PHOENIX — From the bustling streets of Scottsdale to the red rocks of Sedona more than an hour away, a NASA research balloon had some Arizonans wondering whether they had spotted an alien spacecraft.

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.

A family’s journey from hand-set type to hand-coded hypertext

George M. Smith edits a story for the Wheaton Daily Journal sometime in the late 1940s.

The Internet killed the newspaper.

No, it’s the economy, stupid.

Or overleveraged publishing chains. Left-wing columnists. Whatever the cause, change is in the air of the publishing world, but it’s blowing faster than ever.

From the cover of Time magazine to a slew of bloggers, the changes sweeping the news business are an untiring meme lately.

Newspapers big and small are stopping their presses, not to replate with the latest breaking scandal, but to lay off their staffs, shutter the doors, retire the nameplates.

It may be news, but it’s not new. My family has been involved, off and on, in the newspaper game for more than a century. Each generation saw shifts in society and advances in technology challenge their publishing acumen.

My great-grandfather got into journalism in 1900. George M. Smith began writing for the Naperville (Ill.) Clarion fresh out of high school. After attending Wheaton College, just outside of Chicago, where his father taught, he worked his way through a succession of reporting jobs.

In 1913, he purchased the Du Page County Tribune, a weekly in Wheaton, setting himself up as editor and publisher.

Printing a newspaper in those days was a labor-intensive operation. Every line of type was set by hand, using individual die-cast metal letters, thousands per page.

Hot lead and Linotypes

In 1915, the Tribune purchased a new typecasting machine – a Linotype. Headlines still had to be made up by hand, but the body text of stories was cast in lines – slugs – by molding hot lead. Linotypes were complex mechanical contraptions, prone to breakdown, with 90-character keyboards.

The paper was successful under George’s leadership. To speed production, he invested in another. In 1933, in the midst of the Depression, it became a daily, and the nameplate was changed to the Wheaton Daily Journal. A subscription to the solidly Republican paper ran 5 cents per week.

My grandfather, Robert Smith, followed in his dad’s footsteps, writing a column for the Journal, and studying journalism at South Dakota State College – where he met my grandmother Eileen.

She’d been active in her high school newspaper, which was a full page in the local Milbank (S.D.) Herald Advance, printed every week. She studied printing and journalism at South Dakota State before graduating in 1938.

“There were not that many women in printing – really just a few of us in the whole field of journalism.

“At the college, we set some type by hand, but mainly with the Linotype. Working the hell box (where miscast slugs and wrongly-set type were discarded, to be sorted out later) wasn’t much fun. We had to go through and pull out all the letters and put them back.

“Everything was done by hand. The letterpress was hand-fed, which was a lot of work.

“Bob was very good at setting type. I suppose it came easy to me. I’ve been able to do a lot of computer work – at the museum and such – because of it, using a different keyboard than a typewriter.”

They both put themselves through college working for the college press – writing, proofreading, making up pages.

World War II came soon after my grandparents graduated, interrupting Bob’s endeavors in journalism with a stint in the South Pacific for him and California for Eileen. Two boys also arrived, my uncle Joel and my dad, Steve.

After the war, the Wheaton Daily Journal responded to its growing market.

“Everybody brought two papers – the Chicago paper (Tribune) and the Journal. People were working in Chicago, taking the train in.”

Many commuters began to identify more as Chicagoans than as members of their formerly sleepy suburbs. The ubiquity of radio and growing television market – pioneered in the ’30s by The Chicago Daily News – challenged the small suburban publishers.

George Smith died in February 1949, having spent his life putting ink on paper, telling stories.

My grandfather and his two brothers stepped in to run the family business. Bob took over as editor, the others managing the business side.

Hand-set to high-tech

While the presses weren’t hand-fed anymore, pages were still cast in hot metal. Steve Smith – my dad – recalls the press room as a noisy, messy place.

“My father used to come home with burns” from working on the Linotype, he recalls. “You talk about a complicated machine. And that was a tough bunch of guys. He had a crown on one tooth from getting hit with a wrench by a pressman.”

