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For over two centuries we have struggled to understand the scope of Afghanistan's mineral wealth. Now geologists, if they can determine what lies beneath the nation's ground, might also help bring stability to the surface

As we looked out over steep slopes dotted with purple delphinium, the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas all around us, Abdul Latif told me that he had not always been a miner. He had become a mujahideen commander after the Soviet invasion in 1979, he said, and he’d faced the enemy’s artillery and helicopters in these very mountains: land mines and the bones of men were buried out there, and older things too. Haroon, another miner, said that while he was digging a new tunnel several years ago he came across ancient buried walls, the chamber of a house made with neat stone masonry. He found a clay amphora there and smashed it in the hopes of finding gold, but it contained only dust.

Afghanistan’s “artisanal” miners, the gem-seeking equivalent of subsistence farmers, have been extracting and exporting precious stones for more than seven millennia; archaeologists have discovered lapis lazuli from Afghanistan in ancient burial sites as far away as Egypt. For the 3,000 or so artisanal miners working today, the job remains difficult. They have no property rights and keep their operations hidden from the central government, which in any case has little control over the region. Fatal accidents from blasting, cave-ins and avalanches are not uncommon, and the miners survive on a diet of stale bread, tea, chickpeas, rice and hashish, brought up once a week by donkey. In the summer they live in small stone huts with tarpaulin roofs; in winter, they move down into the mines themselves. For these efforts, they produce gemstones with a market value of about $2.75 million annually, and probably keep about a tenth of that for themselves.Haroon beckoned us to enter one of the mines, where the air was cooler. Crouching, he led us through a crude system of tunnels that he and others had dug with jackhammers and dynamite. Several hundred feet into the entrails of the mountain, he hunched down and pointed his lamp at a solid stone face. He placed his finger against a thin line of whitish feldspar. “This is the sign of the emeralds,” he said. He scratched at the vein with his chisel and then reached down and picked up a stone encrusted with a faint fuzz of green crystals. “You see? They must be close.”

That there is mineral wealth in Afghanistan is as obvious as the stone in Haroon’s hand. But no one knows just how much. The Times cited a newly arrived Pentagon task force to support the claim that Afghanistan possesses “nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits,” and the Afghan government itself puts it closer to $3 trillion. But such numbers can’t be found in any published scientific papers. “You can read every one of our reports, and there’s no dollar figure attached to them,” says Jack Medlin, the geologist who coordinated the 2007 U.S. Geological Survey work in Afghanistan that informed the Pentagon estimate.

“From what we can tell, someone took the estimated tonnage and looked up commodity prices for that particular mineral at that time,” Medlin says. “You begin to go through a multiplication and addition process, and someone arrived at a trillion-dollar figure.”
The Pentagon task force estimate also obscured another important fact: Knowing about something is not the same as having it. Geologists and mining professionals carefully distinguish resources—the actual amount of a given material that exists in the ground—from reserves, the amount of that resource that can be extracted at profit with current technology under current conditions. The Pentagon, however, had simply tallied up the current market value of all the minerals buried under one of the most rugged, remote, undeveloped and lawless countries on Earth.

The result, not uncommon in Afghanistan, was the promise of a rich reward with no accounting of what it would take to obtain it. The country desperately needs the resources to rebuild, but future investors will demand a far more careful analysis of the costs and benefits. If scientists can determine what really lies beneath the ground—what can be extracted under the challenging “current conditions” of poverty, chaos and war—perhaps Afghanistan can negotiate its own fate.

* * * *

The Soviet invaders, mindful of the political importance of natural resources, built a fine headquarters for the Afghanistan Geological Survey, on the eastern edge of Kabul, and 21 years after the Soviet withdrawal, the place is still being renovated with international money. When I visited one hot afternoon, workers were applying a fresh coat of paint to the stark concrete exterior.This magnetic anomaly indicates the presence of rare-earth metals.An area with low magnetic anomalies could contain oil or gas.High magnetic anomalies here indicate the presence of copper.Low density also suggests oil or gas, reinforcing the data from (2)The AGS is responsible for, among other tasks, measuring Afghanistan’s mineral wealth, and the World Bank, which has extended $2 billion in loans to Afghanistan, has taken an interest in the project. I was here to meet two of the experts the bank had sent to assist in the effort. I joined Klaus Steinmüller and Jerry Garry in the sunlit map room, crowded with plotting tables and geological charts, where they had been training Afghan geologists. What was it, I asked them, that made countries rich in minerals in the first place?

