The languishly manned spaceflight programs of the world are attracting less and less funding, as well as a rapidly shrinking public presence. Even the most ardent supporters balk at the extravagant launch costs and fragile safety margins endemic to human endeavors in space. However, riding the coattails of these costly missions for decades have been an extensive series of unmanned missions that operate at a fraction of these costs, with vastly differentiated mission times involved. NASA and the ESA quietly landed on Titan (largely to public chagrin and apathy) in 2005, and this 13-year mission has cost a grand total of $3.2 billion, spread across NASA and its European counterparts. In contrast, each near-Earth space shuttle mission is estimated to cost $1.5 billion, and a total of $170 billion has been spent on the shuttle alone.

The STEREO mission consists of two identical probes launched simultaneously on a modified Air Force Delta II rocket in late October 2006. STEREO A and B were placed into very elliptical orbits, and NASA utilized a gravitational slingshot via the moon to place them for operations. The STEREO mission is so-termed for the orbiters’ dual observations in their final heliocentric orbit. The crux of this mission was the utilization of what astrophysics knows as La Grange points – points in space where the gravitational interaction between a two bodies is negated and an object can remain in a simple, stable orbit for long periods of time. Every pair of sun-planet interactions has five La Grange points: L1 is between the body and the sun; L2 is on the opposite side of the orbiting bodies at a precise point. Point L3 is a highly unstable region precisely 180 degrees across from Earth, in our orbital wake – an “anti-Earth” which is perpetually shrouded from our view by the sun. STEREO A and B (“Ahead” and “Behind”) were placed at La Grange points L4 and L5 – the most stable of these gravitationally-canceled regions – which lead and follow along Earth’s orbital path.

STEREO’s simplest mission descriptor is stereoscopic imagery of the Sun in ways we are obviously incapable of when stranded Earth-side. Of particular interest to researchers is the detection and study of the sun’s intermittent Coronal Mass Ejections (discussed on pages 10 and 11). For science nerds, the mission allows for some very interesting optical trickery via false-3D animated .gifs of the sun’s rotation and long, high-resolution video of our star spewing untold billions of tons of matter into the solar system. Each spacecraft carries a wealth of instruments for measuring the many parameters of the sun’s daily operations.

Among the instruments on board each spacecraft are instruments measuring the full electromagnetic spectrum, as well as heavier particles and safe distance measurement of the large plasma masses produced in the large thermonuclear reactor. This instrumentation has now come online in full, as each orbit realigns and the spacecrafts move further away from each other. In January 2009, STEREO A and B reached 90 degrees relative to each other – a landmark that scientists say will greatly improve the orbiters’ data triangulation capabilities. It is estimated that the mission will reach a full 180 degrees from each other in 2011, and this will represent the first time that the entire sun will be visible to humanity at one time. The mission has the possibility to be extended to 2015 and beyond, and like other unmanned probe missions, this would be more time than the project was optimistically budgeted. The burgeoning data emerging from STEREO, its unique mission, and its low cost at $550 million (roughly a third of a shuttle mission) will build more goodwill for NASA. Although popular culture almost exclusively cites manned space accomplishments as milestones, unmanned missions like STEREO will continue to effectively provide a provocative scientific background for decades to come.

As students pass through the University of Minnesota, it may be easy to feel insignificant or boxed-in. We have over 50,000 students on the Twin Cities campus—one of the largest student bodies in the country—and countless local functions that may live and die by University-budgeted decisions. It’s easy to feel that the University’s mandate starts at the West Bank and ends on the East, and indeed I have talked to students who have not even been so far as the Saint Paul campus. However, the U of M has its hands in all aspects of Minnesota’s functioning, and this point must be impressed again and again for each incoming generation.

Without stepping on the toes of the U’s promotional material, the unique makeup of Minnesota and the long-standing (yet ever changing) land holdings of the U have facilitated a symbiotic relationship that cannot be understated.  One of the most interesting facilities operated by our humble Land Grant behemoth is the Soudan Mine facility in Minnesota’s Iron Range. The misinformed existential angst concerning CERN’s particle physics work with 2008’s much-publicized Large Hadron Collider may cast dispersions, but that is neither here nor there. The Soudan facility can, in no way, shape or form, be construed as a doomsday operation, as popular folklore has erroneously declared about the latter. Whenever we feel that tuition is untenable or U management is unreceptive, that feeling must be tempered by the good that has come from our student fees.

