Michael Behar | Writer & Editor | Boulder, Colorado

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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 →

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November 24, 2003 by admin

OUTSIDE | FALL 2003

My Radical Round-the-World Sabbatical Download PDF

Learn the ropes from a traveler who took 15 months off to roam the planet.

While Malawi’s principal highway is illustrated on maps as a proud red swath, its northern half—unpaved and deeply rutted—is more like a crudely graded horse trail. This hasn’t stopped our wild-eyed driver from achieving near-freeway speeds. At daybreak, he picks up my wife, Jackie, and me near Chitimba, a tiny village beside Lake Malawi where we’d been thumbing a ride. Suddenly we’re soaring through lush landscapes, the tiniest bumps pitching us airborne. Jackie and I are enduring this perilous trip while clutching plastic jump seats in the back end of a Mitsubishi SUV, watching the road recede. It’s only the first part of a day’s journey that will include several hitched rides, a two-mile walk in the midday sun, and four sweltering hours packed into a Toyota minivan with 22 passengers, one of whom sits on my lap for at least half the ride, and another to my left who has sustained some sort of head injury that no one seems to notice. The collar of his white shirt is saturated with blood trickling from a wound above his hairline. Continue reading →

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December 1, 2002 by Michael Behar

Smithsonian | December 2002

Like a Rowing Stone Download PDF

An unusual canoe competition in Madison, Wisconsin, floats the notion that concrete waives the rules

It’s barely daybreak in Madison, Wisconsin, but John Gilbert has already worked up a sweat. The 54-year-old, self-described concrete connoisseur is pacing the southern shore of Lake Mendota, which borders the sprawling University of Wisconsin campus. On this summer weekend, the university is hosting the 15th Annual National Concrete Canoe Competition, a collegiate event Gilbert hasn’t missed since 1990. At the moment, he’s inspecting 25 slender canoes—one from each contending school—neatly aligned at the water’s edge. Continue reading →

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September 19, 2002 by admin

The Economist | September 2002

Color BarsGoodbye to the Video Store Download PDF

For too long, “video-on-demand” has promised more than it could deliver. But new ways are emerging for shrink-wrapping massive video files for delivery over the Internet.

It sounds like the movie addict’s ultimate fantasy: a TV-mounted set-top box that taps the film libraries of Hollywood’s big studios. A film buff could peruse thousands of titles spanning dozens of genres, from enduring classics to the latest blockbuster releases. After deciding what to watch, viewers would enter a password, confirm credit-card details, and then sit back as 5.1-channel surround-sound video streams from a remote web server into a home-theatre system in their living room.

Too good to be true? For the moment, yes. Bespoke video-on-demand is at least three years away. But the difference now is that Movielink—a recently formed joint venture between MGM, Paramount, Sony, Universal and Warner Bros—is preparing a collective library for just such a service. The venture intends to serve up an almost unlimited selection of films over the Internet and, eventually, through a web-connected set-top box. Continue reading →

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July 19, 2002 by admin

Wired | July 2002

Cold Rush Download PDF

Long hours. Subfreezing winds. Months of absolute darkness. Welcome to the South Pole, where the coolest science outpost on earth is being built atop 9,000 feet of solid ice.

After a grueling 18 hours on the ice, Jerry Marty wanders into the communications center at Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station and collapses on a tattered sofa. It’s midnight and the place is quiet. As the National Science Foundation’s representative for the station, Marty is, in effect, the mayor of the South Pole. A lanky 55-year-old with fair hair and a broad mustache, he is overseeing construction of a $153 million research facility that will replace the Pole’s current structure—a 27-year-old geodesic dome that is slowly being buried under mounting ice and snow. The sleek new station will have it all: from private rooms outfitted with Ethernet and telephone hookups to modern labs and medical facilities—plus a cozy bar where researchers can host their time-honored Slushy Night in style. By 2006, after 15 years of planning, design, and construction, South Pole scientists and support staff will have a home fit for the 21st century.

But building the new station is a tremendously complex endeavor that demands precision choreography among 85 onsite construction workers, contractors in Denver, architects in Honolulu, administrators in Washington, DC, and a 10,000-mile supply chain that begins aboard a cargo ship in Port Hueneme, California, and culminates at the Pole six weeks later with the daily arrival of up to seven ski-equipped cargo planes. Hence, Marty sleeps by the radio in the “comm center”—if any one of these variables goes awry, he needs to be the first to know. Continue reading →

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July 11, 2002 by admin

Business 2.0 | July 2002

metal faceComputer, Heal Thyself Download PDF

IBM is developing computer systems that monitor themselves and repair glitches as they arise—which could dramatically cut the cost of network maintenance.

Computer networks are fragile and temperamental creatures. They’re prone to unpredictable software glitches and mechanical failures. They’re vulnerable to traffic bottlenecks and hostile intrusions. They’re difficult to diagnose when things go wrong. They’re also extremely expensive, because it takes a lot of people to keep all those finicky machines humming. According to the Standish Group, tech department salaries account for as much as 45 percent of the total cost of running large computing clusters—the labyrinth of application servers, workstations, storage systems, and peripherals that lies at the heart of all networked businesses.

Researchers at IBM think there’s a better way to keep these systems running. “If the demand for IT management continues at the current rate, soon everyone will be a systems administrator,” jokes Robert Morris, director of IBM’s Almaden Research Center in San Jose. Morris believes that tedious, labor-intensive tasks such as updating software, modifying settings, formatting drives, recovering lost data, and optimizing network traffic should take place automatically, behind the scenes, in much the same way that the human autonomic nervous system monitors and adjusts the activity of the heart, lungs, and circulatory system without any conscious effort. With that idea in mind, IBM has launched an ambitious initiative to develop hardware and software systems that can take care of themselves. Continue reading →

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May 24, 2002 by admin

WIRED | MAY 2002

The New Mobile Infantry Download PDF

Battle-ready robots are rolling out of the research lab and into harm’s way.

Lieutenant Colonel John Blitch retired from the Army last fall, filling out the paperwork in an out-processing office of the Pentagon on the morning of September 10, 2001. In his three years at the helm of the Defense Department’s Tactical Mobile Robots Program, Blitch had funded nearly a dozen academic and corporate research efforts. Their goal: building bots to replace human soldiers and rescue workers in dangerous situations. Barrel-chested and brawny, the 43-year-old Special Forces officer was leaving to direct the Center for Intelligent Robotics and Unmanned Systems at the Science Applications International Corporation, an engineering outfit and defense contractor in Littleton, Colorado. He planned to start the 1,500-mile drive the following day.

With news of the terrorist attacks, though, Blitch scrapped the trip. He removed his belongings from the flatbed trailer hitched to his pickup, loaded up a set of tactical mobile robots, or TMRs-most about the size of a football and fitted with rugged treads and an assortment of sensors—and headed for New York. On the road, Blitch donned his fatigues, dug out his military ID, and worked his cell phone, summoning colleagues from Florida to Boston to pack up their finest tactical robots and rendezvous at Ground Zero. “When I arrived, we passed through 32 checkpoints,” he recalls. “People were asking, ‘Who is this guy in camouflage running around with grad students and robots?'” Continue reading →

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