“If you’re a mining company, the first thing you do is, you look at the regional setting,” Garry said. “Is Afghanistan sitting in a highly prospective mineral belt? The answer is yes.” He spread out a chart that showed the major faults in the Eastern Hemisphere and swept his hand in a line from the Balkans down past India. “The Tethyan mineral belt starts in Turkey, runs through Iran and then into Afghanistan, and goes all the way across Asia to Indonesia. It’s renowned for holding world-class base- and precious-metals deposits.” Steinmüller broke in and jabbed at the map. “The Tethyan belt is one of the best-understood. But there are many other mineral belts. There’s another one up here,” he said, pointing toward Afghanistan’s northeasternmost corner, where the mountain peaks can reach above 25,000 feet. “Lots of precious metals. There are many other belts like that, but they’re not well-understood yet.”

The existence of such mineral belts and the difficulty in analyzing them both owe in part to the violent collision of the Indian-Australian and Eurasian tectonic plates, which began some 50 million years ago and which still pushes the Himalayas up by nearly an inch every year. That collision has made the mountainous regions of Afghanistan some of the most rugged on Earth—tough places for surveying minerals and fighting insurgencies alike.

The collision also drained away the prehistoric Tethys Ocean, even as it opened fissures that drew magma to the surface. This is, from the perspective of mineral prospectors, an enticing combination. Magma draws up heavy elements (iron, copper, gold) from the Earth’s mantle and, as it cools, also crystallizes into emeralds and rubies. Meanwhile, the prehistoric seabeds, laden as they are with organic sediment, promise significant oil and gas deposits.

“This country is rich. Everybody knows this,” Garry concluded. “But in order to understand this kind of mineral endowment, you need to undertake systematic exploration.”

* * * *

Afghanistan's potential wealth has long been studied with interest by its ruling powers. The first scientific exploration of the land came with British invasions in 1839 and 1878, and the first systematic surveying efforts began in the mid-20th century, when French, German, Italian and Soviet geologists, at the invitation of King Zahir Shah, traveled the nation on foot and donkey-back, taking rock samples by hand. It was the Soviet invaders, though, who conducted what remain the most extensive ground surveys: They used drilling, trenching, and field samples to evaluate 20 sites in detail, paying special attention to the large Aynak copper deposit south of Kabul and the even larger Hajigak iron deposit in the Hindu Kush. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, all geological work came to a halt. In 1995, as the Taliban massed on the outskirts of Kabul, the staff of the AGS did manage to compile most of the previous research, and when the Taliban took Kabul a year later, the staff hid the documentation in their homes, where it remained until the current occupation.In 2004, American and British geologists began training the staff of the AGS to conduct surveys using global positioning satellites and modern field laboratories. They also began entering the data from the old Soviet reports into computer databases, converting it to correspond to international data standards, and verifying the Soviet geologists’ original sampling material, thereby bringing that decades-old picture of Afghan wealth into greater focus.

Still, significant areas of the country had yet to be studied. A team of USGS geologists delivered a briefing in Kabul to the staff of then-ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, with a particular focus on the petroleum-producing potential of the Sheberghan region in the north. The ambassador’s staff, however, was more interested in knowing if there might be undiscovered wealth in areas that were seen as susceptible to Taliban influence. “The question was: Is there any potential for oil and gas in the southern part of the country? Because that would be critical,” recalls Medlin, the USGS geologist. The presence of natural wealth, it was thought, could attract large-scale development that, in addition to growing the national economy and enhancing the authority of the central government, might employ the people of that unstable region in something other than insurgency.The administration of Afghan president Hamid Karzai determined that additional research was needed and gave the USGS $8.86 million to get started. The USGS in turn solicited approximately $15 million from USAID and other international donors. The problem was that the most promising “frontier basins”—possible oil- and gas-bearing rock regions—were in the most forbidding terrain in the south and southeast, along the Pakistan border. No one from the USGS was going in by road. “These places being in locations where for security reasons you couldn’t get in,” Medlin says, “you need some remote instrument that will allow you to explore it from above.”

