Federal Aviation Administration spokesman Ian Gregor said he got calls about the object all afternoon on Monday.

He said the object did not show up on FAA radar and was likely a balloon.

Later, Bill Stepp of the Columbia Scientific Balloon Facility in Palestine, Texas identified the object as a 4,000-pound research balloon released from a NASA organization used to measure gamma ray emissions in high altitudes.

The balloon was launched at about 7:30 a.m. Sunday morning from Fort Sumner, N.M., and was grounded at about 9 p.m. Monday just south of Kingman in western Arizona.

Stepp said the balloon, which usually floats at an altitude of 130,000 feet, can be seen for about 170 miles on a clear day and has raised concern from Albuquerque to Phoenix.

“It’s something unusual,” he said. “People just don’t know what it is.”

Marshall Valentine, who works in a Scottsdale office, said he and about five other co-workers who spotted the object high in the sky around 2 p.m. Monday had no idea what it was.

“It looks like someone blew a bubble in the sky and it stayed there,” Valentine said. “A plane flew under it and it looked like it was a mountain higher than a plane flies.”

Similar descriptions of an unidentified flying, clear orb were also reported out of Sedona.

Jennifer McCoy, who runs the UFO Store in Sedona with her husband, said a local resident told her about the object around 2 p.m.

She said she went into the parking lot and saw the object in the cloud line.

It “looked like the gigantic bubble from the Wizard of Oz,” she said.

Kececioglu

Someday, genomic sequence testing will help doctors identify whether newborns will develop health problems later in life.

That may seem like science fiction now, but improved technologies and techniques are making genetic sequencing quicker and far less expensive.

Mapping the human genome the first time cost about $3 billion, said John Kececioglu, University of Arizona associate professor of computer science and BIO5 Institute member. Some operations have brought the price down to $5,000.

Kececioglu is conference chair for RECOMB2009, an international conference on computational molecular biology research that will run Sunday through Thursday in Tucson.

Genomic sequencing determines the order of key components in genetic material. Abnormalities such as mutations can mean certain diseases are likely to develop.

All biological processes are governed by the 3 billion lettered segments and their order in human DNA, he said.

“There is a goal to have a $1,000 genome test that a person can actually purchase,” Kececioglu said. “Companies are making use of this data to uncover what disease susceptibilities an individual has.”

Genomics and the environment, including such behaviors as smoking and drinking, contribute to disease, and researchers are trying to offer insights on DNA’s role in the equation, he said.

In addition to identifying the diseases a person is likely to get, markers in a sequenced genome can offer information on which drugs and therapies will best help a person prevail against a specific type of cancer or other disease, he said.

“It’s key to prevention,” Kececioglu said. “It could make health care much more efficient and effective.”

“It’s certainly becoming affordable,” he said. “You do it once in a lifetime. Your genome does not change.”

Continued decreases in price could make use of the tests more commonplace.

If the cost drops to $1,000, it could make economic sense to sequence DNA on all 4 million children born in the United States each year, said Rade Drmanac, chief scientific officer and co-founder of Complete Genomics Inc.

Drmanac will participate in a RECOMB2009 industry panel discussion on personalized genomics.

His Mountain View, Calif., company offers sequencing to research organizations and drug discovery firms for $5,000.

Sequencing efficiencies are expected to increase in the next two to three years, he said, and costs will continue to go down, opening the door for widespread use of the technology.

“The bottom line is we know that having complete and accurate genome sequencing is an absolutely necessary basis for the advance of low-cost health care,” Drmanac said. “We need to do complete genome sequencing to find the genomic basis for disease.”

Pre-diagnosis leading to targeted checkups and early detection can save lives.

Although information from sequencing can benefit health, some fear it could also be used by insurance companies to deny coverage, Kececioglu said.

“The privacy issues are very important. That information is not shared with anyone besides the patient,” he said.

RECOMB2009 will attract 275 top researchers in the computational, mathematical and biological sciences coming from 18 nations, Kececioglu said. It is not open to the public, however.

The BIO5-hosted event, he said, will offer the latest information on how computers help make sense of the huge amount of bioresearch data being produced.

