When potato plants are damaged or under attack, they release a complex organic molecule called Z-3-hexen-1-ol. By following this scent, Colorado beetles home in on their next meal. The stronger the scent, the stronger the electrical signal produced by a beetle’s antennae. Now Michael Schöning from the German government’s Jülich Research Centre, along with coworkers from the Institute for Plant Pathology at the University of Giessen, are exploiting this reaction to make an early warning system for farmers.

The “biological odour detector” tethers a live Colorado beetle to a silicon chip. “The beetle is enclosed in something like a prison,” says Schöning. One of the beetle’s antennae is dipped into a sticky electrolyte solution. This connects it to a component on the chip called a field effect transistor. A thin platinum needle inserted into the beetle completes the circuit. When the organic molecule binds to receptors on the antenna, the voltage in the circuit drops. The voltage can be monitored and an alarm sounded when the molecule is detected.

In the future, the same signal that attracts hordes of potato beetles may alert farmers to the danger. According to Stefan SchĂĽtz from the University of Giessen this improved warning system would mean farmers need only spray potato crops with pesticides when they are under attack.

SchĂĽtz says the electronic circuitry is so small and lightweight that it could be combined with a small radio transmitter and mounted on a free-flying beetle. By plotting its movements, scientists could then study how the beetle reacts to the chemical stimuli it encounters. He says the technology could even be useful for the military; insects that are sensitive to the odour of humans could deployed as tiny spies on the battlefield.

Schöning says the technique works not only with whole beetles, but also with severed beetle antennae. These are much easier to work with, he says, but they function only for 10 or 12 hours. The researchers are searching for ways to preserve the severed antennae and extend their useful life.

The German researchers are also planning to apply their technique to the bark beetle, an insect that is strongly attracted to fires. When attached to a semiconductor chip, this beetle could be a highly sensitive fire alarm.

GERMAN drugs companies have persuaded a court to block publication of a
report that calls on doctors to stop prescribing many medicines. The report,
written by leading pharmacologists, claims that 20 per cent of the drugs
prescribed in Germany offer no real clinical benefits.

On 12 September, three companies—Willmar Schwabe, Strathmann and
Bionorica—obtained a temporary injunction from a court in Düsseldorf,
preventing distribution of the 1997 Drug Prescription Report. The full legal
battle is expected to last for several months.

The Drug Prescription Report is published annually, and is intended to help
doctors and patients distinguish between proven and unproven medications. This
year’s report differed from previous editions in that it included a chart
showing how to replace allegedly ineffective drugs with better—or at least
cheaper— alternatives.

“We didn’t just tell people what’s bad, but also how it can be replaced,”
says Ulrich Schwabe, director of the Institute for Pharmacology at the
University of Heidelberg, one of the report’s editors. It is this section in
particular that seems to have provoked the companies’ legal action.

Schwabe is furious with the companies, and suspects that one of the experts
who was asked to review the manuscript before its publication is responsible for
leaking its contents to contacts in the drugs industry.

The German Pharmaceutical Industry Association, which supports the three
companies’ action, argues that the report is biased. The association points out
that several leading insurance companies provided data for the report or
financial assistance to pay for the analysis.

Health insurers would like to reduce the amount they are forced to pay out to
cover the cost of prescription drugs, claims Kerstin Kilian, a spokeswoman for
the association. “This is not an independent body that’s putting this book out,
and it’s not as scientific as it appears,” she says.

Distinguishing between effective medicines and worthless treatments is
particularly difficult in Germany. Of the 50 000 prescription drugs currently on
the market, 33 000 have never been subjected to rigorous clinical studies. They
include herbal preparations, homeopathic remedies and synthetic drugs developed
before Germany’s Drug Law, which regulates the pharmaceuticals industry, came
into effect in 1978. The most popular of these inadequately tested drugs,
prescribed tens of millions of times in Germany each year, are those intended to
improve blood circulation or clear out the lungs and airways.

COMPUTERISED cockpits leave German airline pilots feeling alienated and
intimidated. More than half of the pilots questioned in a survey say they feel
“inadequately informed” about their aircraft.

The most modern passenger aircraft have digital cockpit displays instead of
analogue dials and gauges. In these aircraft, pilots use a computer interface
rather than manual controls to alter course and adjust throttle settings.