Established in the early 1980s deep in an old mining shaft in Soudan, Minnesota (47 degrees 48’ 57” N, 92 degrees 14’ 16” W), the Soudan facility has slowly expanded operations over the decades as U of M and the Minnesota DNR have seen fit. Extending nearly half a mile into the bedrock of the Iron Range, the Soudan facility was an ideal choice for the monitoring of elusive subatomic particles. Minnesota is particularly geologically stable, and the site was chosen because a cavern was already extant from defunct taconite mining in the area. The Soudan facility is chiefly and famously known for its ongoing neutrino detection experiments. Neutrinos are very high-energy, fast moving particles that are ubiquitous and normally difficult to filter out from background radiation and more prominent particles. Their persistent energy and ability to penetrate unfathomably deeply into the Earth (or anything else, for that matter) form the reason for the University facility’s existence. Deep underground, neutrinos appear at a much lower rate than at the surface and can thus be isolated and studied in greater depth.

Northern Minnesota may not spring to mind when one imagines nuclear physics research, but the Soudan installation has become deeply entrenched in local culture over its lifespan. There are several large, ongoing experiments conducted at the mine, which are run collaboratively by the U of M, as well as its partners in academia and research all over the country. At any given time, according to brochures, there are a dozen to fifteen guest physicists working at the site, and the deep hollow maintains a steady and busy equilibrium.

The lab has been a great boon to the local economy and brings millions in state funding, which may have been otherwise allocated elsewhere.

Currently, the Soudan facility has two experiments in progress. The old husks of the Soudan 1 and 2 detectors were cleared to make way for the CDMS-II experiment. CDMS stands for Cryogenic Dark Matter Search – an effort begun at Stanford University and moved to Soudan in 2003. In this experiment, incredibly delicate detector plates composed of germanium and silicon lattices are super-cooled to temperatures within fractions of Absolute Zero, and thus are very physically static. The detectors are monitored for disturbances, however minor. The goal is to detect what are known as Weakly Interacting Massive Particles (WIMPs) and ultimately tangential confirmation of the existence of dark matter. Because WIMPs only interact with each other via the weak nuclear force and gravity itself, the absolute pristine conditioning of monitoring devices is critical to the experiment’s success. The CDMS experiments have been central to a global effort in researching dark matter and chipping away at one of the most fundamental problems confronting physics today.

The universe, when representative galaxies are sampled and “audited,” has a large disparity in the amount of matter found in visible sources (stars, planets, nebulae) and the observed gravitational interactions between the galactic bodies. It is theorized that the gap in observed gravity can be accounted by the existence of dark matter, and WIMPs are examples of a fraction of the heavy particles that could uphold existing theories. The experiment has been inconclusive in detecting these particles thus far, but the hardware undergoes constant revision and is by all accounts approaching the threshold at which it should theoretically detect WIM particles. Europe’s much-lauded Large Hadron Collider, before its malfunction, was still forecast to be less sensitive to these particles than the Soudan experiment, thus ensuring its continued relevance looking forward.

The other major prominent experiment underway at Soudan is the MINOS detector. Spurred by successful experiments at a similar facility in Japan, the Super-Kamiokande in Gifu prefecture, the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search was initiated in the early 2000s. This experiment is a joint collaboration of the U of M, FermiLab National Research Laboratory in Chicagoland, and a host of participating academic institutions. While all previous Soudan experiments had taken place in a single cavern left over from iron mining, the MINOS detector required an entirely new wing, and the size of the facility was greatly expanded. The chamber holding the experiment is large and arrayed with a large, fairly abstract mural adorning one of its walls. One gets a feeling of overwhelming coziness despite the fantastic depth beneath the surface.

After years of preparation and setup, MINOS began operating in 2005. The procedure calls for Batavia, Illinois’s FermiLab to shoot neutrinos through the crust of the Earth directly to Soudan, Minnesota – a tangential distance of 456 miles. Each neutrino detector is a specialized and highly sensitive series of large, octagonal sheets of iron (which comes from our own Mesabi Range, of course!). The detector in Soudan weighs roughly 6,000 tons and dominates the cavern constructed for the experiment. Working in tandem, this experiment has promising aspirations to unlock the nature of neutrinos and their interaction with the “solid” matter they seem to be so adept at dodging. The resultant changes in energy, trajectory, spin, and other factors, however minor, can be monumentally helpful in refining existing models on these elusive particles. This experiment, as well, is unlikely to face obsolescence any time soon, and will remain at the cutting edge of human forays into physics.

Below the Soudan Mine’s humble, rust-hued elevator shaft head lays one of the most critically important and cost-effective initiatives undertaken by the U of M. It has grown organically in space and importance, and is now well poised to participate in breakthroughs critical to our species’ understanding of the cosmos. Its budget has been modest, the return has been enormous and invaluable, and it should highlight a prime example of a net positive enacted by our University and by academia as a whole.

