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December 31, 2004 by admin

Outside | December 2004

Splendid Isolation Download PDF

It’s a 21st-century Robinson Crusoe fantasy: Your own private island—but with none of the inconvenience and discomfort of being a castaway.

The twin-prop De Havilland touches down on what looks like the ninth fairway at Pebble Beach—a runway of perfectly manicured grass. Greeting us on this emerald carpet are whirling throngs of seabirds: fairy terns, tok-toks, lesser noddies, and a few magpie robins—the seventh-rarest bird in the world. An attendant from Frégate Island Private, the sole property on this 740-acre speck of land in the Indian Ocean, meets us at the airstrip with fresh coconut milk and ice-cold terry-cloth face towels, then loads our bags onto a golf cart and takes me and my fiancée, Ashley, to our villa.

As we weave among almond trees and coco de mer palms, our driver tells us that some guests never leave their cottages. When we arrive at our 2,000-square-foot ocean-view compound, bordered on three sides by a ten-foot hedge of ferns and orchids, it’s easy to see why. Continue reading →

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December 24, 2004 by admin

Smithsonian | December 2004

Treasure Quest Download PDF

For more than a decade, American Robert Graf has combed the waters of a Seychelles island for a multimillion-dollar booty stashed by pirates nearly 300 years ago.

I’ve been treading water in a small, man-made lagoon for about half an hour, waiting for Robert Graf to surface. The 49-year-old American treasure hunter has cordoned off this rectangular swath of Indian Ocean in the Seychelles, and now he’s somewhere 25 feet below, chiseling off chunks of granite and sucking up sand and grit with a four-inch-wide vacuum dredge. He’s searching for the entrance to a stone vault that he believes contains a pirate hoard—part of what many consider the largest high-seas heist in history—stashed nearly 300 years ago. Back then, locals speculate, the area where we’re swimming was dry land, the sea held back by a sand berm later destroyed in a storm.

Graf, a former U.S. Air Force technical instructor, breathes through a 50-foot-long bright pink hose attached to an air tank on shore. He wears a face mask, a tattered wet suit and 26 pounds of lead weight strapped to his waist. Every so often I dunk my head, peering through my mask into impossibly blue water. At one point a faint shadow glides over the bottom, then vanishes into a dark ravine. Moments later there’s a creepy scraping sound, like someone prying open the lid of a sarcophagus. Continue reading →

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October 24, 2004 by admin

Wired | October 2004

Rendering Inferno Download PDF

Flames leap 200 feet in the air and burn at 2,000 degrees. A rain of fire sets thousands of acres ablaze. The smoke jumpers may get the glory, but the battle is being won by the wildfire simulation brigade.”

It was one of the worst years for wildfires in Montana’s history: In 2003, more than 2,300 fires torched three-quarters of a million acres—nearly 20 percent of the total burned by wildfires across the US. The western part of the state was hardest hit, especially in late August, when multiple blazes devoured tens of thousands of acres of pristine Rocky Mountain wilderness. Some 2,000 firefighters were deployed throughout the region, as well as nearly every available fire engine, bulldozer, helicopter, and water-tanker plane. Local commanders were flying wildfire specialists in from around the country. Continue reading →

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July 24, 2004 by admin

Discover | July 2004

Will Genetics Destroy Sports? Download PDF

A new age of biotechnology promises bigger, faster, better bodies—and blood, urine, and saliva tests can’t stop the cheating.”

The chime on H. Lee Sweeney’s laptop dings again—another e-mail. He doesn’t rush to open it. He knows what it’s about. He knows what they are all about. The molecular geneticist gets dozens every week, all begging for the same thing—a miracle. Ding. A woman with carpal tunnel syndrome wants a cure. Ding. A man offers $100,000, his house, and all his possessions to save his wife from dying of a degenerative muscle disease. Ding, ding, ding. Jocks, lots of jocks, plead for quick cures for strained muscles or torn tendons. Weight lifters press for larger deltoids. Sprinters seek a split second against the clock. People volunteer to be guinea pigs.

Sweeney has the same reply for each ding: “I tell them it’s illegal and maybe not safe, but they write back and say they don’t care. A high school coach contacted me and wanted to know if we could make enough serum to inject his whole football team. He wanted them to be bigger and stronger and come back from injuries faster, and he thought those were good things.” Continue reading →

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March 10, 2004 by admin

The Economist | March 2004

Drivers Wanted Download PDF

It is already possible to build driverless cars, trucks and buses. But practical problems and safety concerns mean they may never be allowed on the roads.

The teams competing in DARPA’s Grand Challenge (see article) have it easy. The driverless vehicles racing off-road in the Mojave Desert merely have to avoid boulders, dunes and the occasional cactus. That is nothing compared with the hazards of the open road. Put those same autonomous vehicles on Interstate 15—the busy road that links Los Angeles and Las Vegas—and they would also have to contend with bleary-eyed weekenders, huge trucks and octogenarians puttering along in mobile homes. Even so, engineers and scientists at a handful of academic and industrial research centres are valiantly grappling with the problem of designing autonomous passenger vehicles, buses and trucks. They imagine a future in which convoys of cars would communicate with each other and with roadside sensors to navigate congested freeways, ensure smooth traffic flow and virtually eliminate accidents. Continue reading →