Straight ahead on "Our World" ... another setback for the Space Shuttle ... Lions versus people in Tanzania ... and the telescopes of Mauna Kea..
WEST: "And the reason that they keep getting bigger and bigger is that we want to be able to collect as much light as possible up here. So, the bigger you are, the more light you can see."
Astronomy in paradise, sex and the computer science graduate, and more... I'm Art Chimes. Welcome to VOA's science and technology magazine, "Our World."
Officials with the U.S. space agency, NASA, said Thursday it will probably be March 2006 before the space shuttle is launched again.
Earlier, they said the shuttle might go into space as soon as next month.
The problem is that large pieces of foam insulation broke off the shuttle's big external fuel tank during Discovery's launch in late July. There was no significant damage, but it was a major disappointment for NASA. A similar piece of flyaway foam damaged the shuttle Columbia in 2003, causing the spacecraft to burn up on its return to Earth.
After two and a half years, NASA thought it had fixed the problem with the foam insulation.
The space agency is still committed to finish construction of the international space station and to retire the shuttle fleet by 2010. At a news conference Thursday, NASA chief Michael Griffin said the aim is to view each shuttle mission, each launch, as a process.
GRIFFIN: "We're going to work each mission through the process, being as careful as we can, as deliberate as we can, but with the intent, of course, to go fly. We're going to use the shuttle system between now and then to assemble the space station. We believe that absent major problems, we believe that we can essentially complete the assembly of the space station with the shuttle fleet in the time that we have remaining. And that's what we're going to try to do."
Mr. Griffin's comments came one day after the space agency's management and processes were highly criticized.
The critics were members of the Stafford-Covey Task Group, an independent panel charged with advising NASA on the resumption of human space flight. Their final report, released Wednesday, concludes that NASA has done much to reduce the risk of going into space, although shuttle flights, it says, will always be risky.
But the Task Group's minority report is highly critical of NASA's management. It cites weak leadership, failure to establish and enforce adequate performance standards, the use of presentation graphics instead of proper engineering reports, and a pervasive lack of accountability. In its summary, the minority report says "NASA leadership often did not set the proper tone, establish achievable expectations, or hold people accountable for meeting them."
A new international study of computer science degrees earned by women shows large disparities from country to country, with some surprising results.
Women in all 21 industrialized countries surveyed were under-represented among university graduates in computer science. But if you think you can guess which countries would have the most women getting computer science degrees, you might be surprised at some of the leaders in female participation, including Turkey, South Korea and Ireland.
As expected, women were generally over-represented in traditionally-female disciplines such as education and generally under-represented in engineering and the sciences. Sex segregation persists, even where legal barriers to study have been eliminated, leading the study's sociologist authors to look for other explanations.
One interesting discovery, says co-author Maria Charles of the University of California, San Diego, is that girls may be more likely to pursue non-traditional careers in countries where they don't have a choice.
CHARLES: "Some of the countries where women are best represented in these historically male-type fields are countries where there are requirements that both boys and girls take math up until, you know, the 11th or 12th grade level. Or there are tests that are carried out, and those individuals who perform at a given level on the test are tracked into these math or technical fields, irrespective of their gender."
It's precisely that lack of choice, she says, that helps account for the higher representation of women in computer science programs in Ireland, Turkey and South Korea.
When young women do have greater choice, Professor Charles says, social pressures often lead them to choose a more traditional degree program rather than the challenging and well-paid computer science field. And that choice can affect the nation as a whole.