An association of German pilots, called Cockpit, asked its members what they
thought of these aircraft. Sixty-two per cent of pilots flying the most advanced
planes complained that their technical manuals were “inadequate”, compared to
just 23 per cent of those flying conventional aircraft. More than half of the
pilots of these high-tech airliners said they were not given adequate technical
updates about their planes’ performance. Only 35 per cent of pilots flying older
aircraft had the same complaint.

Pilots of advanced planes were also twice as likely to consider their
training inadequate. And they complained of a lack of sensory stimulation,
because they no longer needed to keep their hands on the controls.

Most of the complaints in the German survey, which was completed last year,
were directed against the Airbus A320, A330 and A340, built by a consortium of
European aerospace companies. These planes’ main competitor, the Boeing 777, was
not in service with German airlines at the time.

Ralf Beyer, a specialist in pilot-cockpit interaction at the German
government’s Institute for Flight Guidance in Brunswick, says that pilots have
generally responded better to Boeing’s plane, which gives pilots more freedom to
override computer systems. John Mazor of the Air Line Pilots Association in
Washington DC agrees: “Airbus has the reputation of designing things with the
attitude that the designers know better than the pilots.”

Pilots resent being taken out of the loop, says Beyer. “They are always
worried that something is happening that’s concealed from them.”

David Voskuhl, a spokesman for Airbus Industrie in Toulouse, France, says
that most of the complaints come from pilots encountering the cockpits for the
first time. After a while, he argues, they come to trust the new technology. “We
are all in favour of the things we are familiar with,” says Voskuhl.

Aircraft manufacturers are keen on automation because pilot error is still
the main cause of crashes. Yet safety specialists have become concerned about
the risks of giving pilots little to do during long flights
(“Out of their hands”, żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ, 23 November 1996, p 16).

For example, the American Airlines Boeing 757 that crashed near Cali,
Colombia, in December 1995, did so after pilots who were relying on the
autopilot lost track of their position. They programmed the aircraft to steer
toward a location that they had already passed. It banked into a turn, trying to
double back, and flew into a mountain.

Despite a six-hour space walk to search for the tear in Spektr’s outer skin
that left it crippled and airless, the astronauts could find nothing. Now some
space officials in the US and Europe are predicting privately that the module,
which housed scientific experiments, will remain unoccupied even if the hole is
eventually fixed. They are worried that the tear might reopen.

Russian and American specialists are experimenting with materials with which
to plug the hole, should it be found. They are looking for resins that will bond
to the metal of Spektr’s outer skin and create a strong seal. But Greg Harbaugh,
a NASA official responsible for the agency’s work on Mir, says: “How do you
satisfy yourself, once you’ve done the repair, that it’s OK to send human beings
back in there?”

The original hole was small and the air escaped slowly, giving astronauts
several minutes to seal off the damaged module. But according to German
astronaut Reinhold Ewald, who was on board Mir earlier this year, the rupture of
a resin patch might create a much larger hole in the station.

NASA officials say that they can continue their scientific experiments
without the Spektr module. But they will carry on helping with the repair effort
because it is providing training for maintenance work on the future
International Space Station.

Russian specialists suspect that the hole in Spektr is beneath the base of a
solar panel damaged in the collision. When a space shuttle visits Mir in late
September it will deliver a metal plate that could be used to patch any leak.

The simulations proved accurate. When Pavel Vinogradov opened the hatch to
Spektr, all he saw were some white flakes floating in the vacuum. He speculated
that they were residues from Michael Foale’s shampoo bottle, which could have
exploded.

Vinogradov and his partner Anatoly Soloveyov quickly succeeded in their main
task, reconnecting some cables that will deliver critical power from solar
panels mounted on the Spektr module. Russian officials hope the repairs will
provide an additional 8 kilowatts, boosting Mir’s power-generating capacity by
50 per cent.

The cosmonauts reported two strange phenomena inside Spektr that mystified
flight controllers. Vinogradov insisted that there was condensation on some of
the equipment, although Russian experts say that in a complete vacuum, water
vapour should have long since disappeared.

The cosmonauts also reported hearing fans and other equipment coming back to
life inside Spektr as they connected the electrical cables. This seemed
impossible because sound cannot travel in a vacuum, and the cables the
cosmonauts were connecting are not linked directly to any equipment in the
module.

NASA officials offered an explanation a few hours later. When Mir emerged
from the shadow of Earth into direct sunlight, some current flowed from the
solar panels directly to batteries and equipment in the Spektr module, causing
some fans to spin.