Leslie Boyer, director of the Venom Immunochemistry, Pharmacology and Emergency Response Institute, holds a tube containing a dead bark scorpion at her office at Drachman Hall, 1295 N. Martin Ave.

Dawn Bray worried she might lose a second child to a scorpion’s sting.

A bark scorpion stung her 6-year-old son Morgan last May. As the family rushed him to the hospital in Globe, a wave of fear came over Bray. Six years earlier, in May 2002, she lost her 2-year-old son Dally to a bark scorpion’s sting.

“When Morgan got bit, I was thinking that it was happening again,” Bray recalled this week. “With another son, we would have the same outcome.”

From Globe, doctors flew Morgan to Tucson for treatment. He received a dose of Anascorp, a scorpion antivenin used widely Mexico but not approved for general use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Morgan made a speedy recovery. Just hours after his treatment, the Brays ate dinner together at a McDonald’s before making the two-hour drive back to their home about 25 miles south of Globe.

Morgan’s survival means that his brother “did not die in vain,” Bray said.

After Dally’s death, the Brays met with Leslie Boyer, director of the University of Arizona’s Venom Immunochemistry, Pharmacology and Emergency Response Institute. Dally received an antivenin but died anyway, his mother said. The family wanted answers.

Of the 60 scorpion species and subspecies in the U.S., only the Arizona bark scorpion is dangerous to humans; consequently, scorpion sting deaths are exceedingly rare in the United States, with fewer than a half-dozen in the past decade. But in equatorial countries more people die of scorpion stings than venomous snake bites. More than 1,000 people a year die from scorpion stings in Mexico, according to an article in eMedicine, an online medical journal.

Two years after Dally’s death, Boyer and a team of UA researchers began studying Anascorp, a drug Mexican doctors used regularly to treat those severely affected by scorpion stings. The UA researchers published their findings in the May 14 issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.

The study focused on 15 children hospitalized for severe reactions to scorpion stings in 2004 and 2005. Eight received Anascorp, which the FDA considers an “investigational drug.” Seven received a placebo.

Symptoms of nerve poisoning disappeared in less than four hours in the children treated with the antivenin. In the placebo group, symptoms lasted for several hours. Children not treated with Anascorp required sedation and longer hospital stays, the study found.

Bark scorpion venom “goes to every nerve of the body and tells them, ‘Fire!’ ” Boyer said.

In the worst cases, the bark scorpion’s venom can cause respiratory failure.

Scorpions sting about 8,000 people in Arizona every year. In Mexico, where Anascorp is widely available, scorpions sting 250,000 people a year.

In about 200 cases a year in the U.S., usually involving children, nerve poisoning becomes severe enough to require hospitalization.

Children in Tucson can go to a hospital emergency room for treatment, Boyer said. “But what about the baby in Morenci, the toddler in Globe?”

The UA study has expanded to include 24 Arizona hospitals. About 600 patients have received Anascorp since 2004, Boyer said.

Even in rural areas, severely affected children can receive the treatment within an hour of getting stung, the doctor said.

Whether the study’s findings will lead to FDA approval remains unclear. “We’re the only state in the country where this is important,” Boyer said.

For the Brays, it was a matter of life and death.

“Dr. Boyer was our angel,” Bray said. “If she trusted it, we trusted it.”

Dr. Leslie Boyer holds a tube containing a dead bark scorpion.

The 340-megawatt plant would be built about 27 miles northwest of Kingman by Mohave Sun Power, LLC, on land it plans to buy from Las Vegas developer Jim Rhodes. The facility will use a solar-thermal design, with parabolic mirrors concentrating the sun’s energy on tubes carrying oil. The heated oil is piped to a central facility to generate steam to turn generators. Some of the energy will be stored in molten salt tanks for use after dark, and a secondary heating system using oil, gas or biofuels can also keep the plant running on cloudy days.

The $2.1 billion plant will be one of the largest of its type in the world, project director Greg Bartlett said Tuesday.

Another plant using the same technology is planned south of Kingman. That 200-megawatt facility is being developed by Albiasa Solar. A Mohave County housing development called The Ranch at White Hills is building a solar facility to power its homes, and a smaller solar project is slated for the Yucca area.

“This is proof that our (Arizona’s) renewable energy standard is finally bearing fruit,” said Arizona Corporation Commission Chairwoman Kris Mayes.