The answer was air power. But remote sensing, no matter how sophisticated, would still present major obstacles. The first was that no private surveyors were willing to risk their crews or equipment in a war zone. The solution: The USGS subcontracted the fieldwork to the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and NASA.

The survey began with a series of flights by geologists in a Navy NP-3D Orion equipped with dual gravimeters and a magnetometer. Security was always a concern, especially given that the CIA, in the 1980s, had equipped Afghan insurgents with hundreds of surface-to-air missiles to use against the Soviet army. The Department of Defense required the pilots to fly at a standoff distance of at least 12,000 feet vertically aboveground and horizontally away from nearby mountain ranges. Since specialized survival gear would have been required for the crew to go more than 26,000 feet above sea level, the surveyors were not able to examine the 30 percent of the country that was more than 14,000 feet above sea level. It also meant that the survey results were less detailed. “You want to go lower and slower,” Medlin says. “Ideally less than 3,000 feet.”

For the second part of the survey, completed in October 2007, Air Force and NASA pilots crisscrossed the country at 50,000 feet in a modified WB-57 Canberra jet bomber equipped with a hyperspectral 3-D-mapping sensor. The USGS geologists complemented this overflight data with images from the NASA-run LANDSAT and Japanese-run ALOS satellite systems, and also with a series of radar surveys from a space shuttle mission in 2000.
In the end, the USGS remote-sensing project helped to confirm and expand on the older data. It indicated that the Hajigak iron deposit was much larger than previously believed and further suggested the presence of oil and gas deposits in southern and southeastern Afghanistan. But remote surveys can only tell you so much. The WB-57 Canberra sensor, for instance, could only create images with a resolution in which each pixel represented a square about 50 feet across—sharp enough to pick up useful data patterns, but still at best merely suggestive.

Ultimately, understanding which minerals are present in what concentrations in Afghanistan will require field research. Medlin says the USGS is hoping that Afghan geologists will one day be able to do that work themselves. “We are training them,” he adds, “because they are the ones who can get out into the countryside.”

* * * *

Back at the Afghanistan Geological Survey, in a half-renovated office down the hall from the World Bank team, Abdul Rahman Ashraf sat hunched over a desktop PowerPoint presentation, occasionally sketching on a pad of paper to illustrate the wavy lines of rock formations—clines and anticlines—that inform decisions about where and when to begin extraction. Ashraf spent most of his career as a geologist abroad, but now he is Karzai’s chief adviser on energy and mines. His job is to bring the country’s mineral-extraction infrastructure up to international standards. “This is Stone Age stuff they’re practicing out there,” he said, referring to the methods of artisanal miners like Haroon and Abdul Latif. “The blasting shatters the emerald crystals and damages their value. But people have learned in these past 20 years to go fast and take what they can.”

Ashraf hopes to change that by opening the nation to long-term investment in mining technology and infrastructure. At Peru’s Antamina mine site, for instance, miners on a 15,000-foot mountain ridge send copper and zinc ore on a conveyor belt to an intermediary plant, where it is crushed into a slurry that can be sent through a nearly 200-mile pipeline that terminates at the port of Punta Lobitos. Such systems are not especially complicated, but they are massive, and making them a reality in Afghanistan will require a commensurately massive investment.

Attracting such investment may prove the greatest challenge of all. Even by the turbulent standards of the Karzai administration, the Ministry of Mines has seen rapid turnover (there have been six appointed ministers since 2002), and it has gained a reputation as one of the most corrupt agencies in Kabul. In 2007 the completion of the largest private foreign-investment deal in Afghan history—a $2.9-billion contract with the China Metallurgical Group Corporation to extract the Aynak copper—was marred by accusations that one of those former ministers had accepted a $30-million bribe from the company.

