Life created in the Lab

If figuring out how to quickly sequence genomes was but the first small step for genetics, Craig Venter has gone ahead and made a giant leap for the discipline. The J. Craig Venter Institute announced today that it has created the world’s first synthetic cell, boasting a completely synthetic chromosome produced by a machine.
"This is the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer," Venter said in a press conference.
The biological breakthrough could have myriad applications, as it essentially opens the door to engineered biology that is completely manipulated by laboratory scientists. The researchers are already planning to create a specially engineered algae designed to trap carbon dioxide and convert it to biofuel. Other applications could include medicine, environmental cleanup, and energy production.
Though a bacteria cell was the final product in this particular experiment, eukaryotic yeast was a critical player in the process. Venter and company synthesized the genome of the bacterium M. mycoides by taking short strains of DNA (contemporary machines can only assemble short sequences at a time) and inserting them into yeast, whose enzymes have a keen ability to repair DNA and combine the short strains together.
The yeast first linked the shorter snippets (just over 1,000 base pairs each) together into longer 10,000 base pair strands. The longer strands were removed, further combined in groups of ten and put back into yeast to connect 100,000 base pair strands. After three rounds of this, the team had produced the full genome, stretching more than a million base pairs. To distinguish their synthetic genome from those found in nature, special "watermark" sequences were added to the DNA so that it won’t be mistaken for a natural species.
The synthetic genome was then transplanted into another type of bacteria, Mycoplasma capricolum, where the synthetic genome started producing new proteins. The capricolum’s original genome was either destroyed by M. mycoides' enzymes or lost during cell replication. Either way, as the cells multiplied, cells were produced borne solely of the synthesized genome and there it was in the petri dish: the world’s first synthetic cells built from wholly synthesized DNA.
"Every component in the cell comes from the synthetic genome," Venter said. "This cell, its lineage is a computer. But this cell is simply a proof of concept to get to the minimal understanding of the synthetic genome."
Not everyone is thrilled with the achievement, however. Upon the announcement, some researchers questioned the validity of the term "synthetic cell" because though the genome was fabricated by computer, the process merely modified existing life rather than created it from scratch. There are also plenty ethical – and legal – ramifications to such a technological advance that will no doubt be argued in coming months.
What is not up for dispute is that Venter and company have carried out a serious technological feat in stringing together a million nucleotide base pairs to create a complete genome in the lab. Not only that, but they did it accurately enough that the cell accepted the DNA.
"Probably 99% of our experiments have failed," Venter said of the decades-long journey to this point. "This was a debugging, problem solving process from the beginning, because there was no recipe."
Now that there's a recipe, Venter and company want to get cooking. Having strung 1 million base pairs into a coherent genome, Venter said the next step is algae, as algal genomes generally contain just under 2 million base pairs. By comparison, the human genome contains more than 3 billion pairs, so don't look for synthetic mammals any time soon.

Jupiter Loses A Stripe

In a development that has transformed the appearance of the solar system largest planet, one of Jupiter's two main cloud belts has completely disappeared. "This is a big event," says planetary scientist Glenn Orton of NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. "We're monitoring the situation closely and do not yet fully understand what's going on."
Known as the South Equatorial Belt (SEB), the brown cloudy band is twice as wide as Earth and more than twenty times as long. The loss of such an enormous "stripe" can be seen with ease halfway across the solar system.
"In any size telescope, or even in large binoculars, Jupiter's signature appearance has always included two broad equatorial belts," says amateur astronomer Anthony Wesley of Australia.
"I remember as a child seeing them through my small backyard refractor and it was unmistakable. Anyone who turns their telescope on Jupiter at the moment, however, will see a planet with only one belt--a very strange sight."
Wesley is a veteran observer of Jupiter, famous for his discovery of a comet hitting the planet in 2009. Like many other astronomers, he noticed the belt fading late last year, "but I certainly didn't expect to see it completely disappear," he says. "Jupiter continues to surprise."
Orton thinks the belt is not actually gone, but may be just hiding underneath some higher clouds.
"It's possible," he hypothesizes, "that some 'ammonia cirrus' has formed on top of the SEB, hiding the SEB from view." On Earth, white wispy cirrus clouds are made of ice crystals. On Jupiter, the same sort of clouds can form, but the crystals are made of ammonia (NH3) instead of water (H20).
What would trigger such a broad outbreak of "ammonia cirrus"? Orton suspects that changes in global wind patterns have brought ammonia-rich material into the clear, cold zone above the SEB, setting the stage for formation of the high-altitude, icy clouds.
"I'd love to send a probe in there to find out what's really going on."
Indeed, Jupiter's atmosphere is a mysterious place which would benefit from exploration. No one knows, for instance, why the Great Red Spot is red-or what has sustained the raging storm for so many years. Neither does theory explain why the twin equatorial belts are brown, nor why one should vanish while the other remains. "We have a long list of questions," says Orton.
This isn't the first time the SEB has faded out.
"The SEB fades at irregular intervals, most recently in 1973-75, 1989-90, 1993, 2007, 2010," says John Rogers, director of the British Astronomical Association's Jupiter Section. "The 2007 fading was terminated rather early, but in the other years the SEB was almost absent, as at present."
The return of the SEB can be dramatic.
"We can look forward to a spectacular outburst of storms and vortices when the 'SEB Revival' begins," says Rogers.
"It always begins at a single point, and a disturbance spreads out rapidly around the planet from there, often becoming spectacular even for amateurs eyeballing the planet through medium-sized telescopes. However we can't predict when or where it will start. On historical precedent it could be any time in the next 2 years. We hope it will be in the next few months so that everyone can get a good view.
"I'll be watching every chance I get," says Wesley. "The revival will likely be sudden and dramatic, with planet-circling groups of storms appearing over the space of just a week or so."
Indeed, says Orton, "anyone could be the first to spot the return of the SEB."
Jupiter shines in the eastern sky before dawn: sky map. Point your optics at the "morning star" and ... is that really Jupiter? Happy hunting!