The company looked all over the Southwest before settling on Mohave County, Bartlett said. Some of the benefits to locating the project in Mohave County, as compared to Maricopa County, included a higher elevation, the remote area, the amount of water and the ability to acquire 4,000 acres from a private landholder. The company has a lease purchase agreement with Rhodes for the property.

According to information from Mohave County Supervisor Buster Johnson’s office, the plant will use about 1,500 to 3,000 acre-feet of water per year to wash the mirrors and generate steam. The plant intends to recycle some of the water. The company says it’s well aware of the water concerns in the county and is spending a lot of time upfront on the issue, Bartlett said.

The ACC is watching the water issue carefully, Mayes said.

Gibson

University of Arizona engineering junior Malcolm Gibson is focusing on developing tiny robots to precisely deliver medicine and other treatments in the human body.

NASA announced Tuesday that Gibson was awarded a two-year aeronautics scholarship valued at $40,000.

Gibson has been working for two years on MEMS, or microelectromechanical systems, that can be steered through the bloodstream to a specific organ to deliver treatments exactly where needed.

While such microbots may appear to have little to do with flying, biomedical engineering plays a big role in aeronautics, said Tony Springer, lead for communications and education at NASA Aeronautics Research.

About 500 “cream of the crop” students applied for the 20 undergraduate and five graduate scholarships offered, Springer said.

The scholarship program’s goal is to attract top engineering talent to NASA in particular and the aerospace industry in general, he said.

Jeff Goldberg, dean of the UA College of Engineering, said, “We like to think our students are really strong and this shows they are strong on a national level.”

Gibson, 21, who is pursuing double majors in aerospace and mechanical engineering, said his research work and educational background helped him earn the scholarship.

“Even though the global aspect of the project is not related to aerospace, I’ve been focusing more on the mechanical aspects,” he said. “They are looking for motivated students who are involved in research, even if not directly related to aeronautics.”

The scholarship, which begins in September, offers $15,000 per year to cover tuitions costs for two years and $10,000 for use during a 10-week summer 2010 internship at a NASA research center.

Gibson, who plans to continue his MEMS research through graduation from UA, will leave in mid-August for five months of research and study at the Institute of Robotics and Intelligent Systems in Zurich, Switzerland.

Starting June 1, Flandrau will start sending traveling planetarium shows to schools and youth organizations.

The shows will display a virtual night sky, bringing the planetarium to the classroom.

“It’s unique because we’re using digital planetarium technology to enhance many of the shows with dynamic content and real space images, including data from University of Arizona research programs,” said Jennifer Fields, associate director for education at Flandrau.

“In general, with the decision by the administration to close the Flandrau facility on campus, we are moving to a stronger outreach presence in the community.”

The program is designed primarily for K-8 students, but can be used by day-care facilities and other organizations that have programs for kids, such as the YMCA.

“We just started offering and promoting these programs so we don’t know how many organizations will sign up, but we have already begun getting inquiries about the programs,” Fields said.

The Flandrau Center follows state science standards so its programs mesh with a teacher’s curriculum.

They are designed not merely as a teaching tool, but also as a way to get children excited about astronomy.

Matthew Wenger, a graduate associate at Flandrau, said there is no better place for children to learn about astronomy. He describes Tucson as the astronomy capital of the U.S. and maybe the world.

“Tucson has beautiful, dark skies compared to other cities its size,” Wenger said. “We also have so many clear nights that stargazing is an easy hobby to get into.”

There are five different shows: “Little Sky Show,” “There’s No Place Like Space: All About Our Solar System,” “Follow the Drinking Gourd,” “Constellations” and “Seasons.”

The first three, designed for younger children, are 20 minutes long. “Constellations” and “Seasons,” for older students up to eighth grade, are 50 minutes long.

Flandrau requires a minimum order of two shows. The shorter shows cost $100 for the first show and $50 for the second. The longer shows cost $175 for the first show and $75 for the second.

All shows are designed for about 15 to 20 students. The traveling planetarium system requires a 15-by-20-foot area and a minimum ceiling height of 10 feet.

If a classroom isn’t big enough or if the teacher wants to accommodate more students, the shows can be put on in a school’s auditorium.

