faulty circuit. Cosmonauts jerry rigged a workaround until the computers could be replaced later.

The station’s main U.S. computers inside NASA’s Destiny lab have also experience their own growing pains, including a major crash back in April 2001.

The folks with NASA’s computer resources and architecture department say that space station computers receive new software updates for different applications several times a year to support new requirements, interfaces and new arrivals of modules and other hardware as the orbital laboratory’s construction continues.

You know, when I first heard that J.J. Abrams was doing the next retcon-ed Star Trek movie with a trip to Starfleet Academy I got a little squeamish. Let’s face it, Mission Impossible III was “Alias” with a prettier lead. Still, the first teaser trailer is up and it’s all nerd-bump-inducing. Go HERE to see it as I can’t seem to embed it.

The National Science Board rolled out Science and Engineering Indicators (SEI) 2008 today - a biennial report on the state of science and engineering research and education in the United States.

The report also documents public attitudes about science and technology - and there are some observations — albeit few of them — regarding space.

For example, the report notes that, while support for federal research investment is at historically high levels, other kinds of federal spending generate even stronger public support.

“Support for increased spending is greater in numerous program areas, including education (73%), health care (72%), assistance to the poor (68%), environmental protection (67%), and Social Security (61%),” the report explains.

And here’s a kick-in-the-head for space fans: “Scientific research ranks about on a par with mass transit (38%) and well ahead of space exploration (14%) and assistance to foreign countries (10%) in the proportion of the U.S. population favoring increased spending.”

The SEI report also points out that television and the Internet are Americans’ primary sources of science and technology information. While the Internet is favored below the TV tube for info, “to learn about specific scientific issues, more than half of Americans choose the Internet as their main information source.”

Regarding environmental quality here on Earth, the report observes that in 2007, 43% of Americans expressed “strong concern” about the environment, up from 35% in 2005. However, concern about the environment ranks somewhere in the middle among 12 issues. Global warming has recently become more prominent among environmental issues of concern to the public, the report states, although it still ranks 8th among 10 issues.

The Science and Engineering Indicators 2008 is prepared by the National Science Foundation’s Division of Science Resources Statistics on behalf of the National Science Board.

Dig into the just-released report by dialing in your Internet feed-line to:

http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind08/

They’re calling it the world’s cheapest car, priced same as the DVD player in a Lexus.

While I can’t vouch for that comparison, you can’t argue that $2,500 will draw some buyers. The price actually includes 4 tires, 4 doors and a steering wheel, not to mention an engine and all the other basics one needs. Indeed, the car costs far less than the bill for a used engine we just had to stick in our son’s car.

But, for now you’ll have to go to India to get one. The Tata company unveiled the 10-foot Nano there today.

From a Times article:

Citing moments in history including the first manned flight by the Wright Brothers and man’s landing on the moon, Ratan Tata, the chairman of the company, revealed a cute, compact car designed to appeal to first-time car buyers in one of the world’s fastest growing car markets.

There might be some seductive science behind the world-famous pipes of Barry White — the “Walrus of Love” — and other low-voiced males.

Researchers asked Tanzanian women of the Hadza people to pick a voice they preferred from sample of men saying “hello” in Swahili. Most of the time, they went for the deeper voices, according to a Jan. 3, 2008 article by Sean Bowditch of NPR. Turns out that men with deeper voices also had more children than the average Hadza daddy.

Harvard anthropologist Coren Apicella commented on the curious data in Bowditch’s piece:

“Why there’s this relationship, we’re not entirely sure yet,” Apicella said. “It could be that these men have greater access to mates. Maybe these men that have deeper voices have higher levels of testosterone. Or maybe they’re better hunters and they’re able to bring more food home to their wives.”

Whatever the case, other scientists agree that voices may be “signaling some biologically relevant information to potential mates.” Apicella and her colleagues aren’t yet sure, however, if the the deep-voice preference extends to other cultures — including the United States.

If you’re running for president, you’re required to say “America has the best healthcare in the world, but …” Statistics differ:

The United States is last among 19 countries when it comes to deaths that could have been prevented by access to timely and effective healthcare, according to new research supported by The Commonwealth Fund and published in the January/February issue of the journal Health Affairs. The study is published today.

If the United States had performed as well as the top three countries ( France, Japan, and Australia) out of the 19 industrialized countries in the study there would be 101,000 fewer deaths per year here, the researches calculated.

While other countries saw these types of deaths decline by an average of 16 percent, we only a 4 percent decline. We’re also behind Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

“It is notable that all countries have improved substantially except the U.S.,” said study leader Ellen Nolte of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. She and colleague Martin McKee note that “it is difficult to disregard the observation that the slow decline in U.S. amenable mortality has coincided with an increase in the uninsured population, an issue that is now receiving renewed attention in several states and among presidential candidates from both parties.”

In the presidential debate the other night, Republican candidate Mike Huckabee argued that America’s healthcare system is broken because it focuses on treatment rather than prevention. While the other candidates spoke about whether and to what extent healthcare should be funded by the government vs. the individual, Huckabee noted the white elephant in the discussion:

“We do need to get serious about preventive health care instead of chasing more and more dollars to treat chronic disease, which currently gobbles up 80 percent of our health care costs, and yet is often avoidable,” Huckabee said.