The changing business and inevitable conflicts among the brothers led to a sale of the Journal in 1953.

Bob went into teaching, first for a local high school, eventually becoming a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin, Eau Claire. Before he died in 1975, he was working to move the college’s program to a new computerized system.

From hand-set to high-tech, in a lifetime.

My dad went to college to study printing just as technology was shifting.

In the late ’60s, newspapers were moving to more-efficient platemaking processes and high-capacity web presses.

Colleges were still teaching outdated photoengraving techniques, even as the new technology penetrated the business. A career based on a fading process didn’t seem too viable.

Besides, the art department held more attraction. It didn’t take long for my dad to drop his journalism and printing courses.

My journey through journalism began in high school, where I learned how to type, badly, and paste up a news page by hand, using hot wax and type output from a primitive computer system at the local Prescott Courier.

After some schooling at the University of Arizona, I wrote and edited copy for a string of Tucson alternative papers whose names are mostly lost to history.

I served a stint as editor and publisher of ¿K? Magazine, an arts and culture monthly, in the mid-1990s. Despite the streamlining of the desktop publishing revolution, print publishing remained an expensive proposition.

Learning the code

In the late’ 90s, I moved into Web design, learning an alphabet soup of languages: html, xml, js, css and more.

A few years ago, the Citizen was kind enough to take me on, and eventually let me manage the Web site.

In the short time I’ve been here, the technology we use has dramatically shifted. From basic html pages to rich applications that feature video and databases, the addition of reader comments and forums, the focus of the Citizen online has changed along with the culture of the Internet.

But the impressive values of the Citizen staff have remained: accuracy, fairness, truth.

This may well be the last piece I write for a daily newspaper. It leaves me with a bit of an empty feeling, sitting at my desk, preparing for the Citizen’s last edition, knowing that my family’s history with the printing press has stopped rolling.

The family paper, having changed hands several times through the years, continues as the Wheaton Sun – a suburban weekly that’s part of the Sun-Times group.

Yes, they’ve got a Web page.

And like many newspaper chains, the Sun-Times recently filed for bankruptcy.

I hope to carry on my ancestors’ legacy of reporting. Given the trend, that will have to be in some online-only capacity. I’ll miss the smell of fresh ink, but I enjoy the 24/7 challenge of keeping the news fresh.

No matter if it’s delivered by a paperboy on a bike, or via the never-ending stream of the Internet, it’s all about telling stories.

———

Ink in the blood

Many Citizen staffers have families with long histories in the newspaper business.

Alan Fischer’s father, George Fischer, was in the newspaper industry his entire life. He started as a carrier for the Grand Forks (N.D.) Herald as a youth, and held a number of jobs there before becoming a pressman. He brought his skills here, working as a pressman for Tucson Newspapers from 1965 until his retirement in the late 1980s.

B. Poole’s mom, Norma Poole, and sister, Cathy Rowe, were typesetters for newspapers in Illinois during the ’60s and ’70s.

PK Weis’ grandfather PK Weis Sr. was a reporter for the Moberly (Mo.) Monitor in the early 1900s. Senior began his career as a printer’s devil when he was a young boy.

Polly Higgins’ grandfather Rathbun R. Higgins wrote a column called “The Stamp Man” for the Chicago Heights Star from 1948 to 1960 and resurrected it for the Columbus (Ind.) Republic 1967-82.

Garry Duffy’s father, Joseph L. Duffy, was an assistant to Roy Howard, of Scripps-Howard newspapers, in the late ’40s and early ’50s.

Fernanda Echavarri’s great-grandfather Jesús María Benítez Martínez, was a columnist for the local daily in Querétaro, Mexico, from 1973 to 1997.

Randy Harris’ grandfather was circulation manager of the Danville (IL) Press-Democrat from the age of 15. His mother was women’s editor for the Marion (IN) Chronicle-Tribune in the ’60s and ’70s.

Bruce Johnston descends from three generations of journalists on both sides of his family. Both of his great-grandfathers owned weekly newspapers in Canada; one of them brought the first Linotype into the country. The papers passed on through the next two generations in his family. One still publishes today, although no relatives still work for it.

