MUSIC: "Our World" theme
Straight ahead on "Our World" ... A preview of next week's space shuttle launch ... World Breastfeeding Week ... and math meets psychology to create musical illusions
DEUTSCH: "You can hear a scale that goes up and up and never returns to the beginning, or it can appear to be going down and down all the time and never returning to the beginning."
Those stories, a new clue in the mystery of sudden infant death, and more. I'm Art Chimes. Welcome to VOA's science and technology magazine, "Our World."
On Tuesday, the space shuttle Endeavour is scheduled to take off on another construction mission to the International Space Station.
Endeavour is the youngest vehicle in the shuttle fleet, and this will be its first flight in five years. It was a replacement for Challenger, the ill-fated spacecraft that exploded in 1986 seconds after liftoff, killing all seven astronauts on board.
One of the Challenger victims was a schoolteacher named Christa McAuliffe.
Her backup was Barbara Morgan, then a teacher, who joined the astronaut corps in 1998, and she'll be flying this week on Endeavour. At a news conference recently she was asked about the message she'll be bringing to students as an astronaut-educator.
MORGAN: "What I would like them to do is take a good look, again, at themselves and their own curiosities and what they want to know and learn, and I look forward to our students looking with pride at their own teachers and all that they do to help them get ready for the future."
Morgan will be doing some lessons while in orbit, and in addition to their construction duties, the astronauts will keep busy with other things, too. Canadian mission specialist Dave Williams, who is a medical doctor, said one experiment he'll be doing involves testing saliva for the presence of latent viruses, which might help scientists understand how those inactive viruses become active.
WILLIAMS: "Perhaps, then, we can take that knowledge to the clinical environment and for patients who have problems with shingles, be able to detect it early on in the saliva and then treat them prophylactically with medications before they actually get a severe infection. So I think that's a clear demonstration of one of the spinoffs of the space medical research to the clinical environment."
This week shuttle technicians dealt with a leaky valve as they prepared for a launch scheduled for early Tuesday evening, Florida time. Assuming technical issues are resolved, weather is always a concern during the summer, when thunderstorms are common, particularly late in the day.
Some years back a television commercial asserted that "without chemistry, life itself would be impossible." Well, that's obviously true since everything, including you and me, is made of chemicals. The ad campaign, by a chemical company, was a clever attempt to get people to think more positively about chemicals ... and the chemical industry. As essential as plastics and pharmaceuticals and other chemical creations are to modern life, we tend to consider them pollutants. But can chemical products be made in a more environmentally-responsible way? Reporter Reid Frazier visited a chemist who is one of the pioneers in a movement known as 'green chemistry.'
FRAZIER: This room looks and sounds like a chemical lab anywhere in the world. Trays full of vials sit atop machines with blinking lights. Notebooks filled with hand-written numbers sit next to computer screens. But this isn't a typical chemistry lab.
Evan Beach is a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. He works at the Institute for Green Oxidation Chemistry, or Green Ox. Beach is analyzing wastewater from a pulp and paper mill:
BEACH: "We try and work with as close to the real pollution as we can. We actually have the paper mill ship the stuff to us."
FRAZIER: Beach is working on a chemical that he hopes will clean up the wastewater before it hits rivers and streams.
The Green Ox lab is run by Terry Collins. His career as a green chemist started as a college student in his native New Zealand. He worked during summers at a plant that made refrigerators. One summer, he discovered that workers using a cleaning agent were all getting sick.
COLLINS: "Just in lunch with them I'd hear about their headaches and their blood noses and I realized, my goodness, they're using an awful lot of these organic solvents, and if there's any benzene there, these are signature benzene intoxication conditions, early stage."