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FOR MORE INFORMATION

• Call or e-mail astronomy coordinator Mike Terenzoni.

•E-mail: miket@ns.arizona.edu

•Phone: 626-3646

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Show descriptions

“The Little Sky Show”

Age: Three years – first grade

Length: 20 minutes

Price: $100 for the first show, $50 for each additional show. Two-show minimum.

This show will teach through story and song about constellations, the sun and the moon.

“There’s No Place Like Space: All About Our Solar System”

Age: Three years – first grade

Length: 20 minutes

Price: $100 for the first show, $50 for each additional show. Two-show minimum.

Dr. Seuss’ rhymes in “There’s No Place Like Space,” teach children about space.

“Follow the Drinking Gourd”

Age: Kindergarten – fifth grade

Length: 20 minutes

Price: $100 for the first show, $50 for each additional show. Two-show minimum.

“Follow the Drinking Gourd” is a book about how slaves used the stars of the Big Dipper to find their way to freedom. Students will learn how to identify constellations like the Big Dipper.

“Constellations”

Age: Fourth grade – eighth grade

Length: 50 minutes

Price: $175 for the first show, $75 for each additional show. Two-show minimum.

Students learn how the night sky changes based on Earth’s motion. They will also make their own “star-finders” and practice using them.

“Seasons”

Age: Fifth grade – eighth grade

Length: 50 minutes

Price: $175 for the first show, $75 for each additional show. Two-show minimum.

This show provides a better understanding of the changing of the seasons based on Earth’s position and motion.

The Dry Lake Wind Project, Arizona's first wind farm, is scheduled to begin sending electricity to Salt River Project customers late this year.

Thirty big wind machines rising off a little-used highway between Holbrook and Heber are a curiosity for now in a state that lags its neighbors in alternative energy. But that soon will change.

The 412-foot turbines, Arizona’s first, will begin sending energy to Salt River Project customers later this year, and many more turbines are on the way.

Utilities are rushing to develop alternative energy because of state requirements mandating more renewable sources and because of federal taxes being proposed on activities tied to fossil-fuel burning and global-warming pollution.

Developments such as the Dry Lake Wind Project are attractive to utilities because, if there is room for the energy on existing power lines, the turbines are quick to build, use no water and generate electricity more cheaply than solar-power plants.

“We are going after wind because it reduces emissions,” SRP Energy Manager Charlie Duckworth said.

Of the 19 states west of Texas, only Arizona and Nevada still lack operating wind farms to help meet growing energy demands.

SRP already buys wind power from turbines in New Mexico.

At Dry Lake, every time the wind tops about 7 mph, the turbines will spin and send energy to the power grid.

The turbines hit their maximum efficiency at a sustained breeze of about 26 mph. Brakes keep them from spinning when storm winds top 55 mph.

The 30 turbines will have a maximum capacity of 63 megawatts when conditions are right. In a steady wind, each massive turbine can generate enough electricity to power about 500 homes. When the wind hits them all at once, they’ll generate enough power for more than 15,000 homes.

More on the way

Iberdrola Renewables, a Spanish company with U.S. headquarters in Oregon, is building the $100 million Dry Lake project. The company has plans for 209 more turbines at the Navajo County site in subsequent phases.

If all are built, the turbines will stretch about 15 miles across the northern Arizona plains.

Dry Lake is not the only wind-power project planned for Arizona.

With Arizona utilities striving to generate 15 percent of their power from renewable sources such as wind turbines and solar panels by 2025 to meet state requirements, wind farms have also been proposed from Flagstaff to Bisbee.

Arizona Public Service Co., the other big utility in the state, announced last week that it plans to pursue an in-state wind farm.

The Navajo Nation, which stretches across parts of several counties in three states, has been trying to develop a wind farm north of Flagstaff in Coconino County.

Wind is classified based on the average speed and consistency, and most of Arizona’s windy land is classified as moderate.

any locations would require new power lines to deliver the energy to the power grid, so it’s unlikely every windy hilltop and valley in the state will see turbines.

A rancher’s initiative

Navajo County and Iberdrola officials give rancher Bill Elkins credit for researching the area’s wind potential and attracting the first wind farm to Arizona.