Ray Suarez’s grandfather Edgar worked for TNI in the mailroom and advertising. Grandmother Beatriz was a switchboard operator, while Ray’s father, Stephen, worked in the composing room. Aunt Selina works in circulation for Gannett, while another aunt, Eloina, worked the switchboards. All told, Ray says that his family has put in 117 years working for TNI and the Citizen.

Astronauts narrowly avoided disaster Thursday during their first spacewalk to upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope, but the more treacherous tasks still await them.

Astronaut Andrew Feustel on Thursday successfully wrenched out a stubborn bolt that, if it had broken off, could have blocked installation of a $132 million camera on Hubble. The camera is one of astronomers’ highest priorities for this mission, the fifth and final visit to fix and modernize the Hubble.

There will be no weekend off for Feustel and the other six crewmembers of space shuttle Atlantis, which pulled up to the Hubble on Wednesday. In the next few days, they’ll undertake work so difficult that NASA is downplaying their chance of success.

“Today was a speed bump,” Hubble senior scientist David Leckrone said. “Two days from now is going to be the hold-your-breath day.”

What’s planned:

• On Saturday, Feustel and astronaut John Grunsfeld will attempt the first repair on a Hubble scientific instrument while in orbit. Fixing the Advanced Camera for Surveys requires them to remove tiny screws that they won’t be able to see – while wearing bulky space gloves.

“This will be a nail-biter all the way,” Grunsfeld said before Atlantis’ May 11 launch.

• On Sunday, astronauts Michael Massimino and Michael Good will try to mend another broken scientific instrument. To bring the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph back to life, they’ll have to undo more than 110 screws not much bigger than watch screws.

The telescope could be crippled if a single stray screw floats into it.

“I don’t know exactly how it’s going to turn out,” Massimino said before launch. “A lot of miracles have to occur.”

The scientific instruments on Hubble – unlike its standard components, such as the observatory’s batteries – were not designed to be fixed in orbit. So it’s extraordinarily difficult to access them. Hubble’s managers decided the two instruments are so scientifically valuable that it’s worth the risk to try to repair them.

If the astronauts pull off the repairs, Hubble will have five functional scientific instruments for the first time since 1993, but Hubble’s overseers are trying to tamp down expectations.

“On this mission, the final mission, we’re going for broke,” Leckrone said.

Thursday’s spacewalk was not expected to be challenging, but the astronauts encountered an unexpected obstacle as they tried to remove a scientific instrument known as Wide Field Planetary Camera 2.

The camera has been a scientific workhorse, but it’s 15 years old, and its replacement will be 15 to 35 times more powerful. Astronomers are eager to start using the new camera.

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.

KINGMAN – A new solar plant is planned for Mohave County, the fourth and largest now slated to be built in Arizona’s northwest corner.

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.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. – An unknown number of people were cut off from Google Inc.’s search engine, e-mail and other online services Thursday, sparking a flurry of frustrated venting that served as a reminder of society’s growing dependence on Google’s technology.

Without providing specifics, Google said technical problems had prevented a “small subset of users” from getting into their e-mail accounts. The e-mail issues also had a ripple effect on other services, including the Google’s search engine, according to the Mountain View-based company.

The intermittent trouble lasted for hours before the issues were fixed by early afternoon EDT

Before the repair, many people locked out from Google went elsewhere on the Internet to express their dismay and despair.

Multiple messages posted on Twitter, a popular information-sharing forum, indicated that people all over the world had trouble with the Google search engine and e-mail. But other Twitter users said their Google services have been running smoothly.

Because Google is used by hundreds of millions of people, even a breakdown affecting a small percentage of its audience can have a major impact. Google’s search engine, by far the most popular on the Internet, fields more than 9 billion monthly search requests in the United States alone.

As part of its effort to retain its current users and expand its market share so it can sell more Internet ads, Google has invested billions of dollars to create a vast network of computers to lessen the chances of breakdowns.

