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EPA Unveils New Clean Air Program; Some Companies Make Attempts To Protect Data In Case of Terrorist Attack; Some Bald Eagles Still Suffer From DDT Poison
Aired April 18, 2004 - 17:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
FREDERICKA WHITFIELD, CNN ANCHOR: Hello. I'm Fredericka Whitfield at CNN Center in Atlanta. NEXT@CNN is coming up next, but first a look at the headlines.
Spanish troops may be leaving Iraq soon. Just a day after assuming office, Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriquez Zapatero ordered his troops out of Iraq as soon as possible. But he did say Spain will continue working with its allies in the war against terrorism.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOSE LUIS RODRIGUEZ ZAPATERO, SPANISH PRIME MINISTER (through translator): The government will keep Spain as a loyal ally of its partners. We will comply with the international commitments of our country and very particularly with those related to our participation in international missions of peace and security.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
WHITFIELD: In Gaza, angry cries of revenge. Tens of thousands of Palestinians took to the streets to mourn the death of Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi. He was assassinated by Israel yesterday. Sources say the militant group is keeping its new leader's identity a secret to protect him. Meanwhile, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice disputed the notion that the U.S. somehow gave Israel the green light for the strike.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
CONDOLLEEZZA RICE, NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER: The President has said repeatedly to the Israelis that they need to take account of the consequences of what they're doing. And certainly given that we had just talked about trying to get the road map underway in the Middle East, trying to get the Gaza disengagement plan under way, the timing is not helpful. But we understand that the Israelis have to defend themselves.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
WHITFIELD: NEXT@CNN is straight ahead.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
DANIEL SIEBERG, CNN TECHNOLOGY CORRESPONDENT: Hello, everybody, I'm Daniel Sieberg. Today on NEXT@CNN, a vision for cleaner air. The head of the EPA unveils a plan to make the air we breathe healthier. But environmentalists say the new rules won't live up to their billing.
Thousands of kids are playing with home-made robots this weekend, at a competition sponsored by Segway inventor Dean Kamen, but it's more than fun and games. We'll tell you what's up for grabs.
And when it comes to young chimpanzees learning how to find food it seems boys just want to have fun. All that and more on NEXT.
Welcome to a special edition of NEXT@CNN. All of the commotion below me here at the GeorgiaDome in Atlanta, Georgia is the FIRST Robotics Competition. First is an acronym which means For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology. And it's yet another brainchild of inventor and technology advocate Dean Kamen. Every year hundreds of high school teams build robots and put them through their paces for fun, glory and scholarship money. We'll tell you more later in the show.
And with Earth Day coming up next week, the Bush Administration has announced a new initiative that says it will help Americans breathe easier. Environment correspondent Sharon Collins reports.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
SHARON COLLINS, CNN ENVIRONMENT CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The EPA says a million school absences will be eliminated and fewer Americans will rush to the emergency room with asthma attacks because of stronger ozone regulations. The agency announced tougher smog rules this week and told the governors of 31 states they'll have to develop better pollution controls. EPA administrator Mike Leavitt says this marks a new chapter in the pursuit of cleaner air.
MIKE LEAVITT, EPA ADMINISTRATOR: In the United States there may be a few places where the phrase dirtier air can be properly used, but not very many. Clean air is a national success story in America. In the last 30 years, we cut the pollution in half. And now, we're going to raise the bar for everybody.
COLLINS: The tougher smog standard was actually set back in 1997. Environmental groups and the American Lung Association have pushed for enforcement of that rule for seven years. They say they're happy with the announcement, but fear some states are being given too much time and flexibility in meeting the regulations.
FRANK O'DONNELL, CLEAN AIR TRUST: They have out and proposed a requirement that electric power plants clean up their pollution to some degree over the course of the next two decades. We think that the cleanup could come quicker and there could be more of it.