Ancient Shipwreck to Aid Ghostly Neutrino Search

You wouldn't think a sunken ship from 2000 years ago could hold the key to the success of a neutrino detection experiment , except perhaps in a Hollywood movie, or a NOVA special on Jacques Cousteau. But sometimes truth really is stranger than fiction. Scientists with the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE), a neutrino observatory buried under the Gran Sasso mountain in Italy, hit the motherlode when archaeologists discovered a Spanish ship off the coast of Sardinia, filled with lead that dates back two millennia.
Yes, lead. Really, really old lead. That might not seem very exciting to you, but for CUORE scientists, it's a godsend. They use lead (also copper) as a shielding material for their neutrino detection materials. See, neutrinos -- dubbed "Ghost Particles" because they so rarely interact with everything (billions course through you every second) -- are extremely difficult to detect, in part because their signals can be obscured by things like cosmic rays, and the natural radioactivity in rocks, for example.
CUORE is looking for an even rarer event, known as neutrinoless double-beta decay. Among other things, such an observation would provide a handy means of directly calculating the mass of a neutrino (which is very, very small -- so small that for decades physicists believed neutrinos had no mass).
Alas, there are also trace amounts of radioactivity in the very materials that are supposed to shield the experiments from interference -- the radioactive isotope lead-210, in the case of contemporary lead ingots. But if you have lead that is 2000 years old, that radioactive isotope has pretty much disappeared. Unfortunately, lead that old is quite a rare find. US scientists working on the IGEX experiment lucked out a few years ago when they snagged from 450-year-old lead from a sunken Spanish galleon.
That's why the discovery of this new sunken ship is so exciting to nuclear physicist Ettore Fiorini, who finessed some key financing from the Italian National Institute of Nuclear Physics so that archaeologists could salvage the vessel -- in return for for a bunch of that ancient lead. And there's rather a lot of it, apparently. While most such ships were merely lined with lead, this particular vessel was actually carrying lead as its cargo, so the find "multiplies by many times the quantity of ancient lead available in the world," according to Fiorini.
The CUORE scientists have received a couple of batches of the precious ancient lead so far, which will be cleaned and melted down to make a shield for the experiment. CUORE should be fully operational in two to three years. And if they succeed in observing neutrinoless double-beta decay, and applying that knowledge to determine the "ghost particle's" mass, it will be partly thanks to that very old lead -- and the archaeologists who shared the bounty of their find.