Although its search engine is renowned for its reliability, Google isn’t fail-safe. Its 5-year-old e-mail service, in particular, has been susceptible to periodic outages.

In this image from NASA TV the Hubble Space Telescope is shown being held by the robotic arm from Shuttle Atlantis on Wednesday. Atlantis began a 350-mile-high grab of the telescope on Wednesday setting the stage for five days of formidable spacewalking repairs.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – A pair of spacewalking astronauts stepped outside Thursday to begin demanding repair work on the Hubble Space Telescope, a job made all the more dangerous because of the high, debris-ridden orbit.

John Grunsfeld and Andrew Feustel emerged from space shuttle Atlantis and quickly got started on their first job, a camera swap. The telescope — the size of a school bus — loomed over them.

“Ah, this is fantastic,” Grunsfeld said as he floated out.

“Woo-hoo,” Feustel shouted.

It was the first of five high-risk spacewalks to fix Hubble’s broken parts, install higher-tech science instruments and make the observatory more powerful than ever.

Atlantis and its crew are traveling in an especially high orbit, 350 miles above Earth, that is littered with pieces of smashed satellites. A 4-inch piece of space junk passed within a couple miles of the shuttle Wednesday night, just hours after the shuttle grabbed Hubble. Even something that small could cause big damage.

Grunsfeld and Feustel first needed to remove a 15-year-old camera and then put in an updated model. Each is the size of a baby grand piano and awkward to handle. Also on their to-do list: replacing a computer data unit that broke down last fall, and installing a docking ring so a robotic craft can guide the telescope into the Pacific years from now.

The new wide-field and planetary camera — worth $132 million — will allow astronomers to peer deeper into the universe, to within 500 million to 600 million years of creation.

The old one coming out was installed in December 1993 during the first Hubble repair mission, to remedy the telescope’s blurred vision. It had corrective lenses already in place and, because of the astounding images it captured, quickly became known as the camera that saved Hubble. It’s also been dubbed the people’s telescope because its cosmic pictures seem to turn up everywhere.

The camera — which has taken more than 135,000 observations — is destined for the Smithsonian Institution.

Grunsfeld, the chief repairman with two previous Hubble missions under his work belt, took the lead on the camera replacement as well as the work to install a new science data-handling device.

Hubble’s original data handler, which was launched with the telescope 19 years ago, failed in September, just two weeks before Atlantis was supposed to take off on this fifth and final servicing mission. The breakdown caused all picture-taking to cease and prompted NASA to delay the shuttle flight by seven months.

Flight controllers managed to get the telescope working again, but NASA decided to replace the faulty computer unit. The goal is to keep Hubble running for another five to 10 years.

Astronaut Michael Massimino, who will venture out Friday, took a moment to send a Twitter update from Atlantis on Thursday.

“Rendezvous and grapple were great, getting ready for our first spacewalk,” he typed.

Massimino, a.k.a. Astro—Mike, has been sending tweets since a month before liftoff.

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.

Harvest Plus, a research organization funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to fortify crops for developing nations, is focusing on using conventional breeding techniques rather than genetic engineering.

A multivitamin for the world’s poor could be found in a cup of corn meal.

Scientists in Spain have engineered African lines of white corn to provide high levels of beta carotene, a key source of vitamin A, a nutrient critical to protecting eyesight.

The grain, which has an orange tint because of the beta-carotene, also contains significant levels of vitamin C and folate.

Less than a cup of the corn could provide the recommended daily intake of vitamin A, scientists reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers said the achievement “opens the way for the development of nutritionally complete” grains.

The corn joins versions of rice and other crops that scientists are trying to breed to alleviate malnutrition in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Some 250 million preschool children are deficient in vitamin A, and as many as 500,000 kids go blind each year for lack of the nutrient, according to the World Health Organization.

The Rockefeller Foundation is pushing ahead with an effort to produce large amounts of a vitamin A-enriched rice, known as Golden Rice. At World Food Prize’s Borlaug Dialogue symposium last fall, the foundation’s president, Judith Rodin, said the rice could “save almost 3 million children’s lives, while nourishing as many as 300 million more.”