When you went to the ballot box on November 4, you were probably primarily concerned with electing a new president. However, another interesting and far more local issue was also on the ballot: the Minnesota Clean Water, Land, and Legacy Amendment. This measure, passed with 55 percent approval, raised Minnesota’s sales tax by three eighths of a percent in order to provide more funding to preserve the state’s cultural and environmental heritage. 14.25 percent of this money will be directed toward the Minnesota State Park and Trail system, according to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. The passage of this amendment shows Minnesota’s special relationship with their parks and forests.

Minnesota’s extensive State Park system has always been one of the nation’s best. If you’ve never been to a Minnesota State Park, or you’ve only been to one or two, you’re in for a treat. According to the DNR, there are 66 parks in the system, totaling about 267,000 acres (about 97.8 times the size of the University of Minnesota campus). With that amount of recreational space, there’s something for everyone. Here are a few of what I believe to be the best parks, including a few less than a four-hour drive from the cities.

My first camping trip at a state park was before I could talk, and each successive trip, be it with family, friends, or alone, offers a new and special experience for me. I’ve been to probably about half of Minnesota’s parks, and many more than once. Here are some of the standouts:

Jay Cooke
My absolute all-time favorite State Park is Jay Cooke. Cooke is located about 2 1/2 hours from the city just off of Lake Superior south of Duluth. The St. Louis River crashes through the park with rapids and giant rock canyons that make for great climbing and exploring. You really feel like a trailblazer. Known as an excellent park for hiking, Jay Cooke has a normal car-campground and several hike-in sites for those who want to be a little more secluded. There are also bike and horse trails. This is also one of the best places in the state to see amazing fall colors. Make sure to check the weather before your trip, though: the park’s soil is primarily clay. Rain, I discovered last fall, turns the park into a muddy, slippery mess.

Afton
Afton State Park is quite a bit closer, located less than 45 minutes east on the St. Croix River. Perfect for day hikes or quick camping trips on a weekend, Afton provides scenic trails and backpack camping on a bluff overlooking the river. If you can tolerate the number of suburbanites who come here to jog and walk their dogs, you’ll be in for a great day of camping, biking, or hiking a stone’s throw from Minneapolis.

Itasca
If you’re looking to get away from the Twin Cities in earnest, you might want to visit Itasca, Minnesota’s largest and oldest State Park. After about a four-hour drive, you will arrive at a park that boasts 32,690 acres of wilderness and is crisscrossed with tons of hiking trails. Biking is not so good here, but there are 11 really, really amazing secluded hike-in campsites that will make you forget your homework in an instant. This park contains the source of the Mississippi River, at Lake Itasca. It’s small enough to jump across.

Whitewater
If you’d rather canoe to your site than walk or drive, but don’t want to go to the Boundary Waters, then Glendalough State Park is for you. Situated around Lake Glendalough, the park offers great bass fishing (I caught a huge one here) and a canoe or bike-in campground. Glendalough also has a nice variation of terrain, from broadleaf forests to lakes to canoeable creeks to prairies. This is another one of my all-time favorite parks, and is definitely worth checking out.

As you can see, there are tons of recreation opportunities available at Minnesota state parks. Every time you buy something, you’re supporting this valuable resource, so it makes no sense not to take full advantage of it. A weekend of State Park camping typically costs less than $40 plus gas, so it’s dirt cheap. Reservations for the best weekends in the summer go quickly, so if you’re looking to plan a state park outing this summer, reserve a site quickly.

Reservations can be made at www.dnr.state.mn.us/state_parks/index.html

A parade of gentle, forceful and resonant sounds echo from the larger-than-life Japanese wooden Taiko drums, played by renowned Taiko drummer Koji Nakamura, commencing the “Whole Systems Healing” lecture series as presented by the University of Minnesota’s Center for Spirituality & Healing. The drums are being used to communicate spiritual values that resonate through the four corners of universe. This resonance represents the integration that the Center for Spirituality & Healing seeks to create in healthcare and communities. The keynote speaker for the evening is environmental advocate and author of The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems, Van Jones.

Van Jones, perhaps drawing on his experience working with urban youth, engages the audience in fluctuations of humor and seriousness that allow him a comfortable, even intimate, presence at the University of Minnesota’s Ted Mann Concert Hall. He addresses the audience as a collective group that has fought for things like renewable energy and local foods while simultaneously battling against all things inefficient — including large buildings not unlike the one they occupy. The lecture seems to be intended for persons who are environmentally conscious and looking for motivation or a place to collaborate on environmental initiatives.