View of Earth and Moon from Mars

This stunning picture is the first image of Earth ever taken from another planet that shows our home as a planetary disc, with the Moon in the distance.Captured by Nasa's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter as the spacecraft orbited the Red Planet, both the Earth and the Moon appear as crescents, engulfed in the vast darkness of space. Our planet is captured in a 'half-Earth' phase, while the image also shows the Earth-facing hemisphere of the Moon.Because the Earth and the Moon are closer to the Sun than Mars, they exhibit phases, just as the Moon, Venus, and Mercury do when viewed from Earth.
When the image was captured in 2007, Earth was 88million miles from Mars, giving the HiRISE image a scale of 88 miles per pixel.Nasa could only picture the Earth and moon at full disk illumination when they are on the opposite side of the Sun from Mars. However, then the range would be much greater and the image would show less detail. On the Earth image you can make out the west coast outline of South America at lower right, although the clouds are the dominant features.This image required a processing, with the Moon image brightened so it would show up next to Earth

Aliens had abducted me - A President's claim

A Russian MP has asked President Dmitry Medvedev to investigate claims by a regional president that he has met aliens on board a spaceship. Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the leader of the southern region of Kalmykia, made his claim in a television interview. MP Andre Lebedev is not just asking whether Mr Ilyumzhinov is fit to govern.
He is also concerned that, if he was abducted, he may have revealed details about his job and state secrets. The MP has written a letter to Mr Medvedev raising a list of his concerns.
In his letter he says that - assuming the whole thing was not just a bad joke - it was an historic event and should have been reported to the Kremlin.
He also asks if there are official guidelines for what government officials should do if contacted by aliens, especially if those officials have access to state secrets. Mr Ilyumzhinov said in an interview on primetime television that he had been taken on board an alien spaceship which had come to planet Earth to take samples - and claims to have several witnesses.
He has been president of Kalmykia, a small Buddhist region of Russia which lies on the shores of the Caspian Sea, for 17 years. The millionaire former businessman has a reputation as an eccentric character.
As president of the World Chess Federation, he has spent tens of millions of dollars turning the impoverished republic into a mecca for chess players - building an entire village to host international tournaments.

Stephen Hawking - Build your own Time Machine (part 01)

Hello. My name is Stephen Hawking. Physicist, cosmologist and something of a dreamer. Although I cannot move and I have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am free. Free to explore the universe and ask the big questions, such as: is time travel possible? Can we open a portal to the past or find a shortcut to the future? Can we ultimately use the laws of nature to become masters of time itself?
Time travel was once considered scientific heresy. I used to avoid talking about it for fear of being labelled a crank. But these days I'm not so cautious. In fact, I'm more like the people who built Stonehenge. I'm obsessed by time. If I had a time machine I'd visit Marilyn Monroe in her prime or drop in on Galileo as he turned his telescope to the heavens. Perhaps I'd even travel to the end of the universe to find out how our whole cosmic story ends.
To see how this might be possible, we need to look at time as physicists do - at the fourth dimension. It's not as hard as it sounds. Every attentive schoolchild knows that all physical objects, even me in my chair, exist in three dimensions. Everything has a width and a height and a length.
But there is another kind of length, a length in time. While a human may survive for 80 years, the stones at Stonehenge, for instance, have stood around for thousands of years. And the solar system will last for billions of years. Everything has a length in time as well as space. Travelling in time means travelling through this fourth dimension.
To see what that means, let's imagine we're doing a bit of normal, everyday car travel. Drive in a straight line and you're travelling in one dimension. Turn right or left and you add the second dimension. Drive up or down a twisty mountain road and that adds height, so that's travelling in all three dimensions. But how on Earth do we travel in time? How do we find a path through the fourth dimension?
Let's indulge in a little science fiction for a moment. Time travel movies often feature a vast, energy-hungry machine. The machine creates a path through the fourth dimension, a tunnel through time. A time traveller, a brave, perhaps foolhardy individual, prepared for who knows what, steps into the time tunnel and emerges who knows when. The concept may be far-fetched, and the reality may be very different from this, but the idea itself is not so crazy....( Cont.)

Stephen Hawking - Build your own Time Machine (part 02)