Researchers on the ground cheered news that the cosmonauts had retrieved a
laptop computer and a stack of computer discs. These may contain data from
several experiments that were interrupted on 25 June, when a supply ship crashed
into Spektr, forcing the crew to abandon the module. Most of the experiments
were devoted to studying the effects of long-term spaceflight on the human body.
Although some data might now be recovered, blood and urine stored in a
refrigerator were ruined.

A team of German and Italian researchers were not so happy. They are
investigating how well muscles can perform sudden, strenuous tasks, such as
jumping, after long periods of weightlessness. But when they arrived in Moscow
they learnt that Vasili Tsibliev, who was at Mir’s controls when the supply ship
rammed Spektr, would no longer take part in their tests. He has been said to
suffer from an irregular heartbeat, but he is also bitter at accusations that he
is partly to blame for Mir’s problems.

Tsibliev and his flight engineer, Alexander Lazutkin, were supposed to fill
out a weekly questionnaire while in orbit, reporting on how they felt about life
on board. The stress and strain of recent months may make for some interesting
results, says Nick Kanas, the psychologist who designed the study for NASA. “I
just hope they filled out their questionnaires and that they did it honestly.”

The companies that are building and launching the satellites talk in public about how the images will help urban planning or cellular telephone networks. In reality, however, “they know that a substantial part of their market is going to be dictators and the military”, says Gerald Steinberg from the Centre for Strategic Studies at Bar Ilan University near Tel Aviv, Israel.

The frontrunners in the race to be the first to deliver such images are two American companies. Space Imaging EOSAT, based in Thornton, Colorado, will launch a satellite named Ikonos in December. Ikonos is capable of resolving objects as small as 1 metre. Another Colorado-based company, Earthwatch of Longmont, plans to launch two satellites. The first is scheduled to go into orbit in October and has a resolution of 3 metres. The second, to be launched next year, will be able to detect objects just 85 centimetres across. Companies in France and Israel are hoping to launch similar satellites soon.

These commercial spy satellites are being built by the same companies that once designed and built spy satellites for the American military, including Lockheed, E-Systems and Ball Aerospace. The chairman of Space Imaging EOSAT, Jeff Harris, was once director of the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), the American government agency in charge of acquiring images from space. Until a few years ago, the very existence of the NRO was classified.

Each of the new satellites will carry a telescope that can swing up to 30 degrees in any direction to aim at precise coordinates on the Earth’s surface. The resulting images are picked up by an array of charge-coupled devices, similar to those inside video cameras, and radioed back to Earth in a stream of encrypted data.

There is nothing particularly ground-breaking about this technology. The world’s superpowers have long been able to capture images from space, and the best of their spy satellites can reportedly detect objects as small as 10 centimetres across. But until now, countries that possessed this technology were willing to share only an inferior version of it with the public.

Since 1986, the commercial market has been dominated by the French SPOT system, which offers images with 10-metre resolution. Russia sells photographs with a resolution of about 3 metres, taken by some of its older spy satellites, but customers complain that delivery is slow and unreliable. Images from NASA’s Landsat system, set up for government use but now available commercially, are accurate to only 20 metres. Delivery can take months.

The new commercial satellites will offer lower resolution than the best spy satellites and will deliver images as quickly. “Timeliness is often better than higher resolution,” says Vipin Gupta, a researcher at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, California.

For television news programmes, the satellites are a dream come true. Mark Brender, who is in charge of covering the Pentagon for ABC News, has been campaigning for high-resolution images to be made available commercially for more than a decade. “Governments have known for fifty years the power of these pictures,” he says. Soon the viewers of his news programmes will also experience that power. Brender wants to order pictures of volcanoes in the Pacific, nuclear facilities in Iran, and troop movements in Iraq.

Seeing is believing

Bhupendra Jasani of the Department of War Studies at King’s College London also welcomes the satellites. Greater “transparence” between nations leads to better decisions, and a view from the heavens can resolve rumours and calm panicked leaders. If high-quality images of the Soviet Union had been available in the late 1950s, he says, the myth that the Soviets had huge numbers of missiles could have been laid to rest.

Sharp eyes in space could also be used for monitoring multilateral arms control agreements, says Jasani. At his suggestion, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is considering using commercial satellites to detect evidence of nuclear proliferation. Richard Hooper, an official in the IAEA’s safeguards division, says satellite images could help the agency check whether countries have secretly moved the boundaries of nuclear sites.