About six years ago, Elkins started working with Northern Arizona University to build towers on his ranch to gauge wind speeds. He studied the power-line capacity in the area to determine whether wind power could transmit to the power grid.

His research proved to Iberdrola that a wind farm on the site was feasible.

The Dry Lake turbines are being built in three curvy rows of 10 each, crossing land owned by Elkins, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and the state.

Landowners lease their land to wind-farm operators. A typical agreement pays the owner $3,000 to $5,000 annually, according to the American Wind Energy Association.

Elkins declined to say what his family expects to earn.

The BLM will earn $36,966 in leases this year for the 10 Dry Lake turbines on its land and should get $87,255 a year after that, officials said last year when they approved the project.

The state, which has a different deal with Dry Lake tied to the amount of energy generated by the nine turbines on its land, could earn $4 million during the 50-year agreement.

“It’s worked out real well,” Elkins said. “There’s test towers on all the ranches surrounding us now as other companies are trying to move in.”

Positive impact

Now that Elkins has successfully attracted turbines to his ranch and President Barack Obama’s policies are strongly supporting the development of alternative energy, many more turbines are expected to rise over the landscape.

“We’re very happy with what has happened in the economic-stimulus package,” said Jan Johnson, an Iberdrola spokeswoman.

The package allows developers who start building wind-power plants before 2011 to receive Treasury Department grants worth 30 percent of the cost.

“It will be a huge impetus for 2009 and 2010 projects,” Johnson said.

Not only does Iberdrola plan to expand the Dry Lake project, but Navajo County has been busy approving new testing stations that will guide developers to the gustiest swaths of the county, Assistant County Manager Dusty Parsons said.

“We’ve been waiting to see this happen,” Parsons said.

With an unemployment rate reaching into the double digits, Navajo County is embracing the Dry Lake project.

Most of the 200 construction workers are living, shopping and eating in Holbrook. Once the plant is finished, about 10 operators will hold permanent jobs at the plant.

“Even that helps,” said Rod Ross, government-relations administrator for Navajo County. “The county is going through hard times just like everybody else. And we have a pretty good supply of wind up here.” Few Holbrook residents seem bothered by the turbines on the horizon.

Rusty Long, pointing to the coal-burning Cholla Power Plant nearby, noted, “They’re just a little shorter than those stacks on that power plant.”

Ebaa Al-Obeidi

Margaret Wilch, a science teacher at Tucson High Magnet School, has reason to be especially proud this week.

Six out of nine area students going to the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair are hers.

They, along with three others, make up the largest entourage ever from here to go to the fair, the world’s largest precollege science contest. Each year more than 1,500 high school students from more than 50 countries exhibit their independent research and compete for nearly $4 million in scholarships and prizes. Doctoral-level scientists are judges.

“These kids are phenomenal. They really are our future for science and engineering in Pima County,” said Kathleen A. Bethel, director of the Southern Arizona Regional Science and Engineering Fair. “I think they’re all going to do great.”

Wilch agreed. “It’s amazing when you give a person an opportunity, what they’ll do. They’re incredibly dedicated and spend lots of time on their projects.”

She is accompanying her students to the fair, which started Sunday and runs through Friday in Reno, Nev.

“She’s just incredible,” Bethel said of Wilch. “Year after year she has at least one student going to Intel, and often they win.”

This is the 11th straight year that Wilch has had international competitors. And seven have come home with awards. Wilch’s students and their projects are:

• Angela Schlegel: “The identification of enzymes used in Salvia divinorum to produce salvinorin A”

• Mahwish Khalid: “The effect of male size of cytoplasmic incompatibility in the parasitic wasp Encarsia pergandiella”

• Negin Nematollahi: “Factors affecting bone strength during development in peri-pubertal girls”

• Michael Wallace: “Artificial selection for polystyrene degradation in bacterial communities”

• The team of Emily Derks and Alice Glasser: “A comparison of the effects of added urban stresses on native and non-native soil microbial communities.”

The other competitors are:

• Ebaa Al-Obeidi, from Canyon del Oro High: “Sonoran Solar Solution”

• Martin Lopez and Mario Valdez, from Rio Rico High: “Terminal Ballistics of Household Structures”

Wilch said her earlier education has molded how she prepares her students for success.