“I am not scared [of the economic situation], because from breakdowns come breakthroughs,” Van says solemnly. One can’t help but believe him—he tells the audience of his personal path into sustainability—beginning with his own breakdown from his work with urban youth. Repeatedly seeing young people in caskets (among other unsettling realities), led to his emotional degradation and subsequent reinvention through sustainability. In this practice, Jones found hope in creating jobs and optimism for individuals who sometimes had neither.

President Obama is referenced several times in Van Jones’ speech—he emphasizes that Obama’s passion and policy are the products of the beauty Obama sees in America’s citizens. It is the American peoples’ duty, Jones believes, to move forward and act on the environmental initiatives presented to them as individuals and as communities. Here, Van Jones references Obama’s stimulus plan, “One hundred to 150 billion dollars for sustainability,” which Van Jones estimates is, “Humanity’s biggest investment in green to date.” Jones declares that the investment cannot be made everywhere at once, and that the Minnesota will be one of the key places in showing the integration of “social justice and ecology, government and entrepreneurs, and social change and spirituality.”

Van Jones drives the audiences’ emotions and inspires their minds to act: “The reason you were born is to be fully expressed – right now.” Van is trying to spur action with his voice. He appears to be successful with affirmative shouts and supportive applause intermittently dispersed through his speech. He leaves the audience with some direction: “the seeds of ideas you’ve had in notebooks…the ideas you haven’t moved on, this is the moment to act them.”

In the international space community, there is no quest that plagues mankind more than the search for extraterrestrial life. Driven both by necessity and curiosity, a discovery of an environment hospitable to even the most primitive form of life in Earth’s own backyard would strengthen the argument that there are likely tens of hundreds of solar systems in the universe that harbor the same potential.

With ever-shrinking financial resources and substantial technological challenges, fierce competition has raged on concerning the best scientific investment for the future of human civilization. Several missions to various planetary bodies have been proposed, but realistically our limited space exploration infrastructure can support only a handful of these.

It was with this in mind that NASA had to make a major decision as to where in the solar system it would devote the bulk of its efforts. The leading contenders, Titan and Europa, are two names that have long conjured sentiments of promise and intrigue.

Titan, Saturn’s largest moon, is a rocky planet interspersed with water and ice. In fact, it is the only object other than Earth in which clear evidence of stable bodies of water has been found. The moon is also relatively young, has a nitrogen atmosphere, and may have tectonic activity. This leads some scientists to the conjecture that Titan may be a lot like primordial Earth, only at a much lower temperature.

It is also important to note the presence of methane in the atmosphere of Titan. Though many believe the gas is originating from Titan itself via cryovolcanoes, it is possible that the methane’s source is biological. Methane is released in the process of decomposition of organic matter. Hence: if it lives, it rots.

Orbiting Jupiter and nestled between neighboring moons IO and Ganymede, Europa is a relatively young and smooth planet, covered with a layer of ice. Due to its composition, it has been hypothesized that below its top layer lays a liquid ocean. Heat energy generated from tidal movement could keep the ocean from freezing over, making Europa a likely home of the closest thing to life as we know it on Earth.

In February of this year, NASA made an announcement that will have a giant impact on the future of space exploration. Both Titan and Europa remain targets for future NASA missions: the Titan Saturn System Mission (TSSM) and the Europa Jupiter System Mission (EJSM). However, the mission to Europa will take priority, with a potential launch date of 2020. The main reason the EJSM will be launched first is that it was determined to be more technically feasible than the Titan-Saturn mission.

The undertaking will consist of three proposed components which are: The Jupiter Europa Orbiter—developed, launched, and controlled by NASA and planned to study Europa and Io. Second, the Jupiter Ganymede Orbiter—developed, launched, and controlled by the European Space Agency (ESA) and planned to study Ganymede and Callisto. Lastly, the Jupiter Magnetospheric Orbiter—developed, launched, and controlled by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and planned to study Jupiter’s magnetosphere.

The renewed mandate for sustainable energy in America has forced policymakers to consider an unusual problem. The moratorium on new nuclear power plants in America has been in effect for over thirty years now, and the industry has a strange generational breakdown to show for it. In short, there are concerns that the current nuclear power workforce will not be able to readily assume the challenges of designing and constructing new plants. This process remains an arduous and lengthy one even with the lessons of older reactors under our belts. The concept of a generational absence may seem preposterous, but consider that, in 1979—the year of Three Mile Island and the impetus for the moratorium—most of the engineers and architects of today would have ranked relatively lowly in their profession. An engineer aged sixty and near retirement today may have been a thirty year old journeyperson at the time of the federal policy change, and far from the top echelons of reactor planning and design.

