1 ui'M.lav, Scpiemhei
Tuesday, September 19, 2000
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Page 5A
THE BATTALION
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t is nearly guaranteed that, driv:
lown any street in America,no
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ng to it. This musical style isnt
t> appeal to a narrow stratum of
xiople, but those people will Ik
his CD. The mixing is like the:
ic: fast and hard.
This music will take somese
ing used to for the average list
>ut for those who have a bad-
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especially happy hardcore—il
7D should be a hit. With trad-'
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is Da Predator, Scrumbleheaifei
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People looking for the hard:
racks on the block should her:
>tores buying this right now.Re
ommended for bullies and foe
metalheads. (Grade: B+)
Atlantis mission completed
NASA Space Station pilot and crew prepare to com home
from work on international station Wednesday morning
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■ CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP)
Space shuttle Atlantis’ astronauts ti
died up their ship Monday for the
ripe home, leaving behind a fully
stocked international space station.
I NASA expects the space station's
first permanent crew to move in in
six weeks, after yfcars of uncertainty
and delay.
I “This crew certainly has laid out
the red carpet,” said space station
manager Robert Cabana. “They ac
complished everything that we asked
tnem to do, everything we wished
they could do and, I think, about
everything we dreamed that they
could do."
I All that remains is for Atlantis to
return to Earth before daybreak
Wednesday.
I Atlantis and its crew of seven flew
two laps around the space station ear
ly Monday, following a smooth un
docking the night before.
a
It sparkled like
a jewel out there
when it was .
against the blue
background of
the ocean, a very,
very beautiful
sight for us”
— Scot Altman
Atlantis pilot
The astronauts beamed down
video that engineers will use to assess
the condition of the metallic outpost.
“It sparkled like a jewel out there
when it was against the blue back
ground of the ocean, a very, very
beautiful sight for us,” said Atlantis
pilot Scot Altman.
The shuttle astronauts put away
more than 6,000 pounds of supplies
for the three men who are sched
uled to move in at the beginning of
November. They also installed the
toilet, oxygen generator and tread
mill inside the living quarters,
which were linked up to the space
station in July.
Russia’s economic crisis had
stalled construction of the living
quarters, which in turn had stalled
space station assembly in orbit. The
delays spanned more than
two years.
“We pretty much got the place
ready to live in,” Altman said.
“Maybe we left a couple of surpris
es for the future crew, but we don’t
want to give everything away.
WeTl let them discover it when
they get up there.”
Before American astronaut
Bill Shepherd and his two-cos
monaut crew can move in, Dis
covery must carry up the first
piece of space station truss, or
girder. The truss will serve as the
support structure for American-
made solar wings and motion-
control gyroscopes.
Discovery is due to lift off on this
constmction mission Oct. 5. Shep
herd and company will follow from
Kazakstan on Oct. 30.
will
n
Jason Benf
Wen Ho Lee case said to
be based on racial profiling
I NEW YORK (AP) — Nuclear scientist Wen Ho
Lbe was the victim of the same type of racial pro
filing that sent Japanese-Americans to intern
ment camps during World War II, Asian-American
civic leaders told a presidential commission
Monday.
I “The government’s prosecution of Dr. Wen Ho
Lee was politically motivated and tainted by
racism from the start,” said Margaret Fung, ex
ecutive director of the Asian American Legal De
fense and Education Fund. “The government of
ficials responsible for this debacle must be held
accountable for their actions.”
The 60-year-old Taiwan-born scientist, fired
Scenes of Science and Technology
from his job at the Los Alamos weapons lab in
March 1999, pleaded guilty to one count of mis
handling classified material and was set free
last week. The federal government dropped 58
other felony counts that once charged him with
endangering nuclear secrets.
President Clinton said Friday that Lee’s nine-
month pretrial detention conflicted with Ameri
ca’s disdain for “abusive executive authority.”
But Clinton said he had seen no evidence of
racial profiling in the case.