Access to healthcare is key. While many workers get useful coverage, many low-income, part-time, and unemployed people do not. That’s one reason infant mortality in the United States is among the worst of all industrialized nations, as shown in a study last year. Another 2006 study found that in every single health category measured — such as circulatory disease, diabetes and cancer — Americans had a higher rate of sickness than the British.

Eager to take a look at a super-secret U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) satellite?

Now you can thumb through a sourcebook on a Russian satellite tracking facility in Siberia called the Altay Optical Laser Research Center.

Allan Thomson, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst prepared the Russian/English language sourcebook that spotlights the Russian ground equipment capable of cranking out images of high-flying spacecraft.

The sourcebook contains shot-from-the-ground adaptive optics imagery, albeit a bit blurry, of Russian spacecraft, several NASA Earth observing satellites…as well as the NRO’s Lacrosse 2 spysat lofted back in 1991.

Lacrosse (see image) uses powerful cloud-cutting radar for day/night surveillance tasks.

BTW: A second Russian site will be equipped next year with a more powerful satellite-imaging telescope, hardware generally seen similar to a facility the United States operates in Hawaii. That upcoming satellite-scanning, sky-watching Russian equipment is to be located within Savvushka, Zmeinogorskigy area, the Altai territory, according to the sourcebook.

The sourcebook was made available today by Secrecy News from the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy.

Go to:

http://www.fas.org/spp/military/program/track/altay.pdf

Some scientists are fuming about last-minute federal budget cuts to basic science research in several federal agencies.

“The nations that seek to challenge our global leadership in science and innovation should be greatly encouraged by this legislation,” according to a statement today from the American Institute of Physics.

Separately, the Mars Society has complained that the funding bill won’t allow NASA to advance its exploration of the moon nor work toward sending people to Mars, as Bush had dreamed of back in 2004.

Below is an overview of the general funding situation provided by Jim Dawson, editor of Inside Science News Service, a service to reporters from the American Institute of Physics:

For the past four years, President Bush’s budget proposals have been marked by a decline in basic and applied research, and each year presidential science adviser John Marburger justified the science cuts by pointing to the high costs of “winning the war on terror” and “securing the homeland.” But over the past two budgets, Bush has offset concern over the overall decline in US science funding with the promise of significant increases in funding for research in the physical sciences at the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the National Institutes of Science and Technology.

Bush’s acknowledgement of the importance of basic science research, as well as science education, to both the economy and US national security, was expressed in his American Competitiveness Initiative, unveiled by the White House in February, 2006. The ACI called for a doubling of funding for science programs at NSF, DOE, and NIST over 10 years, and was a reflection of concerns coming from not only the scientific community, but private industry leaders worried about economic competitiveness.

But as the 2008 budget worked its way through Congress, the administration’s insistence on a hard overall spending cap and disputes over funding priorities, resulted in the long-promised ACI increases to all but evaporate. A proposed 15 percent increase for the DOE’s office of science was cut to 5 percent. A proposed 8.7 percent increase for NSF research was cut to 1.1 percent, and NIST, which was looking at a 12.8 percent increase, was reduced to a 4.7 percent gain.

More information on all this is provided by the AIP:

• Reaction to FY 2008 Spending Bill: “A Step Backwards,” “Very Disappointing.”
• FY 2008 NIST Funding Bill Falls Short.
• FY 2008 Budget Bill Gives NSF a 2.5% Increase.
• Budget Cycle Closing With Disappointing DOE Science Outcome.
• New Augustine Report on U.S. Competitiveness.

The chance that a rogue mini-world — asteroid 2007 WD5 — will smack into Mars on January 30th has increased from 1.3 percent to 3.9 percent.

That’s the new estimation from officials at the Near Earth Object Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), stemming from several sky watching teams in Alaska, New Mexico, and in Arizona.

“The impact probability resulting from the recent orbit refinement has increased to a surprising 3.9 percent…about 1 in 25 odds,” explain JPL’s Near Earth Object Program website, updated today regarding the asteroid meets Mars altercation.

Still, there remains an uncertainty, although a Mars impact is still possible. However, the most likely scenario in the weeks to come is that more observations of the asteroid will allow that uncertainty to shrink - so that a Mars impact is definitely ruled out.

The JPL website notes that, in the unlikely event of an impact, the head-on collision would take place on January 30th at 2:55 a.m. Pacific Standard Time, with an uncertainty of a few minutes.

Nothing to set your watch by…but a big event in our time.

Every excursion across my small swath of suburbia now involves dealing with multiple erratic drivers, swerving dangerously to pass, tailgating, and generally looking as though they don’t realize there are other cars on the road. Truth is, they don’t: They’re talking on a cell phone or, worse, texting, and studies show they really aren’t aware of their surroundings. The problem has grown markedly worse in the past couple years as the devices (count iPods and GPS mappers now, too) have become ubiquitous.

In the UK, it’s illegal.

“Drivers who adjust sat-navs, tinker with MP3 music players such as iPods or send text messages at the wheel could also face prison sentences,” according to new guidelines from prosecuters, detailed in The Telegraph.

Studies clearly show that texting or phoning while driving is dangerous, about like driving drunk.

Of course, motor vehicle laws do not always prevent dangerous behavior. From The Telegraph article: “Using a hand-held mobile while driving was outlawed in 2003, but it is estimated that half a million motorists flout the ban each day.”

Still, the ban should span the pond. Many motorists flout our seat belt law, too, but that doesn’t mean the law should never have been instituted.