...Physicists have been thinking about tunnels in time too, but we come at it from a different angle. We wonder if portals to the past or the future could ever be possible within the laws of nature. As it turns out, we think they are. What's more, we've even given them a name: wormholes. The truth is that wormholes are all around us, only they're too small to see. Wormholes are very tiny. They occur in nooks and crannies in space and time. You might find it a tough concept, but stay with me.
Nothing is flat or solid. If you look closely enough at anything you'll find holes and wrinkles in it. It's a basic physical principle, and it even applies to time. Even something as smooth as a pool ball has tiny crevices, wrinkles and voids. Now it's easy to show that this is true in the first three dimensions. But trust me, it's also true of the fourth dimension. There are tiny crevices, wrinkles and voids in time. Down at the smallest of scales, smaller even than molecules, smaller than atoms, we get to a place called the quantum foam. This is where wormholes exist. Tiny tunnels or shortcuts through space and time constantly form, disappear, and reform within this quantum world. And they actually link two separate places and two different times.
Unfortunately, these real-life time tunnels are just a billion-trillion-trillionths of a centimetre across. Way too small for a human to pass through - but here's where the notion of wormhole time machines is leading. Some scientists think it may be possible to capture a wormhole and enlarge it many trillions of times to make it big enough for a human or even a spaceship to enter.
Given enough power and advanced technology, perhaps a giant wormhole could even be constructed in space. I'm not saying it can be done, but if it could be, it would be a truly remarkable device. One end could be here near Earth, and the other far, far away, near some distant planet.
Theoretically, a time tunnel or wormhole could do even more than take us to other planets. If both ends were in the same place, and separated by time instead of distance, a ship could fly in and come out still near Earth, but in the distant past. Maybe dinosaurs would witness the ship coming in for a landing....( Cont.)

Stephen Hawking - Build your own Time Machine (part 03)

....The fastest manned vehicle in history was Apollo 10. It reached 25,000mph. But to travel in time we'll have to go more than 2,000 times फास्टर

Now, I realise that thinking in four dimensions is not easy, and that wormholes are a tricky concept to wrap your head around, but hang in there। I've thought up a simple experiment that could reveal if human time travel through a wormhole is possible now, or even in the future. I like simple experiments, and champagne. So I've combined two of my favourite things to see if time travel from the future to the past is possible.
Let's imagine I'm throwing a party, a welcome reception for future time travellers. But there's a twist. I'm not letting anyone know about it until after the party has happened. I've drawn up an invitation giving the exact coordinates in time and space. I am hoping copies of it, in one form or another, will be around for many thousands of years. Maybe one day someone living in the future will find the information on the invitation and use a wormhole time machine to come back to my party, proving that time travel will, one day, be possible.
In the meantime, my time traveller guests should be arriving any moment now. Five, four, three, two, one. But as I say this, no one has arrived. What a shame. I was hoping at least a future Miss Universe was going to step through the door. So why didn't the experiment work? One of the reasons might be because of a well-known problem with time travel to the past, the problem of what we call paradoxes.
Paradoxes are fun to think about. The most famous one is usually called the Grandfather paradox. I have a new, simpler version I call the Mad Scientist paradox. I don't like the way scientists in movies are often described as mad, but in this case, it's true. This chap is determined to create a paradox, even if it costs him his life. Imagine, somehow, he's built a wormhole, a time tunnel that stretches just one minute into the past
Through the wormhole, the scientist can see himself as he was one minute ago. But what if our scientist uses the wormhole to shoot his earlier self? He's now dead. So who fired the shot? It's a paradox. It just doesn't make sense. It's the sort of situation that gives cosmologists nightmares.
This kind of time machine would violate a fundamental rule that governs the entire universe - that causes happen before effects, and never the other way around. I believe things can't make themselves impossible. If they could then there'd be nothing to stop the whole universe from descending into chaos. So I think something will always happen that prevents the paradox. Somehow there must be a reason why our scientist will never find himself in a situation where he could shoot himself. And in this case, I'm sorry to say, the wormhole itself is the problem.
In the end, I think a wormhole like this one can't exist. And the reason for that is feedback. If you've ever been to a rock gig, you'll probably recognise this screeching noise. It's feedback. What causes it is simple. Sound enters the microphone. It's transmitted along the wires, made louder by the amplifier, and comes out at the speakers. But if too much of the sound from the speakers goes back into the mic it goes around and around in a loop getting louder each time. If no one stops it, feedback can destroy the sound system.
The same thing will happen with a wormhole, only with radiation instead of sound. As soon as the wormhole expands, natural radiation will enter it, and end up in a loop. The feedback will become so strong it destroys the wormhole. So although tiny wormholes do exist, and it may be possible to inflate one some day, it won't last long enough to be of use as a time machine. That's the real reason no one could come back in time to my party.
Any kind of time travel to the past through wormholes or any other method is probably impossible, otherwise paradoxes would occur. So sadly, it looks like time travel to the past is never going to happen. A disappointment for dinosaur hunters and a relief for historians.
But the story's not over yet. This doesn't make all time travel impossible. I do believe in time travel. Time travel to the future. Time flows like a river and it seems as if each of us is carried relentlessly along by time's current. But time is like a river in another way. It flows at diff-erent speeds in diff-erent places and that is the key to travelling into the future. This idea was first proposed by Albert Einstein over 100 years ago. He realised that there should be places where time slows down, and others where time speeds up. He was absolutely right. And the proof is right above our heads. Up in space.
This is the Global Positioning System, or GPS. A network of satellites is in orbit around Earth. The satellites make satellite navigation possible. But they also reveal that time runs faster in space than it does down on Earth. Inside each spacecraft is a very precise clock. But despite being so accurate, they all gain around a third of a billionth of a second every day. The system has to correct for the drift, otherwise that tiny di-fference would upset the whole system, causing every GPS device on Earth to go out by about six miles a day. You can just imagine the mayhem that that would cause.
The problem doesn't lie with the clocks. They run fast because time itself runs faster in space than it does down below. And the reason for this extraordinary e-ffect is the mass of the Earth. Einstein realised that matter drags on time and slows it down like the slow part of a river. The heavier the object, the more it drags on time. And this startling reality is what opens the door to the possibility of time travel to the future....( Cont.)