Like the corn, the rice came from genetic engineering, which involves adding genes to the plant from other species to give the crop new traits.

“We have so many millions of people around the world who have diets that are less than ideal,” said Greg Jaffe, a specialist in agricultural biotechnology with the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a consumer advocacy group in Washington. “We should be using all the tools available to try to improve those diets.

Biotech seed companies such as Monsanto and Pioneer Hi-Bred are focusing their research on crop traits that will be in demand in developed nations, such as soybeans with oils that are better for the heart and corn that is drought tolerant.

Harvest Plus, a research organization funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to fortify crops for developing nations, is focusing instead on using conventional breeding techniques rather than genetic engineering.

The group is developing fortified varieties of several crops, including corn, beans, millet, wheat rice and cassava, through conventional crops.

But biotech crops have met resistance in many regions, including Africa, where the fortified versions are targeted.

The first vitamin A-enhanced corn variety is targeted for release in Zambia in 2011 and 2012. Other crops will be fortified with iron and zinc.

Conventional breeding may take longer than genetic engineering, but ultimately the new crop may be available sooner, said Yassir Islam, a spokesman for Harvest Plus, an outgrowth of a network of research centers, called the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research.

So far in the greenhouse trials, yields of the biotech corn are equivalent to those in conventional varieties, one of the researchers, Paul Christou, wrote in an e-mail. The research has been funded through the Spanish government and a European Union program.

The scientists have been experimenting on white corn because that’s the favored type in their target areas of Africa. But they don’t believe hungry people will turn down the grain if it’s orange.

“Our intended target population is not well-fed people in industrialized countries, rather starving people in Africa, South America and Asia!” Christou wrote.

Philip Brasher is a reporter for The Des Moines Register. E-mail: pbrasher@dmreg.com

This image provided by NASA on Tuesday and annotated by source, shows white scuff marks around the edge of the shuttle where the right wing joins the fuselage and the belly curves up to the top of Atlantis. The Atlantis astronauts uncovered a 21-inch stretch of nicks on their space shuttle Tuesday, but NASA said the damage did not appear to be serious.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Shuttle Atlantis and its crew moved toward the Hubble Space Telescope for a 350-mile-high grab Wednesday that will set the stage for five days of formidable spacewalking repairs.

Late Tuesday, the astronauts got comforting news: the ugly stretch of nicks on Atlantis’ thermal tiles were not considered serious, and no further inspections were needed. NASA is continuing to prep another shuttle, though, just in case a piece of space junk hits the shuttle during the mission.

Hubble’s unusually high orbit is strewn with smashed satellite pieces and other debris.

Commander Scott Altman and his co-pilot fired the engines Wednesday morning and steered Atlantis up into Hubble’s orbit. Early in the afternoon, robot arm operator Megan McArthur will use the 50-foot boom to grab the school bus-sized observatory and anchor it in Atlantis’ payload bay.

The capture is expected to occur over the Indian Ocean, just northeast of Madagascar.

Hubble scientists and managers warn that Hubble may look a little ragged; it hasn’t had a tuneup for seven years.

Beginning Thursday, two teams of spacewalking astronauts — two men per team — will take turns venturing outside to replace the 19-year-old Hubble’s batteries and gyroscopes, and an old camera and pointing mechanism. They also will install fresh thermal covers on the telescope and a new science data-control unit — the original conked out last September and, although revived, delayed the shuttle flight by seven months.

The space repairmen also will go into the guts of two broken science instruments and attempt to fix the fried electronics. Astronauts have never attempted anything like this before at Hubble.

This is the fifth and final flight to Hubble, costing NASA just over $1 billion. The space agency hopes to get another five to 10 years of dazzling views of the cosmos, with all the planned upgrades, which should leave the observatory more powerful than ever.

The mission almost didn’t happen.

A year after the 2003 Columbia tragedy, NASA canceled the repair effort, saying it was too dangerous. The astronauts would not have anywhere to seek shelter because the international space station is in a different, inaccessible orbit.

