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BOARD OF ADVISERS Violeta Arciaga, Jaime F. BucoyJose C. Calderon, Victoria V. Cervantes,Juanita M. Cruz, Belen P. Dayauon CONSULTANT Merle C. Tan, Ph.D. DIWA OFFICERSSaturnino G. Belen Jr. President Amada J. Javellana Executive Vice President Enrique A. Caballero,Reynaldo M. de la Cruz, Carlo F. De Leon,William S. Fernando,Jose Maria T. Policarpio, Elma L. Ropeta,Lourdes F. Lozano Vice Presidents EDITORIAL BOARDLourdes F. Lozano Executive Editor William S. Fernando Managing Editor Alvin Fl. Julian Magazine Editor Virgie B. Naigan Art Director Silvano C. Santiago Cover Design Jose Valeriano P. Linay Layout Design Jun Mediavillo Illustrator BATO BALANI R O for Science and Technology is published bimonthly by Diwa Scholastic Press, Inc. Bato Balani is one of Diwa’s Scholastics Enhancement Materials ( SEM R O ). The SEM R O trademark refers to a new genre of scholastic publication, comprising a selection of premium - quality magazines for greater learning. All rights reserved. All articles in this publication may be reprinted provideddue acknowledgement is given. All communications should be addressed to THE PRODUCT MANAGER, G/F Star Centrum, Gil Puyat Ave., Makati City,Philippines, Telephone numbers 843-4761 to 66. REACHING FOR THE STARS Can we possibly visit our neighboring galaxies? THE SPACE SHUTTLE: DEPLOYING ASATELLITE PAYLOAD The U.S. Space Shuttle happens to be an intrepidspace truck. ON TARGET: THE STEALTH AIRPLANE How do you turn an entire plane invisible? TWISTING IRON Riding in a roller coaster is exciting. Andunderstanding the forces that governs its travel asit glides along the rail may create more excitement. Dear B B subscribers, Bato Balani maga zine is makingsome changes to your f a vorite maga zine. Among the changes is a ne w section called“ Pseudoscience.” It deals with scienti f icnotions, m yths, and misconce ptions that were po pular at one time. Also, we ha vee x panded our “C yber world” section toinclude a web-linked acti vit y section.W e ho pe that these changes will hel pmake your science studies more rele vantand more f un! En jo y!T he Editor 3Science & Technology News 5Filipino Scientists and InventorsMedical Facts and Fallacies 9Livelihood Technology / I’d Like to Know10Cyber World14Earth Care16Investigatory Projects19Pseudoscience23More Activities To Do24Mind Games I T’S NOT QUITE Jurassic Park, butit’s getting there.Engineers on a Europe-wide projectare developing life-size robotic dinosaursthat will walk around museums, chew onplants and interact with visitors as if theyhad just stepped off the prehistoric plains.The designers want each 3.5-metre-long,80-kilogram robotic iguanodon to beautonomous, making its own decisionsabout where to go and what to do. It willapproach inquisitive visitors, stare at them,and even rear up on its back legs to browseon the nearest potted palm tree.“Usually you have to walk to museumexhibits. In this case the exhibit walks toyou,” says designer Vassilios Papantoniou,who works for the European Associationfor Research in Legged Robots in Lamia,Greece.The robot will be built fromcomposite resins and aviation-gradealuminum. Its movementsare based on what isknown fromiguanodon fossilsand studies of modern animals.“A real dinosaurhas hundreds of muscles,” sayszoologist R. McNeillAlexander of LeedsUniversity, a scientificadviser to the project. “Sowe’ve had tocompromise.” Themajor muscles arereplicated usingbattery-powered actuators. Electronic wizardry tobring dinosaurs back to life A TLANTA—A team of astronomers conducting asystematic search for supermassive black holeshas discovered three more of the mysteriousobjects lurking in the centers of nearby ellipticalgalaxies. This brings the total number of supermassive black holes definitively identified so far to 20. Thediscovery was announced at a news conference held during theAmerican Astronomical Society Meeting.“The formation and evolution of galaxies is intimatelyconnected to the presence of a central massive black hole,” saidDouglas Richstone,leader of the researchteam and a Universityof Michigan professorof astronomy.