Ashraf is quick to point out, though, that the company, which is owned by the Chinese government, had offered more in direct foreign investment than any of the other bidders, some $2.8 billion. It had also agreed to build Afghanistan’s first railroad, running from Uzbekistan through Kabul and over the Hindu Kush to Pakistan. In fact, the rapid growth of neighboring China and India could provide Afghanistan the opportunity to develop its own infrastructure, and ultimately to open up the whole region.

And the Chinese government has already funded the construction of a Pakistani deepwater port at Gwadar. India and Iran, meanwhile, are working together to build roads from southwestern Afghanistan to the competing Iranian deepwater port at Chabahar. It’s not the desire to defeat the Taliban, or the need for a political friend in an unstable region, or the hope for peace that will inspire such partnerships. It’s what’s in the ground.

And so real surveying leads to real investment, which in turn leads to real roads, real jobs and eventually—perhaps—real peace. But precise information about Afghanistan’s mineral reserves is still scarce. The Hajigak iron ore deposit, which at upward of two billion tons is the largest in Asia, is due to be opened for bids this month, but mining experts expect many years to pass before other major deposits in Afghanistan are adequately surveyed.

It’s hard to have patience after these dark years,” Ashraf said, looking down again at his careful sketches of Afghanistan’s geologic inheritance. “But we cannot make these things tomorrow.”

Matthieu Aikins is a freelance writer and photographer based in New York.

Not since the end of the Cold War has the Pentagon spent so much to develop and deploy secret weapons. But now military researchers have turned their attention from mass destruction to a far more precise challenge: finding, tracking, and killing individuals

Where does the money go? Tracking the black budget has always been a challenge. Constantly shifting project names that seem to be randomly generated by computers—Tractor Cage, Tractor Card, Tractor Dirt, Tractor Hike and Tractor Hip are all real examples—make linking dollar amounts to technologies impossible for outsiders. But there are clues.

According to Todd Harrison, an analyst at the CSBA, the allocations for classified operations in the 2011 federal budget include $19.4 billion for research and development across all four branches of the military (funding for the CIA, including its drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan, is contained within the Defense Department black budget), another $16.9 billion for procurement, and $14.6 billion for “operations and maintenance.” This latter category, Harrison notes, has been expanding quickly. This may suggest that many classified technologies are now moving from the laboratory to the battlefield.

In fact, the rise in classified defense spending accompanies a fundamental change in American military strategy. After the attacks of September 11, the Pentagon began a shift away from its late Cold War–era “two-war strategy,” premised on maintaining the ability to conduct two major military operations simultaneously, and began to focus instead on irregular warfare against individuals and groups. That strategic shift most likely coincides with an investment shift, away from technology that enables large-scale, possibly nuclear, war against superpower states and toward technology that helps military planners hunt and kill individuals. Each branch of the military uses different language to describe this process. Pentagon officials have spoken openly about their desire to use advanced technology to “reduce sensor-to-shooter time” in situations involving “time-sensitive targets.” The head of U.S. Special Operations Command talks about “high-tech manhunting,” while Air Force officials describe plans to compress the “kill chain.”

Even inside the Pentagon, few people know the precise details of the black budget. But by combining what is known about Pentagon goals and what is known about the most recent advances in military technology, we can begin to sketch its general contours.

The first link in the kill chain: finding the person to hunt. Particularly in Afghanistan and Pakistan, this type of intelligence gathering is increasingly done using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). According to the New America Foundation, a nonprofit think tank, the U.S. conducted 45 drone strikes in Pakistan in the first six months of this year. The centrality of unmanned aircraft to such missions suggests that the black budget is almost certainly already funding next-generation drones.