COLLINS: And touting a report that uses EPA data on power plant pollution, environmental groups complain that carbon dioxide emissions, which are still unregulated, are now 25 percent higher than they were in 1980. However, the EPA insists it's doing a lot to improve air quality. It will also announce interstate rules addressing pollution that crosses state lines, and it will now regulate emissions from diesel equipment not used on roads. EPA's administrator says that black puff of smoke you see when a bulldozer starts up will soon be a thing of the past.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
SIEBERG: Alright. From clean area to clean water. The environmental group American Rivers has issued its latest list of the top ten most endangered rivers. The group says that waterways are becoming more polluted because of lax enforcement and shrinking budgets for cleanup. Again, here's Sharon Collins.
(BEGIN VIDEO TAPE)
COLLINS: From raw sewage to toxic waste, to runoff from abandoned mines, the environmental group American Rivers says health and recreation are at risk along many U.S. waterways.
REBECCA WODDER, AMERICAN RIVERS: At a time when our rivers are getting dirtier and dirtier, the government is really going soft on polluters and cleanup.
COLLINS: The Colorado River that provides drinking water for about 25 million people, including parts of Las Vegas and Los Angeles tops their endangered river list.
WODDER: The Colorado River I'm afraid wins the water pollution trifecta. It has radioactive waste in it, it's got toxic waste in it and human waste and all those problems are getting worse.
COLLINS: Joining the Colorado in the category of rivers that face an acute threat: Mississippi's Big Sunflower River and for a second year, the Northwest's Snake River was named because its wild salmon are threatened. American Rivers calls the Tennessee River, which runs through Tennessee, Alabama, and parts of Mississippi and Kentucky, a poster child for sewage pollution.
WODDER: This is a river where, if you let your children play in the streams or along the riverbank, their playmates will have names like e coli and hepatitis and dysentery.
COLLINS: The groups compiles health and disease statistics from the EPA, the Centers for Disease Control and other state and federal agencies. They do not do their own independent testing. Wodder says the Allegheny and Monongahela have runoff from the hundreds of abandoned coal mines. Problems ranging from PCBs to urban sprawl put the Spokane, Housatonic and Peace Rivers, Central Ohio's Darby Creek, and the Mississippi on the list.
Wodder says the price tag is estimated at $2 trillion to deal with cleanup and aging water treatment plants, and she says the White House and Congress have slashed federal help for communities to make those improvements. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had this response to the report: "EPA and the states are working to expand water quality monitoring and to clean up impaired waters. States are identifying more and more impaired waters and are submitting plans to clean them up more quickly." The EPA did not address specific claims or individual waterways. The list varies from year to year to put the spotlight on rivers that are facing development or legislation that could affect their status. Sometimes that pays off. The group says at least a half dozen rivers named in the past three years as threatened have gotten cleaner because of the new water usage regulations, new protection for fish and cleanup orders from state governments.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
SIEBERG: In Canada, the biggest harp seal hunt in nearly 50 years is winding down. Now we're about to show you some of it, so if you're disturbed by hunters clubbing seals to death, well, you might want to look away.
(voice-over): This video was taken by a group opposed to the hunt last month. Hunters are allowed to club or shoot 350,000 seals this year. That's the largest number since quotas were established in the 1960s. The seals are taken for their fur and meat. The United States and many other countries ban imports of seal products, but Canada allows the hunt to help the depressed economies of coastal towns. The industry made about $15 million last year, mostly from sales to Denmark, Norway and China.
(on camera) We'll have a more uplifting animal story later in the show. A high-flying plan to help restored the national bird, the bald eagle, to its former glory, but next we'll talk with some of the students here at the FIRST Robotics Competition to find out what makes them and their robots tick. And later we'll talk with the man who created this competition.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SIEBERG: Welcome back to NEXT@CNN. As you can hear, we're at the FIRST Robotics Competition at the GeorgiaDome in Atlanta and I'm joined by Kendra Scousin(ph) from Kingman High School in Kingman, Arizona. OK, because the rules change every year for this competition. How do we understand--be our analyst, if you will, for this--what is it all about? Tell me, first of all, each high school gets the same kit, the same robotics kit, and then they have their own design?
KENDRA SCOUSIN(ph), HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT: Right. You design your robot. There are some robots that actually catch balls in them, and then they can deliver those to human players, which then throw them into the goals because they're mobile or stationary, or you can build a robot that will just push the ball into the human player.