Scientists seek close look
at threatening asteroids
LONDON (AP) —i- They may only strike every
100,000 years on average, but life-threatening
asteroids could be heading Earth’s way, and sci
entists said Monday they want a closer look.
A panel set up this year by the British gov
ernment to assess the risk of asteroids slam
ming into the planet called for an international
program to build a powerful $22.5 million tele
scope in the southern hemisphere.
“The risk is very real — and very tiny — but
with awful consequences, and we ought to be
doing something about it,” said Sir Crispin Tick-
ell, Britain’s former ambassador to the United
Nations and a member of the panel, which pub
lished its report on Monday.
Although millions are already being spent try
ing to track Near Earth Objects, or NEOs, sci
entists acknowledge they’re very much in the
dark. Asteroids near Earth travel at between 10
and 20 miles per second, making them hard to
detect.
C = average
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Aggies
:he
Center
d
Lon.
ier Center and take
■eferrals and more,
e information.
ieet your next empl° vt
Join the
solution
National Instruments Day
Texas A&M University
Wednesday, September 20, 2000 .
Zachry Engineering Building
Technology Open House
10:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.
Info Session
6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
Join us for cool technologies, free food, and prizes!
Engineering, computer science, math,
physics, and marketing majors welcome!
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^INSTRUMENTS
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j_Otr
FORTUNE’
2000
I am going to
break the tradi
tion of hosting
questions from
the general pop
ulace of Texas
A&M today to
answer a burn
ing question
from the graph
ics desk of The Battalion (the ones
who are responsible for the won
derful illustrations you see on the
pages of this paper every day).
Question: Why is it hard to
tickle yourself?
Answer: I do not really want to
know why you want to figure this
out, but here it goes.
Although much research has
been done on the subject, no one is
really sure why you cannot tickle
yourself.
Tickling has long been an enig
ma to neurologists and physiolo
gists. With most stimulus/response
research, scientists can induce a
stimulus in a lab animal and then
examine how the response works
through decisive means such as
cracking the animal’s skull open
and directly seeing which portion of
the brain is stimulated.
Tom Champney, associate pro
fessor in the Department of Human
Physiology and Medical Neurobi
ology, said there are two reasons
why this research cannot be done
with tickling.
The first reason is that you can
not tell when a lab rat is laughing.
Secondly, you cannot usually crack
open the brain of a living human
without serious repercussions from
the American Medical Association.
EY.I.
Though we may never know for
sure, there is a predominant theory.
The theory is that the human
mind anticipates the body’s own
motions and then deliberately
lessens the attention it pays to the
resulting stimulus so it can pay at
tention to unpredicted external stim
uli. An example of this would be
your brain ignoring the constant
pressure on your feet as you walk
down the street.
A study published in the No
vember 1998 issue of Nature Neu
roscience atteriipted to help prove
this theory.
Subjects equipped with brain -
scanning equipment were tickled by
a piece of soft foam on a plastic rod.
These subjects tickled them
selves and were tickled by scien
tists from the University College in
London.
Scientists concluded that differ
ent parts of the subjects’ minds
were active when they were tick
ling themselves as opposed to when
they were being tickled. These sci
entists hypothesized that these ex
tra areas were used to anticipate
and help block out sensory input
from self- tickling.
Research has also been done on
what areas of the body are most
ticklish. Generally it is found that
the underarm is the most sensitive
(trea, followed by the waist, ribs,
foot, knee and neck.
It’s that simple.
If you have a question that you
would like answered, email sci-
fyi@hotmail.com, and I will see if
I can tickle your neurons with an
answer. Please do not forget to in
clude your name, class, and major.
www.unitedflight.com
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409 260-6322
What’s the Word?
Oratorical Contest
^
Is the Civil Rights Movement, still moving?
Informational
Meetinos
September 18,2000
MSC 228 8:30 PM
September 20,2000
MSC Visual Art Gallery
7:00 PM
Oratorical Contest
Thursday, October 19,2000
1st Place $1000
2nd Place $750
3rd Place $500
9 Sl
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