In April 2009, a French magazine published a photograph of one recent product of that funding—a slender-winged aircraft that had previously been spotted in southern Afghanistan and that aerospace experts had begun calling the Beast of Kandahar. After another photograph surfaced, this one a clear shot of the craft on the runway in Kandahar, the Air Force issued a statement that finally gave the Beast a formal identity: the RQ-170 Sentinel.

Manufactured by Lockheed Martin, the RQ-170 is a tailless flying wing with the telltale shape and surface contours of a stealth aircraft. Black-plane watchers immediately noticed similarities between the RQ-170 and Lockheed’s unmanned Polecat aircraft, which UAV observers had long speculated was being developed in secret and which was finally made public at the Farnborough International Airshow in England in 2006. The Air Force says that the Sentinel is a reconnaissance drone, a claim supported by the aircraft’s lack of visible armaments, by the sensors that appear to be embedded in its wings, and by its “RQ” designation.

But much about the RQ-170 is puzzling. Why would the Air Force need a stealth aircraft in Afghanistan, a country with no radar defense system? It wouldn’t, according to those familiar with the drone. The RQ-170 was developed with a more sophisticated enemy, perhaps China, in mind. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t be adapted for current conflicts, however. Unlike the relatively easy-to-spot Predator and Reaper drones, the RQ-170’s stealth could allow it to conduct missions that those aircraft cannot, such as clandestine tracking, or slipping unnoticed across Afghanistan’s border into Iran or Pakistan to spy on their nuclear programs.

Aircraft like the RQ-170, the Predator and the Reaper can get only so close to their targets, of course, which is why the Pentagon is developing micro-drones designed to investigate dangerous terrain undetected. In April the Washington Post reported that the CIA was using pizza-platter-size micro-drones to find insurgents in Pakistan. And the 2010 Pentagon budget contains a brief unclassified reference to Project Anubis, a micro-drone developed by the Air Force Research Laboratory. The Air Force won’t talk about that specific vehicle, but a more general 2008 marketing video released by the lab did suggest that future micro-UAVs might be equipped with “incapacitating chemicals, combustible payloads, or even explosives for precision targeting capability.” The video depicts an explosives-laden drone dive-bombing and killing a sniper. Budget documents indicate that Project Anubis (named for the ancient Egyptian god of the dead) is now complete, which means a lethal micro-drone could already be in the field.

The Pentagon is forging the next link in the kill chain—following an individual—with at least one high-priority research program. The Clandestine Tagging, Tracking and Locating initiative (abbreviated both as CTTL and TTL), which was conceived in 2003, is slated to get about $210 million in unclassified funding between 2008 and 2013 and may receive more than that from the black budget. “The global war on terrorism cannot be won without a Manhattan Project–like TTL program,” was how officials from the Defense Science Board, a civilian committee that advises the Pentagon, described the situation in a 2004 presentation, adding that “cost is not the issue.”

In a 2007 briefing, Doug Richardson, an official working in the Special Reconnaissance, Surveillance, and Exploitation program in Special Operations Command, said that the Pentagon wanted to use 14 different technologies for tagging and tracking targets such as people and vehicles. Tagging could involve marking targets with invisible biological paints or micromechanical sensors; tracking would mean monitoring those markers from a distance. Other schemes entailed capturing a person’s “thermal fingerprint” and then tracking him or her, perhaps from aircraft equipped with infrared sensors.

More details can be found in proposals from companies and scientists seeking Pentagon contracts. One such proposal, from a University of Florida researcher, uses insect pheromones encoded with unique identifiers that could be tracked from miles away. Other plans employ biodegradable fluorescent “taggants” that can be scattered by UAVs. Voxtel, a private firm in Oregon, has already made available a product called NightMarks, a nanocrystal that can be seen through night-vision goggles and can be hidden in anything from glass cleaner to petroleum jelly.