SIEBERG: This is all about scoring points, right? And each ball is worth a different point value. And what are these yellow balls worth versus the purple balls?
SCOUSIN: The yellow balls are double balls. The purple balls are five points, purple balls are the ones you want to get in the goal first. After those balls, you put in the double ball, and that will double whatever you have inside that goal.
SIEBERG: Is it tough to keep all this straight? It seems like a lot of rules to understand.
SCOUSIN: Once you get it, it's fairly easy, but it is sometimes.
SIEBERG: And is it very competitive when you're out there on the floor?
SCOUSIN: Oh, it's very competitive. Sometimes it's every robot for themselves, but mainly you want to help your alliance robots because they're on your same side, and if they get tipped over you want to help push them back up or if they need help getting up, you can give them a nudge, you can even give balls to your alliance players.
SIEBERG: So is this like Robot Wars on Comedy Central where the robots are beating each other up? This is a little different.
SCOUSIN: Not quite. You don't want to intentionally hurt another robot. Sometimes it happens, but you don't want to.
SIEBERG: OK, well, Kendra Scousin-oh, we can hear the buzzer, that must mean this one is over. Kendra Scousin from Kingman High School in Arizona. Thanks so much for joining us.
SCOUSIN: Thank you.
SIEBERG: All right. From robots to robots in a different part of the world. I-Robot Corporation found out last week that one of its robots was blown up, and the company, it turns out, couldn't be happier.
The robot was one of dozens of so-called packbots used in Iraq for battlefield reconnaissance and search and destroy missions for explosives. Now, the company is not saying exactly what the robot was doing when it was destroyed, but company officials say it may have saved the life of a human who might otherwise have been in harms way if the robot hadn't taken on a dangerous task.
Well, if terrorists hit a target, the damage can take many forms. Jim Boulden reports on how some high-tech firms are planning ahead to protect important data in case of an attack.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JIM BOULDEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Beyond the human toll of a terror attack, companies have to count the costs of lost business. That's not just a theoretical exercise for London. Britain's financial center was hit three times by big IRA bombs in the 1990s, forcing companies to establish disaster recovery plans, plans to back up data and find space to house workers if needed. In March, Europe's biggest data recovery center opened near one of the London's airports.
ROB THOMPSON, SUNGARD AVAILABILITY SERVICES: This is what we wanted a 24 by 7 exactly what is happening to all the live environments our clients run on the floor of this center. BOULDEN: Run by U.S.-based Sungard this center houses backup data for British firms, and links in with Sungard's other recover sites for some 10,000 clients.
THOMPSON: We're there to pick up the pieces with them when things go wrong, where their IT equipment, with their facilities or indeed with their access to information that keeps the company running.
BOULDEN: Sungard monitors backups for banks, airlines, insurance companies and for one of the most famous children's hospital, which is in the heart of London.
CHRIS GREGORY, GREAT ORMOND STREET HOSPITAL: With a terrorism incident the chances are there may be some denial of access to the area which could prove a problem. In that circumstance, we might want to withdraw to a recovery site and do our recovery there.
BOULDEN: Sungard's business continuity center is made up of very large rooms with numerous servers and very few people. Though clients do come in all the time to make sure the backups work. And there is some down time waiting for the numbers to crunch. But clients hope to never use this room. Within minutes, Sungard can get it ready for any client who can't get access to their telecoms or to their building.
THOMPSON: They walk through a door of a facility like this, they will have their image on the computer, the telephony will be configured in the way they're familiar with. In fact, the only thing that should change between their office environment and here is the view out the window.
BOULDEN: The hope is these rooms will rarely, if ever, get used because of terrorism, but the expertise is just the same.
THOMPSON: Because if it's a bomb or a hardware failure, actually they could actually result in the same thing, the hardware isn't available and therefore you've got to do the same things to get the business back up and running.
BOULDEN: Doubling a business's IT is costly and time-consuming, but few companies can afford even an hour without their Web site, call center or data retrieval, no matter the cause.
