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...been precocious all his life. Born into a Jewish family in Moscow, Brin fled Russia with his parents amid rising anti-Semitism in the late 1970s and settled in the U.S. Brin's father Michael teaches applied probability and statistics at the University of Maryland; his mother works at NASA. Brin from an early age was fascinated with numbers; his father gave him his first computer, a Commodore 64, when he turned 9. Brin's other love is gymnastics, and he studied flying trapeze at a circus school in San Francisco. He has lately taken up springboard diving. Michael Brin...
...called citizen journalists bagged another trophy last week when THE SCIENTIFIC ACTIVIST discovered that NASA public-affairs aide George Deutsch--accused of trying to muzzle agency scientists on the issue of global warming--had never graduated from Texas A&M University, a detail the 24-year-old presidential appointee later explained away by saying his résumé had been written in anticipation of a degree. After he resigned, THIS BLOG TITLE FOR SALE praised the sleuthing as "proof that blog journalism is real." Meanwhile, THE VELVET BLOG pondered updating his own résumé "in anticipation of graduating from Harvard...
ARTIFICIAL HEART David Saucier, a NASA expert researching rocket-engine fuel pumps in the 1980s, was recovering from heart surgery by renowned surgeon Dr. Michael DeBakey when he had an idea: What about using the technology in the pump that powers the space shuttle to create a heart pump for patients? Saucier talked to Baylor College of Medicine physicians, and for almost two decades NASA and DeBakey worked on a mini ventricular device. The size of a pink beveled eraser, it helps adults and children survive for up to two years while awaiting a transplant...
...ominous a threat as Nazi Germany had been, Congress created the National Science Foundation in 1950 to fund basic and applied science, mostly at universities, "to promote the progress of science; to advance the national health, prosperity, and welfare; to secure the national defense ..." In 1958 it founded NASA in response to renewed fears of Soviet technical competition ignited by the launch of Sputnik the previous year. Also in 1957 and for the same reason, the Department of Defense started the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). And it established or beefed up national laboratories in New Mexico, California, Illinois, Washington...
...itself. Catchphrases that felt inspiring in the 1950s--"Better living through chemistry," "Atoms for peace"--have a darker connotation today. Du Pont, which invented nylon, became known as well for napalm. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island soured Americans on nuclear power. Shuttle crashes and a defective Hubble telescope made NASA look inept. Substances from DDT to PCBs to ozone-eating chlorofluorocarbons proved more dangerous than anyone realized. Drug disasters like the thalidomide scandal made some people nervous about the unintended consequences of new drug treatments. It's in that context of skepticism toward science that some reasonable questions have been...