But a new NASA regime reinstated the flight in 2006 after shuttle repair techniques were developed and tested in orbit. A plan also was put in place to have a rescue shuttle on the launch pad to blast off within days for a rescue.

That shuttle, the Endeavour, will remain on standby until Atlantis and its crew of seven head back to Earth late next week.

As for the nicks on Atlantis, they stretch over 21 inches on the right wing, on the forward edge where it joins with the fuselage. The astronauts discovered the damage Tuesday while inspecting their ship.

The nicks are shallow and embedded in thick thermal tiles, in a location that is not particularly vulnerable during re-entry at flight’s end. Engineers believe those scrapes were caused by debris that came off the fuel tank 1 1/2 minutes after liftoff Monday.

Columbia’s damage was considerably more severe — a plate-size hole in the most sensitive part of the left wing.

———

ON THE WEB

NASA: www.nasa.gov/mission—pages/hubble/main/index.html

If your school or organization can’t take your kids to Flandrau Science Center to see the stars, Flandrau can bring the stars to them.

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.

———

FOR MORE INFORMATION

• Call or e-mail astronomy coordinator Mike Terenzoni.

•E-mail: miket@ns.arizona.edu

•Phone: 626-3646

———

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.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — The Atlantis astronauts have uncovered a long stretch of nicks on their space shuttle, the result of launch debris.

They were inspecting their ship Tuesday for signs of launch damage when they came across the nicks. Mission Control informed the crew that it’s a 21-inch stretch of nicks over four to five thermal tiles on the right side of Atlantis. The damage is where the right wing joins the fuselage.

Mission Control says it could be related to debris that came off the fuel tank almost two minutes after liftoff.

NASA says the damage does not appear to be serious, but more analysis is needed.

Atlantis blasted off Monday on a risky repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope. Endeavour is on standby in case a rescue is needed.

As first wind farm goes up in state, others likely to follow

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.”

As advertisers spend more online, brand name firms increasingly are seeing their names, customers and millions of dollars in sales hijacked by shady marketers.

Instances of deceptive marketing to build traffic for rogue sites or to sell faux-branded products rose 17 percent last year, according to MarkMonitor, whose software tracks digital marketing infringement.

Shady marketers are using so-called cybersquatting to do their digital stealing. They drive people to a “squatted” site via e-mails or through paid search. Once they’ve led someone there, they hope to steal credit card information, spur clicks on ads to skim revenue from online ad networks or sell fake products, such as pharmaceuticals or pricey handbags.

The tactics target electronics, sports apparel, luxury brands and pharmaceutical brands the most and cost marketers about $175 billion worldwide in lost revenue, says Fred Felman of MarkMonitor.

“When the economy goes south, white-collar criminals don’t quit,” Felman says. The company’s “Brand Jacking Index” report shows that daily incidences of cybersquatting against 30 of the top global brands rose to 449,484 last year vs. 382,246 in 2007. A first-time study coming out today in conjunction with industry group Chief Marketing Officer Council addresses how marketers are coping with the surge in cybersquatting.

“We’re at a point in which marketers need a wake-up call in what’s happening to their brand,” says Liz Miller, vice president, programs and operations for the council. “Marketing is in the dark, and cybercriminals are ramping up their game.”

Incidents are up as marketers increasingly use search engine optimization to reach consumers online, where ad spending is expected to top $24 billion this year. While ad expenditures overall are expected to fall by as much as 10 percent, digital advertising in 2009 is expected to be up about 4.5 percent over 2008, according to online marketing tracker eMarketer.

As businesses fight for a share of dwindling dollars, rogue marketers are getting more aggressive. The CMO study says that marketers see their brands as more vulnerable to infringement online than in other media, with 29.5 percent of the 300 marketers reporting brand infringement on the Web vs. 22.6 percent in other media.

Despite the big cost to marketers, few of them invest in protecting their brands online. The CMO study reports 52 percent of respondents spend less than $100,000 on brand protection annually. Just 2.7 percent say they spend $5 million or more.