Perhaps the most advanced tagging concept is “smart dust,” clouds of “motes,” tiny micro-electromechanical sensors that can attach themselves to people or vehicles. Thousands of these sensors would be scattered at a time to increase the chance of at least one of them reaching its target. Kris Pister, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, was sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the Pentagon’s R&D branch, more than a decade ago to work on smart dust and was able to create sensors the size of rice grains. In the beginning, he now says, he and his colleagues imagined “smart burrs” that could attach to a target’s clothing as he or she brushed by, or “smart fleas” that could jump onto their targets. Pister says that this kind of autonomous microsensor is probably still not feasible. In 2001, however, his group succeeded in scattering more-primitive smart-dust motes from a small aerial drone and using them to track vehicles. A single UAV could easily carry thousands of tags, he says.

Citing security concerns, the Pentagon declined to elaborate on its research on clandestine tracking. (When I asked Zachary Lemnios, the agency’s chief technology officer, about advances in tagging, tracking and locating, he mentioned only “recent successes” and “state-of-the-art results.”) Yet in the same 2007 briefing in which Richardson delivered the Pentagon’s wish list of tagging technologies, he said he expected some or all of them to go into service by 2009. Shortly before 2009 arrived, the Los Angeles Times reported that soldiers in Pakistan were using sensors mounted on Predator drones that could track individual combatants even inside buildings—a report that, if accurate, suggests that tagging technologies may now be deployed overseas.

It’s possible that intelligence officials were exaggerating capabilities in order to intimidate insurgents. But there are other clues that the Pentagon may have deployed more-advanced tracking technology than it has disclosed. Last year, the U.K. Guardian reported that the CIA had given Pakistani tribesmen “chips” to plant in the homes of insurgents, who would later be killed by CIA drone strikes. A subsequent report by NBC News revealed a videotaped confession of one tribesman who claimed to have placed the tiny chips in exchange for cash payments from the U.S.

In 1998, U.S. Navy ships in the Arabian Sea fired Tomahawk cruise missiles at a number of training camps in Afghanistan where Osama bin Laden was believed to be hiding. The missiles travel at about 550 mph, roughly the same speed as a commercial jetliner. They took more than an hour to reach their targets. If bin Laden had been in one of those camps, he had left by the time the missiles hit.

Such failures have inspired Pentagon planners to examine options that would allow them to strike precisely anywhere in the world in less than an hour, even if no drones, bombers, ships or troops were anywhere near the target. The Pentagon calls the initiative Prompt Global Strike, and in an April interview on Meet the Press, Defense Secretary Robert Gates may have admitted that the U.S. already possessed this capability. “We have, in addition to the nuclear deterrent today, a couple of things we didn’t have in the Soviet days,” he said. In addition to missile defense, he continued, “we have Prompt Global Strike, affording us some conventional alternatives on long-range missiles that we didn’t have before.” The Pentagon answered follow-up questions with silence.

Technologically, the precise, one-hour capability is not inconceivable. By leaving the Earth’s atmosphere and traveling at 15,000 mph, an intercontinental ballistic missile can reach any point in the world within 30 minutes. Take the nuclear warhead off, and it becomes a conventionally armed Prompt Global Strike weapon. But it’s not that simple. This solution places the Pentagon’s current emphasis on killing individuals in direct conflict with its previous emphasis on fighting large military powers: Russian defense systems are designed to immediately detect the launch of an ICBM anywhere in the world; the government must then decide within minutes whether to retaliate. As a result, until Washington and Moscow find a way to distinguish conventionally armed ICBMs from nuclear ones, firing an ICBM at Afghanistan with the intention of killing even just one person could trigger a nuclear war.

To counter concerns that such an ICBM is heading for Russia, Pentagon officials have said that these weapons could be launched from California, where there are no nuclear-tipped missiles. (Since the placement of ICBMs is regulated by treaty and subject to inspection and verification, this system would, in theory, ensure that Moscow knows whether a missile is armed with a conventional warhead or a nuclear one. But this plan relies on Russia’s trust.)

An alternative to the conventionally armed land-based ICBM is a hypersonic weapon, essentially a cruise missile capable of traveling at many times the speed of sound—faster than anything in today’s conventional arsenal. These missiles would not have to leave the Earth’s atmosphere and would have very different trajectories from ICBMs, so Russia would be less likely to mistake them for nuclear weapons.