This disparity seems to echo a trend in several other highly specialized industries in decades past. The achievements of an older generation are taken for granted and those now living are standing on the shoulders of giants. For example, other pieces of American infrastructure date back to the enormous make-work programs of the 1930s, and our society has rested on its laurels and accomplishments ever since. The new direction of federal policy seems to ask us to challenge those axioms and glimpse our dependence objectively.

It becomes difficult to blame the American policymakers of yesteryear for discouraging nuclear power in the last 30 years. The industry claims a nearly threefold increase in output over that span, and since Three Mile Island there has never been another near-meltdown. The reluctance in
providing incentives for new plants may be owed to America’s extraordinary energy position. By all accounts, this country is sitting on hundreds of years worth of coal, and its cheap abundance has led to a great dependence.

The existence of nuclear power plants raise interesting issues of longevity that don’t cross into our lives very often. The process of setting up new plants has historically been slow and meticulously complicated, and it could be as much of a decade’s span between groundbreaking and commercial power generation. Once every reactor has run its course, there is an equally arduous process of decommissioning a plant. Many components of nuclear plants are not safe outside of their power generating use, and are disposed of with simple burial. The long-standing opposition to nuclear power has been primarily concerned with the disposal of waste material —and to wit, the federal government’s “hey man, just bury it” attitude hasn’t won any converts from that camp.

It was especially interesting to observe how traditional political boundaries blurred in the 2008 election cycle. The driving force behind the movement to stop nuclear power has been the realization that the contaminants produced will outlive all of us buried in Yucca Mountain in Nevada. This environmental wing was joined in opposition by those who worried about the efficacy of terrorist attacks on nuclear sites, forming an unholy alliance which rocked the vapid fabric of insipid, artificial party boundaries. The movement in favor of nuclear power was fairly non-existent until American dependence on fossil fuels found its way into the language of the pundits and policymakers. Nuclear power has been receiving a public image boost in recent years as government has reassessed its safety and ecological riskiness. Public perception was lost somewhere between the two interests, but the bottom line is clear: America will build more plants.

The aging nuclear workforce has been a noted phenomenon for some time, now. In a position statement in June 2006, the American Nuclear Society listed the industry’s aging workforce among its chief concerns, and they were not alone. The IAEA, the international nuclear watchdog best popularly known for its American-prompted finger-wagging at Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, has written extensively on the extraordinary aging concerns with the American workforce. In 2004, the ANS reported an average age of 48.8, and claimed that as much as 28 percent of the industry was eligible for retirement within five years. The problem reached such a noticeable degree, in fact, that it surfaced in an episode of The Simpsons in 1998. In it, Homer and other middle-aged co-workers record a poorly-scripted and -acted video recruiting fresh blood to the industry. The problem and industry solution, were not far from this satire. The nation’s post-secondary institutions have been adding and bolstering nuclear engineering programs in recent years in preparation for future demand. That said, it still may not be quick enough to placate the public’s desire for a nebulous notion of “sustainable” energy.

Even with a roughly static number of plants over the past thirty years, productivity and safety have greatly improved as the industry has refined itself. The nuclear workforce, as it exists today, is composed primarily of older Baby Boomers nearing retirement and a rapidly burgeoning crop of twenty-somethings and recent graduates who will re-staff the industry and constitute the next generation. A longstanding campaign against nuclear power has created unnecessarily negative connotations within public perception, and this was compounded by a widespread series of downsizings in the 1990s in the interests of productivity. The anti-nuclear campaign, interestingly enough, draws much of its power from the fallout (pun intended). The former was a 1979 movie which depicted a nuclear plant’s malfunction and meltdown, and the latter was the closest an American reactor has come to a real meltdown. Public perception has been further colored over the years with the slow revelation of details about the Chernobyl nuclear power plant’s complete meltdown in 1986. Popular concern isn’t without cause, however: the Chernobyl incident was only settled when an event with such broad implications that the offending reactor was hastily buried in a thick layer of concrete, and the nearby city of Pripyat, Ukraine was evacuated and abandoned. These are the incidents which define public opinion on nuclear power, and the industry’s saving grace in America may have been the environmental movement, ironically.