(END VIDEO TAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE VOICE (voice-over): Just ahead: bothered by high gas prices? A fuel-efficient hybrid vehicle may be in your future.
And the future may not be as far off as you might think.
And later, the astronauts aboard The International Space Station get set for a big change.
SIEBERG: Now, back to the FIRST Robotic Competition in Atlanta, Georgia. Well, before any of the 300 high school teams ever make it to the competition floor, they're back here in this rather colorful and slightly noisy area known as the pit area. Just like the car races where you tweak and test all sorts of systems and design stuff. Now this is a team we're going to talk to. Hey, where you guys from?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Wilmington, Delaware.
SIEBERG: Wilmington, Delaware.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Yea!
SIEBERG: Are you guys ready for the big competition?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: We're absolutely ready.
SIEBERG: Any problems so far?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Um, we actually had our front panel completely impaled in our last practice match, but we're tuning it up.
SIEBERG: So a little fine tuning, but it can be repaired in time, right.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Absolutely.
SIEBERG: OK, alright. Well, good luck to you guys out there in the competition.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Thank you. You've got your camera, and we've got ours, too.
SIEBERG: OK, so we're being watched by the camera watching you guys. Wow, we're surrounded by high tech here. Well, good luck.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Thank you.
SIEBERG: Alright, rolling on, now, the city of San Francisco has joined a handful of other cities leasing fuel-cell vehicles. Tuesday, city officials took delivery of two Honda FCX hydrogen-powered fuel- cell cars. The city is also building a fueling station for the vehicles. Fuel-cell cars are considered zero emission cars, that means that only water comes out of the tailpipe. These are worth about $1.5 million apiece, but San Fransisco is leasing them from Honda for $500 a month in a specially-funded program. Fuel-cell cars won't likely be available to the general public for several years, so that gives you some time to save up.
Well, at the New York Auto Show this week the spot light this week was on hybrid cars that run on both gasoline and electricity. Fred Katayama has that story.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
FRED KATAYAMA, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It's not Cameron Diaz's Prius. The fuel-efficient low emission hybrids that run on gas and electricity are getting much bigger, brawnier and classier. And that could fuel sales. The first hybrid sport utility, the Ford Escape, hits showrooms this summer.
WILLIAM FORD, JR., FORD MOTOR COMPANY: It's called the Ford Escape Hybrid and it couldn't come as a better time.
KATAYAMA: Hybrid leader Toyota is going upscale and upping performance. It's luxury SUV, the Lexus RX400H sports a muscular V-6 engine that boasts 20 percent more horsepower than the regular model.
BRAD NELSON, LEXUS SPOKESPERSON: We're looking to bring up the performance and the fuel economy.
KATAYAMA: And get ready for a hybrid pickup, the Dodge Ram later this year. Consumers will be able to choose from 30 hybrids by 2008. Soaring gas prices could lure more customers. Honda boasts its Insight can go as far as 700 miles on a single tank, roughly the distance between Detroit and New York. Hybrids count for less than 1 percent of all vehicles sold, but that's expected to jump to roughly 4 percent in four years. But price remains a drag. The average hybrid costs about $4,000 more than a similar non-hybrid vehicle.
WALTER MCMANUS, J. D. POWERS & ASSOCIATES: Mainstream, if you mean high volume, I don't think they're going to get that anytime soon. The main drawback to them is going to still be the price, and even though I know they're working on the performance, I think there are issues.
KATAYAMA: And don't expect to recoup your investment quickly. While motorists will visit the gas station less often, hybrids will take seven to eight years to pay off. Acting green may make you feel better, but it won't save you green in the short run.
(END VIDEO TAPE)
SIEBERG: OK, when it comes to big auto shows like the one in New York this week, you'll find people less impressed by super efficient cars and more impressed by super fancy ones. Our Jeanne Moos falls into that category.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
JEANNE MOOS, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): The car show, it's where you go to gap at the $450 million Mercedes SLR McLaren and then drive home in your Honda.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I'd rather have the Ferrari.
MOOS: Luxury bells and whistles. Who wouldn't fall for a recliner.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It's like a private jet on wheels.