The Pentagon has mentioned two non-ICBM candidates for Prompt Global Strike, one from the Army and one from Darpa. Both of these weapons would be boosted into the atmosphere by rockets and then glide back to Earth at hypersonic speeds. In addition to these official Prompt Global Strike options, the Pentagon is conducting at least three other hypersonic or near-hypersonic research efforts: the Air Force’s X-51 WaveRider, which used a scramjet engine to accelerate to Mach 6 in May; the Navy’s Revolutionary Approach to Time-Critical Long-Range Strike project, known as RATTLRS; and the Darpa-sponsored HyFly, a dual-combustion ramjet. (Ramjets and scramjets achieve rocket-like speeds without the heavy burden of liquid oxygen by mixing jet fuel with compressed air that enters the engine from the atmosphere.)

The proliferation of hypersonic research may mean that the Pentagon has faith in the technology. But it also makes black-budget watchers like John Pike, the director of the military information Web site GlobalSecurity.org, suspicious. Pike believes the military’s hypersonic programs may just be a cover for yet another black project. What kind, though, he has no idea.

“Have you ever tried to get to the bottom of the American hypersonics program?” Pike asked me rhetorically. “You know, I tried to about five years ago, and it made no sense. There were just too many programs.” Although this could just be typical Pentagon duplication, Pike sees something more suspicious. “If I was building a cover for something, I would either reduce the signal or increase the noise,” he says. “I think they’re increasing the noise.”

Sharon Weinberger is a national-security reporter in Washington, D.C.

Here's where you can learn to blow stuff up, scale 150-foot trees, make toys and catch lightning--all for college credit

Over the years, PopSci has pulled together annual lists of the coolest, funnest college labs, the places where we would like to have spent our youth tinkering, exploring, and learning. Here, we've collected the ultimate list of all the great labs we've ever covered.

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/educational/A_Guide_to_the_30_Coolest_College_Labs';

Launch the gallery for our full illustrated list of the coolest college labs in the country.

Only a few percent of the 15 million or so cargo containers that enter the country every year are screened for nukes, a number that Congress mandates must be 100 percent by 2012. That benchmark is impractical using today’s tech, however. Standard detectors can miss nuclear material hidden behind lead or steel, and naturally radioactive cargo such as kitty litter gives false positives, requiring a labor-intensive hand-search.

A new detector from Decision Sciences, a security company in California, sees through anything and can scan a semi in less than a minute. It tracks muons, cosmic particles constantly bombarding Earth. Muons penetrate everything but are deflected more by heavy atoms such as uranium and plutonium. The detector tracks these deflections.

The company finished lab tests this spring and is now building detectors to deploy at several ports in the next year. “As long as it works quickly enough, it should fit the bill,” says Robert Dynes, a physicist at the University of California at San Diego who reviewed radiation detectors for Homeland Security. Tests indicate that the device should be speedy on real cargo, says Decision Sciences’s chief technology officer, Allan Wegner. And it’s nearly foolproof. Wegner can’t go into detail about its weaknesses (for obvious reasons), but he assures us that kitty litter and watermelons will no longer threaten national security.

How It Works

As muons come from the sky, they pass through the top detector, the truck and the bottom detector. The muons create ionization trails in the scanner's gas-filled detector tubes, which sensors record.

Heavy atoms, such as uranium and plutonium, deflect muons more than lighter ones do. If the angles of muons' entrance and exit paths vary by a wide magin, nuclear material could be present.

The detector also senses gamma radiation, which the computer combines with muon data to build a 3D view of suspicious muon-scattering objects, alerting customs agents exactly where to search.

The biotech company Alnylam announced in June that its drug ALN-VSP cut off blood flow to 62 percent of liver-cancer tumors in those 19 patients, by triggering a rarely used defense mechanism in the body to silence cancerous genes. Whereas conventional drugs stop disease-causing proteins, ALN-VSP uses RNA interference (RNAi) therapy to stop cells from making proteins in the first place, a tactic that could work for just about any disease. “Imagine that your kitchen floods,” says biochemist and Alnylam CEO John Maraganore. “Today’s medicines mop it up. RNAi technology turns off the faucet.”