Overall, the industry has operated in the shadow of public perceptions for years. Although the oft-mentioned moratorium on nuclear power plant plans came in the late 1970s, the newest American reactor came online in 1996. The power grid has been growing at a pace independent of the reactions of a public which may or may not realistically care about the source of its power. It is only with the galvanizing force of scarcity that the issue has returned to prominence in public debate. By this reckoning, the stigma of nuclear power has only served to empty out the industry of graduate interest, and cause a knowledge retention problem that is rather unique. No lasting “damage” (if one terms it as such) has been done, however – Toshiba announced in late February that it will be constructing state of the art reactors at an existing site in southern Texas. The nonchalant, necessary influx of nuclear design expertise from other nations is, if anything, evidence of a more realistic global view of enterprise, and not a fatal blow to America’s “homegrown” prowess. How the debate will shift further in the coming decades is anyone’s guess. The disparity between pop culture campaigns and federal policy, however, should be noted in questioning the efficacy of public reaction initiatives on our day-to-day lives.

I tend to get motion sickness. Well, perhaps “tend” is not the correct way to explain. The sentence needs no auxiliary verb; I get motion sickness. I mean, a person who cannot play “Rainbow Road” on Mario Kart 64 without getting nauseous does not just “tend” to motion sickness.

The first time I became aware of my weakness was on a sixth grade trip to the Science Museum’s Omnitheatre. Before you get all excited and start imagining embarrassing stories in the grain of “I vomited on the cutest boy in school” or “people called me ‘Upchuck’ until senior year,” I am going to stop you. I did not throw up that day because I learned a very important trick: close your eyes tightly, hang onto the arm rests and the waves of nausea will pass. This trick is imperative for me because during that somewhat uncomfortable day, I also learned that I love movies at the Omnitheatre.

There is just something about being completely surrounded by the action of the movie that enthralls me, in addition to upsetting my stomach. The 60-ton, 9-story tall, 89-foot wide screen captivates me. There is definitely a struggle when I need to pull my eyes away to save my stomach.

As much as I love movies at the Omnitheatre, I do not think I could bring myself to sit through five films in row. My powers of stomach-control would probably be undermined by the sheer grandness of five Omnitheatre films.

But if your biological composition is tougher than mine, you should check out Omnifest, the film festival running from March 6 to April 12 at the Science Museum of Minnesota in St. Paul.

Usually the Science Museum shows only one movie at a time, but during Omnifest five films will be shown in daily rotation. The first costs $7.50 for adults and $6.50 for children and seniors. If you go to a second, third, fourth or fifth that same day, the tickets will be 15 percent less.

During the weeks of the festival, the museum will be open extended hours: Monday-Friday from 12 p.m. to 9 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Exhibits will also be open during these times.

Perhaps I’ll venture to one or two. Maybe I could even handle three if I give myself time to recover in between. The opportunity is too good to pass up, even for the weak of stomach.

The movies being shown are as follows:
Super Speedway: Featuring footage shot by Mario Andretti, this film transports viewers to the cockpit of racecar traveling at 230 mph.

Lewis and Clark: Great Journey West: Join Merriweather Lewis, William Clark and their crew as they travel across the untamed west.

Adventures in Wild California: This film explores all the natural wonders California has to offer, from the tallest mountain to the deepest valley to the world’s biggest kelp forest.

Mysteries of the Great Lakes: Viewers will get to know the great lakes of the United States through this film, which explores the lakes’ beautiful views, unique wildlife and shipwrecks.

Grand Canyon Adventure: River at Risk. In this film, viewers will be taken white water rafting down the Colorado River.

Ranging from assisted suicide to genetically altered food to psychosurgery, the field of bioethics is diverse and of great importance. Every day people grapple with the moral struggles modern science has presented us with. In America, we value our beliefs like we value our identities.

The country’s new shift in political majority likely means a large-scale upheaval of previously enacted social policy. In the midst of this sweeping transformation sit several very important bioethical hot button issues: abortion, stem cell research, gene therapy, and population control, among others. As such, the doors to the great paradoxical debate of “what is moral and just?” have been flung wide open.

Though by no means have these issues ever fallen out of the spotlight, it is now more than ever that the decisions made by President Obama and lawmakers concerning bioethical issues will define our nation and shape its future.

The Past
By all accounts, George W. Bush was one of the most ardent pro-life leaders this country has ever seen. For the past eight years, stem cell research, abortion and cloning have faced significant adversity in the wake of legislation passed by the president and conservative members of Congress. Throughout this time, America had been plagued by some of its toughest moral conundrums, including the right-to-die case of Terri Schiavo and rapid advancement in cloning technology.

The partial birth abortion ban signed by Bush in 2003 set a definitive pro-life direction for America. This was the first time the court has allowed any ban on abortion since 1973. This law, coupled with the Global Gag Rule ending U.S. foreign aid to organizations that promote or provide abortions, likely contributed to the continuing decrease of abortions domestically and abroad.