She specifically recalls two science teachers: Gary Benesh at George Washington High School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and David Lyon, Ph.D. at Cornell (Iowa) College.

In Lyon’s class, Wilch published a scientific paper as an undergraduate, a rarity.

“And I don’t ever remember having a textbook in Mr. Benesh’s class. I remember going out into the field, going to the zoo. He had us reading Scientific America magazine.”

Her students are getting a similar education. She has University of Arizona professionals as mentor to her students, who are actually doing research in UA science labs. And she has a UA graduate student working in her classroom, thanks to a National Science Foundation grant.

In addition to the nine competitors at internationals, four students, who also had first-place wins in either the Southern Arizona Regional Science and Engineering Fair in Tucson or the first-ever Arizona State Science and Engineering Fair in Phoenix earlier this year, will attend as observers.

“For observers, we look for kids who have a long-term commitment and who we think will learn what it takes to get to the next level,” Bethel said. “We’ve had a lot of observers who’ve come back and done well at regionals and internationals.”

CDO’s Al-Obeidi was an observer last year, Bethel said.

This year’s observers and their projects are:

• Ostin Zarse and Joshua Sloane, from Sonoran Science Academy: “Upping the Power: Can reflective materials be cost effective while increasing the output of photovoltaic cells?”

• Stanley Palase, also from Sonoran Science Academy: “Metabolic Comparison of Carbohydrates”

• Anna Guarino, from Salpointe Catholic High: “Microbial Contamination of Pens”

Emily Derks (left) and Alice Glasser compared the effects of added urban stresses on native and non-native soil microbial communities.

Angela Schlegel

“Angels & Demons,” which opens Friday, tells the tale of bad guys who threaten to destroy Vatican City with an explosive device containing a tiny amount of antimatter.

“We’re debunking the premise that you can really create a dangerous device out of antimatter,” said Erich Varnes, associate professor of physics at UA. “I don’t want people to worry that terrorists are going to build an antimatter device and hold it over us.”

Varnes will discuss the science of antimatter and how it applies to the movie at 8 p.m. Wednesday in the UA Harvill Building.

When antimatter collides with matter – for example, a normal electron with a negative charge meets an antimatter electron with a positive charge – they are annihilated and converted into energy, Varnes said.

Since e=mc2, or energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared, it would take a lot of antimatter to create an effective bomb, he said.

“If you had enough antimatter you could release huge amounts of energy,” he said. “The key point is there is really no practical way to generate or store enough antimatter to do any serious damage at all.”

If U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois ran flat out for 20 years producing antimatter, and if you could store that much antimatter – which you can’t – you would have the equivalent of 10 pounds of conventional explosives, Varnes said.

The movie is accurate in stating that antimatter can be produced in a lab, and if you get enough, it would annihilate with matter and create a lot of energy, he said.

Scientists see public interest in the movie as an opportunity to inform the public.

“The movie uses particle physics as the basis of its entire plot,” he said. “This is a chance for people to learn what is real in the movie, what is exaggerated, and where we are at the cutting edge of particle physics today.”

The movie is based on a novel by Dan Brown, who also wrote the novel on which a 2006 movie, “The Da Vinci Code” was based.

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IF YOU GO

What: Angels & Demons: The Science of Antimatter and the Large Hadron Collider

When: 8 p.m. Wednesday

Where: Room 150 of the Harvill Building, 1103 E. Second St.

Speaker: Erich Varnes, University of Arizona associate professor of physics

Cost: Free

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WHAT IS ANTIMATTER?

Antimatter is made up of elementary antiparticles, like protons and electrons with an opposite electrical charge. When matter and antimatter come into contact, they release energy while being destroyed.

A: Not until this summer. Usually the best and most predictable shooting star show is the Perseid meteor shower in August, but that is being supplanted by the Geminids around Dec. 13-14. This year the Perseids peak on the nights of Aug. 11-12 and 12-13, but the moon will interfere after 10:30 p.m. on the peak night of Aug. 12-13. If it’s cloudy on those nights, you can still see some Perseid meteors on the nights of Aug. 10-11 and 13-14, even through moonlight.