Here’s another analogy: If DNA is the blueprint for proteins, RNA is the contractor. It makes single-stranded copies of DNA’s genes, called mRNA, which tell the cell to produce proteins. In 1998, scientists identified RNAi, a mechanism that primitive organisms use to detect and destroy virus’s double-stranded RNA and any viral mRNA. Mammals’ immune systems made RNAi’s antiviral function irrelevant (although all vertebrates, including humans, still use RNAi to regulate mRNA activity), but researchers found that introducing small segments of double-stranded RNA to cells could trigger the ancient mechanism and selectively halt the production of specific proteins.

That ability makes RNAi a potential fix for many diseases, including cancer, that arise when abnormal cells produce excessive amounts of everyday proteins. In theory, manipulating RNAi to kill proteins is simple. ALN-VSP, for example, consists of synthetic double-stranded RNA designed to match tumor mRNA that codes for two proteins: VEGF, which cancers overproduce to help grow new blood vessels, and KSP, which sets off rapid cell division. The researchers send the synthetic RNA into liver cells, and the body’s RNAi system kills both the synthetic RNA and any matching tumor-grown mRNA. Knock out the mRNAs coding for those proteins—which in the liver are produced only by cancer cells—and the tumor stops growing.

“We can turn off any one of 20,000 genes with RNAi,” says Bruce Sullenger, a molecular biologist researching RNAi at Duke University. “The challenge has been to get a drug into only the desired cells and not harm others.” Researchers have worried that a drug might disrupt normal protein production in a healthy cell, or that the immune system will destroy the drug before it reaches its target.

Alnylam overcame both concerns by packaging the drug in a fatty envelope that is absorbed primarily by the liver. This allowed doctors to administer the drug through the blood, rather than by an injection to one spot, which improves results by ensuring that the entire liver receives an even dose.

The technique’s ability to attack single genes could lead to drugs for the 75 percent of cancer genes that lack any specific treatment, as well as for other illnesses. Alnylam is already testing RNAi therapy for Huntington’s disease and high cholesterol in cell cultures; other researchers are tackling macular degeneration, muscular dystrophy and HIV. The potential has driven nearly every major pharmaceutical company to start an RNAi program.

Because the approach is fundamentally simple, RNAi therapy could be ready within two years, say experts including John Rossi, a molecular geneticist at City of Hope National Medical Center in California. Alnylam plans to enroll an additional 36 patients in the ALN-VSP trial and increase the dosage, but the early results are good enough to suggest that it could be among the first RNAi therapies to hit the market. “I think RNAi could work for anything,” Rossi says. “But even if it only works for liver cancer, it would be pretty good.” For liver-cancer patients who have been failed by chemotherapy and radiation and felt their harsh side effects, that would be wonder drug enough.

Dresser uses domestic cats as surrogate mothers for African wildcat embryos, and although a tabby mother can calm the kittens, her influence doesn’t last. “They aren’t as hissy, and they don’t fight as much,” she says. “But once you get them away from domestic cats, especially once puberty sets in, their aggressive survival behavior emerges.”

Clones aren’t blank slates, Dresser explains. They’re exact genetic copies of another creature. The behaviors that make African wildcats successful hunters in the savannah are, fundamentally, made possible by the activation of just the right gene at just the right time. The first African wildcat whose DNA told its brain, “Hey, eat that field mouse” stood a better chance of surviving and reproducing, and when it did, its offspring inherited that trait and automatically expressed the same survival behavior. “Those genes pass on when you clone an animal, too,” Dresser says. “I think our clones’ behavior makes a strong case that instincts are at least partly genetic.”

So if scientists ever clone a saber-toothed tiger, it won’t end up in a Las Vegas magic act—it would probably rip your arm off. And sadly, a resurrected dodo wouldn’t know how to avoid repeating history. It would stand around like they all did, waiting to be clubbed back into extinction.

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