But the satellites will also be used to prepare for war, warn some specialists, and as gunsights for missiles and bombers. “Every bad guy in the world is going to be buying these pictures,” says John Pike from the pressure group the Federation of American żěè¶ĚĘÓƵs. He warns that the images could fuel a Latin American arms race. Indeed, military forces that cannot afford their own spy satellites will be able to study an enemy’s most vulnerable targets from space, just as the US and the Soviet Union have done for decades. “The thing that countries developing missiles have been missing is information on where the target is,” says Gupta.

The Ikonos satellite will be particularly useful as an intelligence-gathering tool. In contrast to the Earthwatch satellites, which will deliver data to Earthwatch-owned ground stations, Ikonos will be controlled by an international network of up to ten ground stations, most of them operated by other companies. The ground stations outside the US, which have not yet been identified, will have exclusive rights to images of the country in which they are located.

The stations will mostly be run by private companies. But the government of a country with one of these ground stations on its territory will effectively acquire its own spy satellite, says Gupta. If a ground station were set up in Saudi Arabia, for instance, the Saudi government would be able to order images from all over the region, including the Dimona nuclear complex in Israel. But if Israel-or the IAEA or ABC News-wished to buy images of air bases in Saudi Arabia, they would have to buy them from the Saudi-controlled ground station, and the request might well be denied.

Israeli officials see the new satellites as a military threat. Last autumn, they persuaded the US Congress to pass a law prohibiting American-owned commercial satellites from delivering overhead images of Israel that are superior to images available from foreign sources. Officials at Space Imaging EOSAT refuse to comment on the law.

The US government has the right to restrict distribution of images collected by American-owned satellites during times when they could “compromise” American national security, international obligations or foreign policy objectives. At such times, the public may lose access to the new high-resolution images. Brender says these restrictions are too vague and probably a violation of the first amendment to the constitution, which guarantees freedom of the press. He predicts that the issue will end up in the courts.

But Pike believes that commercial competition will eventually thwart attempts to draw a curtain over parts of the Earth. “Given that there will be two systems in orbit, or three, nothing’s going to be completely blacked out anymore,” he says. “And despite having been an opponent of this, I fully intend to be first in line to buy an image and put it up on my Web site.”

UP TO a quarter of young Germans have damaged their hearing by listening
to loud music, according to a study of military recruits. And one in ten of the
country’s 18-year-olds may have suffered damage severe enough to handicap them
in normal conversation, a separate study has found. The results have prompted
German officials to propose Europe-wide limits on the volume of personal
stereos.

Researchers at the Institute for Occupational Medicine at the Heinrich Heine
University in DĂĽsseldorf examined 1800 men between the ages of 16 and 24 at
several military recruiting offices around the country. They found some hearing
loss in around a quarter of them. They also discovered that the recruits with
poor hearing were more likely to have spent time listening to loud music.

In a second study, supported by the government’s Federal Environment Office
(FEO), researchers examined the listening habits and hearing of 270 students in
Berlin. According to Hartmut Ising, a specialist on noise pollution at the FEO,
nearly 10 per cent of students aged between 16 and 18 had lost so much of their
hearing that they had difficulty understanding some normal conversation.

The researchers also found that students who listened to music on headphones
for more than two hours a day and visited discos at least once a week suffered,
on average, a 10-decibel reduction in their hearing sensitivity. Most of this
loss was in the frequency range between 3 kilohertz and 6 kilohertz, which might
prevent a person distinguishing between the sounds of the letters “s” and “f”.

Adrian Davis, who works at the Medical Research Council’s Institute of
Hearing Research in Nottingham, says he is “a little sceptical” about the German
results. His own studies have failed to find a similar pattern of hearing damage
among British youngsters who listen to loud music. Similar studies in Sweden
have also failed to establish such a pattern.

The German government, however, is now calling for the European Union to
limit the noise levels of personal stereos. It has proposed a maximum output of
90 decibels, a significant reduction from the 120 decibels produced by some
personal stereos. The proposal is under consideration by CENELEC, a body within
the European Commission that sets standards for electronic equipment. Other
countries have been asked to submit their views on the German proposal by 15
July.

The German move follows unilateral action by France, which last year passed a
law capping the output of personal stereos at 100 decibels
(“Falling on deaf ears”,
żěè¶ĚĘÓƵ, 29 June 1996, p 12).

Manufacturers claim that there is no widely accepted method for measuring the
sound emitted by personal stereos. Sound levels measured by a microphone on the
earphones of a music system are not equivalent to what is actually heard by the
ear, they say.