MOOS: The chauffeur-drive Mercedes sells for $380,000, push a button and the door closes. The Maybach features an electro transparent moon roof. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Or you touch the button and it's clear.
MOOS: Buttons are big on the Astin Martin.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALER: And this is how you start the car.
MOOS: And if shifting gears leaves you exhausted, on the Astin Martin...
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The gearshift is gone. It's buttons.
MOOS: Though the buttons don't include 007's favorite. No one ejected at Camp Jeep. Where auto show visitors ride around an indoor obstacle course future drivers had their own course, though their skills weren't exactly confidence-inspiring. Headlights are turning heads these days. Lexus and BMW feature adaptive head lights.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The actual headlight will turn with you.
MOOS: The better to see around the bend. And some Cadillacs have a gizmo that senses oncoming headlights and switches your high beams to low. If it's rainy, you never have to worry in your Rolls Royce Phantom.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We have this umbrella. That comes right out of the door like this.
MOOS: The boy is the grandson of the dealer. How much does this car cost?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: $330,000
MOOS: You have that much, right?
Better sock it away, kid, for a rainy today.
(END VIDEO TAPE)
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE VOICE: Coming up in the next half hour of NEXT@CNN: little boys really do learn differently from little girls, at least if you look at the latest that researchers have learned from chimpanzees. Also ahead, these baby eagles were stolen from their mother's nest while they were still in the nest. Find out what the thieves had to do to put them back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
WHITFIELD: Hello. I'm Fredericka Whitfield. NEXT@CNN is going to be continuing in a moment, but first the headlines.
Police in Oregon today captured a convicted child rapist who has confessed to molesting more than 200 victims. Police arrested 49 year-old Edward Stokes at a Laundromat today.
Members of a Baptist church in Ohio pray for the safe return of Army Reserve Private Matt Maupin. Before duty in Iraq he had attended services at the church with friends. Maupin was taken hostage after his convoy was attacked near Baghdad on April 9th. And Arabic TV network al Jazeera aired video of him appearing unhurt. His captors offered to exchange him for Iraqi fighters being held by the U.S.
A day after assuming power, Spain's new prime minister, Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero orders Spanish troops out of Iraq. The contingent is based near Najaf. Zapatero had promised to withdraw the Spanish troops unless the UN assumed control of Iraq by June 30th. Now he says he wants his troops out as soon as possible.
Protests in Tokyo; Japan's hostage crisis may be over, but the anger is still brewing. Thousands of people marched through the streets protesting the war in Iraq. Many people are criticizing their government for supporting the U.S. in Iraq.
21 year-old Prince William made his water polo debut in Wales yesterday. He played for the Scottish National University's team and attracted a huge crowd for his first public tournament, but despite his princely charms his team lost both games.
In Rome, hundreds of people gathered to mark the birth of the city, which, according to legend, took place this month in 753 BC. Dressed as gladiators and emperors, people marched through the streets recreating scenes from Roman history.
And a Russian spacecraft is preparing to blast off into orbit. The Soyuz is in launch position in Kazakstan. It's scheduled for liftoff tomorrow morning and will carry a 3 man crew to the International Space Station, 2 of the men will stay for 183.
I'm Fredericka Whitfield. Those are the headlines. Now back to more of NEXT@CNN.
SIEBERG: Welcome back to NEXT@CNN. We're at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, Georgia and I'm joined right now by Dean Kamen, who founded the first robotics competition and Dean, what has changed in the, sort of, 12 or 13 years or so since the first FIRST Robotics Competition?
DEAN KAMEN, FOUNDER FIRST ROBOTICS COMPETITION: The good thing is nothing changed in terms of our purpose and our focus. Give kids an opportunity to see what's possible in a world of technology and science and creating and inventing. The great thing about what's changed is the first year we did this, I think I had 23 companies that adopted 23 schools from around the country, all descend on a little gym, a high school gymnasium in New Hampshire, and we had our event, the whole one event for the year.
SIEBERG: Now we're at the Georgia Dome.