Stephen Hawking - Build your own Time Machine (part 04)

....Right in the centre of the Milky Way, 26,000 light years from us, lies the heaviest object in the galaxy. It is a supermassive black hole containing the mass of four million suns crushed down into a single point by its own gravity. The closer you get to the black hole, the stronger the gravity. Get really close and not even light can escape. A black hole like this one has a dramatic e-ffect on time, slowing it down far more than anything else in the galaxy. That makes it a natural time machine.
I like to imagine how a spaceship might be able to take advantage of this phenomenon, by orbiting it. If a space agency were controlling the mission from Earth they'd observe that each full orbit took 16 minutes. But for the brave people on board, close to this massive object, time would be slowed down. And here the e-ffect would be far more extreme than the gravitational pull of Earth. The crew's time would be slowed down by half. For every 16-minute orbit, they'd only experience eight minutes of time.
Around and around they'd go, experiencing just half the time of everyone far away from the black hole. The ship and its crew would be travelling through time. Imagine they circled the black hole for five of their years. Ten years would pass elsewhere. When they got home, everyone on Earth would have aged five years more than they had.
So a supermassive black hole is a time machine. But of course, it's not exactly practical. It has advantages over wormholes in that it doesn't provoke paradoxes. Plus it won't destroy itself in a flash of feedback. But it's pretty dangerous. It's a long way away and it doesn't even take us very far into the future. Fortunately there is another way to travel in time. And this represents our last and best hope of building a real time machine....( Cont.)

Stephen Hawking - Build your own Time Machine (part 05)

.....You just have to travel very, very fast. Much faster even than the speed required to avoid being sucked into a black hole. This is due to another strange fact about the universe. There's a cosmic speed limit, 186,000 miles per second, also known as the speed of light. Nothing can exceed that speed. It's one of the best established principles in science. Believe it or not, travelling at near the speed of light transports you to the future.
To explain why, let's dream up a science-fiction transportation system. Imagine a track that goes right around Earth, a track for a superfast train. We're going to use this imaginary train to get as close as possible to the speed of light and see how it becomes a time machine. On board are passengers with a one-way ticket to the future. The train begins to accelerate, faster and faster. Soon it's circling the Earth over and over again.
To approach the speed of light means circling the Earth pretty fast. Seven times a second. But no matter how much power the train has, it can never quite reach the speed of light, since the laws of physics forbid it. Instead, let's say it gets close, just shy of that ultimate speed. Now something extraordinary happens. Time starts flowing slowly on board relative to the rest of the world, just like near the black hole, only more so. Everything on the train is in slow motion.
This happens to protect the speed limit, and it's not hard to see why. Imagine a child running forwards up the train. Her forward speed is added to the speed of the train, so couldn't she break the speed limit simply by accident? The answer is no. The laws of nature prevent the possibility by slowing down time onboard. Now she can't run fast enough to break the limit. Time will always slow down just enough to protect the speed limit. And from that fact comes the possibility of travelling many years into the future......( Cont.)