“Radiation and high-energy particlesreleased by theformation and growth Black Hole Or Galaxy? of black holes are the dominant sources of heat and kinetic energy forstar-forming gas in protogalaxies.”Richstone says the team’s conclusions are inferred from twopieces of evidence. First, all or nearly all galaxies with spheroidaldistributions of stars (bulges in spirals) seem to have massive black holes. The mass of these objects seems to correlate with the mass of the central part of the host galaxy. “The ubiquity of this association,as well as the correlation, points to a connection between the massiveblack hole and the galaxy, and poses a ‘chicken and egg’ dilemma of which came first,” Richstone said.Second, comparisons of the history of star formation in theuniverse with the history of quasars, conducted by other scientists,reveal that quasars developed well before most star formation ingalaxies. Quasars are extremely powerful bright objects capable of generating the luminosity of one trillion suns within a region the sizeof Mars’ orbit. University of Michigan Which Came First: European Association for Research in Legged Robots “We’ve got three in each leg,” he says. Theactuators are controlled by their ownmicroprocessors, which are linked to thecentral processor that controls the beast. Atwo-metre-long prototype has already beencompleted.The robot is being funded by theEuropean Union as part of aproject to liven up museums.The designers hope tocomplete a full-sizeversion by 2001. P ITTSBURGH—CarnegieMellon University’s Nomadrobot, which conducted anautonomous search formeteorites in Antarctica fromJan. 20-30, has successfully completed itsmission, examining more than 100indigenous rocks, studying about 50 in detailand classifying seven specimens asmeteorites.An expert from the National ScienceFoundation’s Antarctic Search for Meteorites(ANSMET) program, who collected thespecimens after Nomad identified them inthe field, has concluded that five of the sevenare meteorites. The other two raise enoughquestions about their composition to meritfurther study. ANSMET is housed at CaseWestern Reserve University in Cleveland.Meteorites are curated at the Johnson SpaceFlight Center in Houston and made availableto scientists around the world.“Nomad has found and correctlyclassified three indigenous meteorites in-situ,” said Dimitrios Apostolopolous, asystems scientist at Carnegie Mellon’sRobotics Institute and project manager of the Robotic Antarctic Meteorite Search U sing a technique called neutralatom imaging from a satellitehigh above the North Pole,researchers at the Departmentof Energy’s Los Alamos NationalLaboratory aredeveloping pictures of the magnetosphere, aninvisible magneticlayer around the Earth.These pictures will beessential to a betterunderstanding of the“weather” in space,where a blast of solarwind particles canknock out amultimillion-dollarsatellite.Developingwhat he calls “weathermaps for the radiationbelts,” Geoff Reevesof the Los Alamos Space and AtmosphericSciences group and Mike Henderson of LosAlamos’ Space and Remote SensingSciences group devised a way to take rough,low-resolution satellite data and create moreinformative composite images of the solar-wind-driven particles trapped in themagnetosphere.Used as still pictures or animated fortime-lapse movies, their pictures show theebb and flow of these particles as they nearthe earth and are drawn around and downthe magnetic field lines. These images areespecially critical for understanding theprogress and structure of a spacephenomenon called geomagnetic storms.Geomagnetic storms are the spaceequivalent of hurricanes in the Atlantic. Foryears scientists believed that geomagneticstorms were made up of smaller“substorms” which occur more frequentlyand in isolation. But more recently scientistshave found that storms and substorms arerelated — but distinctly different —phenomena. This is similar to discoveringthat hurricanes and thunderstorms arerelated, but that a hurricane is not just acluster of thunderstorms or a larger, moreintense thunderstorm.Future missions to themagnetosphere will carry dedicated, LosAlamos-designed, neutral atom imaginginstruments. These include NASA’s IMAGEmission and TWINS, which will providethe first stereoscopic images of themagnetosphere. Los Alamos National Laboratory - University of California initiative. “The robot correctly classifiedthree other indigenous meteorites andmisclassified one as terrestrial rock. Nomadachieved these results autonomously andwithout any prior knowledge about thesamples.”Most of the chondrites that Nomadfound are relatively common types,composed mainly of rock with smallmetallic infusions that probably srcinatedfrom asteroids. One achondrite meteoritewhich Nomad classified as interesting is sorare that the robot didn’t have the data in itsbase to make a determination. Carnegie Mellon University Nomad Finds in