KAMEN: Now this year, 2004, 26 cities have held regional events with the average event having 50 or more teams. We had a thousand teams compete this year, and here we are in the Georgia Dome in Atlanta for what's going to be a spectacular year.
SIEBERG: A lot of activity, a lot of enthusiasm with people here. What do you hope that these kids take away from this event? KAMEN: I more than hope. I now know what they take away. You just walk through those pits and you talk to these kids, particularly find the rookies, and you'll see kids that eight or nine weeks ago thought engineering and science and inventing was a special thing only available for a few nerds, and these kids, now every single one of them, comes away from this competition knowing it's accessible, it's fun, it's rewarding, and it's an option for all kids to be part of these exciting career opportunities.
SIEBERG: Now, what are the projects that you're maybe most known for is the Segway, which you're on, we should point out. Do you think that these kids will have the ability to take what they learned from here to become an inventor or an engineer? I mean, obviously, they need to go to school perhaps after this, but are they getting some real world skills here?
KAMEN: This program is a microcosm of the real world of inventing, of engineering, and of business. Every product I've seen in the real business world, you never have enough time, you never have enough money, you never know what the competition's going to do, you have to get this thing, it's got to work, you got to ship it. They, in six or seven weeks, are doing the entire process of what product development and innovation is all about, and they all leave here, not only with an understanding of what it's about, but a lot of them with the idea they want to participate.
SIEBERG: All right, Dean Kamen, thank you so much for joining us and you're doing so well balancing on that Segway. You must have had a little practice.
KAMEN: I've had a little practice. Well, this thing has better balance than I do.
SIEBERG: All right, Dean, thanks so much for joining us.
KAMEN: Thank you.
SIEBERG: Now to a couple of robots out of this world. The twin rovers rambling around Mars should be in better shape this week thanks to new instructions from home. On Wednesday, NASA showed off the largest panorama taken so far. It was taken by Opportunity's panoramic camera and documents the rover's travel through the Eagle Crater. Another image shows the deepest hole dug by either rover. It's a trench Opportunity dug with its wheel so we could analyze the soil beneath the surface.
The two rovers have taken about 24,000 images, so far. That's quite a scrapbook.
Well, astronomers studying the most distant known object in our solar system say they're baffled. The planetoid called "Sedna" does not have a moon. Scientists expected to find one based on Sedna's very slow rate of rotation, which could be caused by the gravitational pull of a moon. But images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, last month, show no sign of one. And then the most dragged out project in NASA history may finally get off the ground soon be off the ground. The Gravity Probe B Spacecraft has been in the works for 40 years, reportedly hitting technical snags. It was cancelled several times only to rise from the grave. The spacecraft's mission is to test whether massive objects, like earth, warp the fabric of space time as proposed by Einstein's theory of relativity. The probe is scheduled for launch on Monday.
Early next week, a new crew is scheduled to arrive at the International Space Station for a six-month stay. Is six months a right amount of time for a hitch onboard the orbiting laboratory? Well, officials are considering a Russian proposal to keep crews up there for a year.
Ryan Chilcote reports.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
RYAN CHILCOTE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): American "Mike" Fincke, Russian Gennady Padalka, and a Dutchman Andre Kuipers entering one of the world's most exclusive clubs.
Replacing a two-man crew on the International Space Station since last fall, the American astronaut and Russian cosmonaut will spend the next six months in orbit. Kuipers is traveling on a seat Russia sold to the European Space Agency. He'll be spending just over a week at the station. Together they are set to blast off on a Russian Soyuz transport vehicle. The one and only space craft that has carried cosmonauts and astronauts to and from the station every six months since the shuttle's fleet was grounded last spring.
(on camera): The Kazakhstan Russian Space Agency wants to change that and NASA is now considering a Russian proposal to leave crews on the space station for a year at a time, freeing up seats on the Soyuz for paying customers.
(voice-over): Like American entrepreneur, Greg Olsen. Paying to go for only two space tourists have gone before him. Olsen is reportedly shelling out $20 million for his seat on a later flight. Without the shuttles operating, NASA can't ignore the Russian plan, and with proposed flights to the moon and Mars, NASA will need to train for extended missions. So far, the American record is just under seven months. The record holding Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov flew for over 14 months. Space veteran, Norm Thagard flew with Polyakov.