The Present
With every new president comes a welcomed sense of direction, optimism and, dare it be said, change. As the citizens of the United States anticipate stark contrast in policy from President Obama, it is likely that a heaping (and healthy) amount of debate will take place.

Less than two months into his presidency, Obama plans to give an executive order to lift the eight-year ban on embryonic stem cell research. On Jan. 23, he used the same process to reverse the aforementioned Global Gag Rule that Bush instated.

Cell therapy has the potential to treat cancer, diabetes, Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, cardiac failure, muscle damage and neurological disorder. Though adult stem cells have already been instrumental in creating current therapies, researchers are hopeful that the reinstated ability to use embryos for experimentation will lead to further breakthroughs that have yet to be conceptualized.

The Predicament
When discussing the notion of these medical practices, the “ethics” part of bioethics cannot be stressed enough. At the root of all of the preaching and politics lies one very blunt question America has to answer: “What is life?” If we can answer that, then the only thing left to worry about is whether or not Americans value life, which is a loaded issue itself.

For instance, the meat packing industry kills over 40 million cattle each year, but if someone throws your dog into oncoming traffic, then they are sentenced to three years in prison. It is illegal to help someone die when they are willing, but legal to make that decision for an unborn fetus.

Social policy surrounding bioethics is really about philosophy. Because philosophy is innately abstract and relative to an individual’s ideals, there is no common answer to theproblem. Regardless, the debate will rage on, and it is important that everyone, especially students, utilize the same fervor they did during the elections to raise their voices.

The most important thing you can do is get involved. Though there are numerous organizations concerning individual issues (particularly abortion), there are few that address the field as a whole. A convenient resource for students is the University of Minnesota’s Center for Bioethics, which can be found on the East Bank of campus or online at http://www.ahc.umn.edu/bioethics/.

On first glance it seems a little pretentious. A title like “Life” has a lot of implications, and to form any sort of art around a topic as large as life itself sounds a bit silly. But Frans Lanting probably gave his work this title for a couple of reasons. First of all, as the world’s foremost nature photographer (as claimed by some), Lanting has spent the better part of his life immersed in some of the wildest places in the world, searching for the best representations of this planet’s amazing ecosystems. Secondly, his newest collection, “Life,” is the culmination of this entire life’s work. Recognizing this, Lanting seems to have accomplished what he set out to do: document life in its entirety, past to present, left to right, plain and exotic, the whole gambit. After one sees his images, all ideas of pretentiousness or ridiculousness are cast away and what is left is a collection of images that defy our very sense of the world.

“Life is like a skin on the planet,” a monotonous voice states from a television screen in the center of the exhibit. Lanting describes his work as an attempt to picture life photo courtesy bell museum on planet earth, from its humble ocean beginnings to its complex and varied existence today. He suggests that the unifying force between all life on this planet is time. He does not believe that there are any separations in nature or on the earth for that matter. Lanting wanted to create a symbiosis of art and science, and to do so he used the art of photography. The result of such a combination is extraordinary. To Lanting, life is as important a force as the very processes that cause our planet to rotate, or for the continents to move. Life is the most important, dynamic and essential force on the planet.

The final form of this artistic work is the accompaniment of Lanting’s amazing photos with a musical score written and played by none other than Philip Glass. As you walk through the exhibit and look at all of the photographs, the ephemeral and cellular music Glass composed gives a voice to the images, making them both mysterious and wonderful. The Bell Museum has also used concrete examples of fossils and skeletons to go along with Lanting’s desire to express life on earth over time. From a plaster copy of the famous Berlin Museum’s Archaeopteryx (the famous fossil that links the evolution of reptiles into birds) to tortoise shells, the culmination of the art, the music, and the science behind it all brings the history of life on this planet to um, life.

Franz Lanting’s “Life” is on display at the Bell Museum of Natural History, here on the University of Minnesota Twin Cities until April 12, which gives you plenty of time to see it. On March 21 Franz Lanting himself will be appearing at the Bell Museum for a day-long workshop about nature photography and how he envisions his art. Tickets for this are $69.

It may have been inconceivable in decades past that the end of Pax Americana would come so soon. Oh, there were movies, of course. Little tongue-in-cheek nods to what we smuggly, privately “knew”: that our age was different. The world had reached a new epoch of development. This time around we would stave off the pitfalls that have dampened economic “progress” in the past. The new, everexpanding network of producers and consumers would expand, without bound, providing jobs to all of the disenfranchised third world and bringing developed nations more wealth than had ever been accrued before. Faux-pastoral suburban sprawl dominated the landscape and quickly became the default environment for Americans. Credit was abundant, terms were good and everyone was happy.