Stephen Hawking - Build your own Time Machine (final part )

Imagine that the train left the station on January 1, 2050. It circles Earth over and over again for 100 years before finally coming to a halt on New Year's Day, 2150. The passengers will have only lived one week because time is slowed down that much inside the train. When they got out they'd find a very diff-erent world from the one they'd left. In one week they'd have travelled 100 years into the future. Of course, building a train that could reach such a speed is quite impossible. But we have built something very like the train at the world's largest particle accelerator at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland.
Deep underground, in a circular tunnel 16 miles long, is a stream of trillions of tiny particles. When the power is turned on they accelerate from zero to 60,000mph in a fraction of a second. Increase the power and the particles go faster and faster, until they're whizzing around the tunnel 11,000 times a second, which is almost the speed of light. But just like the train, they never quite reach that ultimate speed. They can only get to 99.99 per cent of the limit. When that happens, they too start to travel in time. We know this because of some extremely short-lived particles, called pi-mesons. Ordinarily, they disintegrate after just 25 billionths of a second. But when they are accelerated to near-light speed they last 30 times longer.
It really is that simple. If we want to travel into the future, we just need to go fast. Really fast. And I think the only way we're ever likely to do that is by going into space. The fastest manned vehicle in history was Apollo 10. It reached 25,000mph. But to travel in time we'll have to go more than 2,000 times faster. And to do that we'd need a much bigger ship, a truly enormous machine. The ship would have to be big enough to carry a huge amount of fuel, enough to accelerate it to nearly the speed of light. Getting to just beneath the cosmic speed limit would require six whole years at full power.
The initial acceleration would be gentle because the ship would be so big and heavy. But gradually it would pick up speed and soon would be covering massive distances. In one week it would have reached the outer planets. After two years it would reach half-light speed and be far outside our solar system. Two years later it would be travelling at 90 per cent of the speed of light. Around 30 trillion miles away from Earth, and four years after launch, the ship would begin to travel in time. For every hour of time on the ship, two would pass on Earth. A similar situation to the spaceship that orbited the massive black hole.
After another two years of full thrust the ship would reach its top speed, 99 per cent of the speed of light. At this speed, a single day on board is a whole year of Earth time. Our ship would be truly flying into the future.
The slowing of time has another benefit. It means we could, in theory, travel extraordinary distances within one lifetime. A trip to the edge of the galaxy would take just 80 years. But the real wonder of our journey is that it reveals just how strange the universe is. It's a universe where time runs at different rates in different places. Where tiny wormholes exist all around us. And where, ultimately, we might use our understanding of physics to become true voyagers through the fourth dimension.

Aliens are here Mr. Hawking- Canadian ex-def minister

Accusing world famous astrophysicist Stephen Hawking of spreading misinformation about threats from aliens, former Canadian defence minister Paul Hellyer claimed on Sunday that extraterrestrials have actually been visiting earth for decades.
Rather than harm mankind, he said, their (aliens') spaceships have provided us information for triggering today's microchip and IT revolution on our planet.
Hawking has recently warned humanity against contacting aliens. "If aliens visit us, the outcome would be much as when Columbus landed in America, which didn't turn out well for the Native Americans,'' the British astrophysicist has said.
Hellyer told the Canadian Press that "the reality is that they (aliens) have been visiting earth for decades and probably millennia and have contributed considerably to our knowledge.'' He said our computer screens have their origins in alien spaceships. "Microchips, for example, fiber-optics, they are just two of the many things that allegedly - and probably for real - came from crashed vehicles,'' the Canadian said.
Blaming Hawking for scaring mankind about aliens, he said, "He (Hawking) is indulging in some pretty scary talk there that I would have hoped would not come from someone with such an established stature. "I think it is really sad that a scientist of his repute would contribute to what I would consider more misinformation about a vast and very important subject.''

NASA Astronaut Trainer wants to train Indian Astronauts

Michelle Ham, a trainer for Astronauts at NASA, has expressed her willingness to extend her support to the ISRO's human space flight programme slated for 2015-16. "I would be delighted and honoured," Michelle told PTI when asked if she was ready to take up the assignment if offered by the Indian Space Research Organisation.
"I would love to be part of the Indian space programme when you guys start sending people to space....," Michelle, who trains Space Station and space shuttle astronauts, said. Besides the US space agency NASA, Michelle has trained astronauts of European, Japanese and Russian space agencies in past seven years.
Michelle, whose husband is a NASA astronaut, said she was ready to be of help in astronaut training in India but only for a "short time because there is so much of the world I would like to see". According to ISRO officials, the space agency has already drawn an outline for astronaut training centre which would come up near Bangalore international airport at Devanahalli on the outskirts of the city.
Officials expect investment of about Rs 600 crore to Rs 700 crore for the training centre. ISRO has already carried out a detailed study on the feasibility of undertaking the indigenous mission, with an aim to build and demonstrate the capability for carrying humans to low earth orbit and their return to earth. The programme envisages development of a fully autonomous orbital vehicle carrying two or three crew members to about 300 km-low earth orbit and their safe return.