1 In his book, Men From Earth , Buzz Aldrin provides a broad overview of space history leading up to his moon landing on Apollo 11. The book begins with the launch of the first V-2 rocket by Werhner von Braun’s German rocket team at Peenemunde and progresses systematically through both the American and Soviet space missions. In contrast to many of the astronaut autobiographies, Aldrin’s book is...

The Earth Simulator (ES) is a distributed memory parallel system which consists of 640 processor nodes connected by a single stage full crossbar network. Each processor node is a shared memory system composed of eight vector processors and a memory system of 16 GB. The total peak performance and main memory capacity are 40 Tflops and 10 TB, respectively. Its development was initiated in 1997 an...

The link between environmental degradation and international security has attracted new attention due to the publication of the United Nations report A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility, authored by the High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, a group of experts assembled by Kofi Annan and tasked with advising the Security Council about new global threats. The panel specif...

Earth is much more complex than all the other solar system objects that we know. Thanks to its rich and diverse geology, our planet can offer habitats to a wide range of living species. Emerging insights suggest that this is not just a happy coincidence, but that life itself has in many ways helped to shape the planet.

A number of informal terms (e.g., Anthropocene, Anthropozoic, Psychozoic, Noozoic, and Technogene) have been used to designate the rock unit and time interval where the impact of collective human action on the Earth system is clearly recognizable (called here the Humanized Earth System or HES). Presently, Anthropocene is the most commonly used, and the International Commission on Stratigraphy i...

METHODS in somatic cell hybridization, introduced by Kohler & Milstein (1975), have made it possible to produce monoclonal antibodies in tissue culture. Whilst the method has proved entirely successful for the production of antibodies against particulate antigens such as those on the cell surface (Trucco et al., 1978) and viruses (Koprowski et al., 1977), it has only recently been successfully ...

Summan Previous cross-sectional data suggest a positive association between serum cholesterol and brain neoplasms. but the results of cohort studies are inconclusive. There is evidence that in women the growth of meningiomas and astrocytomas depends on the hormonal status. The present investigation comprised data on serum cholesterol and P-lipoprotein concentration among 229 participants in a h...

A major trend of the past several years is the digitization of all forms of geospatial data. An aspect of this trend is the accelerating pace of data acquisition from existing and new types of sensors; most if not all of these data are digital. Many of these sensors have provided forms of data not readily available before, such as high-resolution, dynamic 3D data from the atmosphere or the ocea...

T he Test Storage Ring (TSR) has been in operation at the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics for some 20 years now. It is a racetrack of sorts, with a 55-meter circumference, on which charged particles race around, guided by magnets. Compared with its big brothers, such as the new super-accelerator LHC at the European particle physics lab in Geneva, the TSR is quite modest. But by no mean...