As the media has noted extensively, this was not the case. The plan backfired for its shortsightedness. The long trend of false pastoralism in the suburbs has been met with a snapback effect, which threatens to further bury the Rust Belt and decimate the American Southwest. Detroit, for example, has been on a downward trend for 50 years. Large portions of city blocks have been turned over to the prairies they came from.

In the Southwest, sprawl and cheap credit have been the law of the land. Las Vegas and Phoenix, two prime examples of sprawl with no urban center, are also critically dependent on an allocation of resources. Lake Meade–the man-made reservoir that is the lifeblood of Greater Las Vegas– is at roughly 30 percent of its total capacity. Catching a glimpse of a single desert-bound, irrigated golf course is enough to know why. The western states draw their water predominantly from the Colorado River; the headwaters of which fall under the jurisdiction of the eponymous state. Water is becoming an issue with substantial political hay in the West, as the Coloradoans feel threatened by ever-expanding allocations of their water from those downstream. Some speculate that Arizona’s John McCain may have lost Colorado solely due to the perception that he would forcefully renegotiate the Water Compact if elected president.

Many of the long-standing initiatives of the environmental movement have become mainstream. Americans realize that we are on the downward slope of an epoch that will be physically impossible in the future. There seems to be great confusion and denial about the severity of our outlook. If I would allow myself to speak some meta-truth for a moment, it seems that for every job lost, there are about ten worthless Op-Ed pieces reporting through the looking glass. All the snarky, post-modern analysis of the status quo, however, won’t change the physical reality that we have been depleting our resources at an alarming rate. The people know the truth: that under the veneer of material progress there’s a tissue-thin barrier between humans and catastrophic change. That’s an objective truth that is larger than any credit default swap or federal policy. It seems now that Americans are suffering from a massive onset of ALH – Acute Lovecraftian Hysteria. Like a character in any number of that author’s horror stories, the revelation of a lurking, unknowable truth with universal application precipitates the onset of a catatonic withdrawal from reality. America has met its Lurking Horror. For some reason, out of all of the painful truths in the world, the fact that we can’t keep our ornate manmade oasis is coming crashing down whether we like it or not.

There is a bright side, of course, in the realization that the end of traditional home ownership will ultimately lead to a much more mobile, well-adept workforce. It’s impossible for one to quantify the human damage which could have been avoided if residents were forced to move away from Michigan, Indiana or any other number of Rust Belt states that have been in a small-scale successive recessions for decades. A measured dose of mobility within the country crossed with a destruction of ideal homeownership would likely be good for Americans in the long run. It would ensure, among other things, that people not be held down by 30-year mortgages in regions that are already being turned over to desert. The idea of a nation of perpetual renters may seem like a recipe for solidification of our everexpanding class gap, but if renting is perpetual serfdom, I honestly can’t see a difference from modern notions of “idyllic” American living arrangements. Americans today are far less mobile between states than in previous generations. Whether this is tied to an apparent resurgence of regional identification is unknown. Maybe Lovecraft hit us with the unknowable truth, “Wisconsin sucks” as well.

In our postmodern society, it will be particularly interesting to see how the media covers the idea of widespread homelessness and poverty. Whether the “economic crisis” has been exacerbated or introduced by the media is a topic for a billion other self-righteous college opinion columns. However, there should be serious concerns about whether the current generations can even process the idea of real scarcity. In addition, media coverage will likely reach a new equilibrium in substituting bread and circuses for substantive discourse. After all, there are only so many dodgy euphemisms and simplistic graphic work one can endure before the reality of resource destitution comes crashing down.

We live in a closed system. Las Vegas, Phoenix and the Sun Belt may go down in history as reminders of the delicate and finite nature of our closed system on Earth. It may be possible to provide a comfortable way of life for the billions that will inherit the planet, but lifestyles will appear very dissimilar to those of the Western Hemisphere today. The abundance of cheap land translated into cheap resources, cheap credit, and so on until the system became so taxed that it went beyond its natural buffering capacity. American suburbs and improbable cities will exist as an analogue to Percy Shelley’s fictional statue of Ramses II, proclaiming
unequivocal greatness while overlooking desolation. Whether current trends fall within the realm of long-dead romantic poetry is irrelevant. What matters is that we are sitting in the middle of a transitional period that would have sounded laughable just ten years ago. Whether Fox News hems and haws about it, or distracts its viewers, the truth is spelled out in every overwrought business park and chintzy, consumer packaging you’ve ever seen. Fortunately, humans have shown a marked talent for creating one-way systems of rapid resource change. We will certainly be tested to see if we can rein it in to something rational. Whether we approve or not, it’s going to happen; we may as well get in on the ground floor.