NORM THAGARD, ASTRONAUT: You have to be a person who can tolerate a fairly isolated environment in personal contact with only one or two other human beings.
CHILCOTE: Padalka and Fincke are expected to be in close personal contact for just a half year. Small comfort to Fincke's son.
"MIKE" FINCKE, ASTRONAUT: My son is two-and-a-half years old, he thinks he's coming with me and it's going to break my heart when he watches that rocket go up, and he's not on it. CHILCOTE: The next crew could be together in space for more than a year.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ANNOUNCER: Coming up, one airplane goes out by boat, and another comes in by land, at least parts of it. We'll explain.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
SIEBERG: Now, back to the FIRST Robotic Competition in Atlanta, Georgia.
Behind the scenes here, there is a practice area and I'm joined now by Keith Chester.
Keith, you guys are from New Jersey, right?
KEITH CHESTER (PH), FIRST ROBOTIC COMPETITION, COMPETITOR: Yeah.
So, the Hawaiian shirts pushing for warmer weather sort of theme?
CHESTER: Yeah, it's been cold down there all season. We always try to do something wacky and so far, it's been a tradition to use Hawaiian shirts.
SIEBERG: This your eight year in this competition?
CHESTER: Personally, it's my third year, but it is the team's eighth year in the competition.
SIEBERG: OK, well we can see your robot, it's right here in the practice area, right now. It seems to be a little violent. Do you guys have a certain strategy here?
CHESTER: Well, we do have a very defensive strategy, and that basically keeps everyone away from the goals and the balls in order to score. But, the large arm that you also see on there is used to hook onto the bar and raise itself literally a few feet in the air and score 50 points at the end of the game.
SIEBERG: Right. We should tell people there are different points for different tasks that you have to do during the competition, right?
CHESTER: Yeah.
SIEBERG: Now, what got you interested in this robotics competition?
CHESTER: My family has a lot of engineers in it. My brother's an electrical engineer for Boeing. My father is a mechanical engineer for J&J. So, I've always had an interest in science or engineering, so when I heard that there was a robotics team in high school, I had to check it out and once I saw the machines, I was hooked.
SIEBERG: And you guys got to work together and have a little fun, too while you're out here, hence is the Hawaiian shirt theme.
CHESTER: What's the point of competing if you can't have fun?
SIEBERG: All right, Keith Chester, thanks so much for joining us and good luck out there.
CHESTER: Thank you.
SIEBERG: Well, it was a rather unglamorous finale for an airplane that once symbolized luxury and speed. A last, British Airways Concorde, this week, made its way slowly up the River Thames on a barge, stripped of its wings and tail. It's on its way to an aviation museum in Scotland. This plane is the last of British Airways' seven Concordes to find a home after commercial Concorde flights ended last year. It'll be taken up the east coast of England to Scotland then transported two miles cross country to the museum where it'll get its wings and tail back.
As Concorde fades into aviation history, another groundbreaking aircraft prepares to make its debut. The Airbus A380 may not match the Concorde's supersonic speeds, but it'll be the biggest airliner ever built. Jim Bitterman reports.
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JIM BITTERMAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Down a narrow country road on a dark night in what someone once called old Europe, the first sections of what will be the world's largest airliner were threading their way through the village of Levignac, France. Giants that towered over the heads of the locals, who stayed up late not to miss a convoy like this. But, it won't be their only chance. There will soon be huge Airbus 380 parts passing through here once a week as subassemblies, from all over Europe, are brought together at the Airbus final assembly plant in southwestern France, if the plane is as successful as its designers are betting.
NOEL FORGEARD, AIRBUS CEO: No, it's not a gamble. It's a very well thought economic decision based on market realities, on a product that the airline have requested.
BITTERMAN: Still, Airbus and its partners in the 380 project have put nearly $11 billion on the table, an investment that, for now, seems to be paying off, since customers have already signed orders for 129 aircraft at $275 million each. Lining up to buy a plane with 50 percent more room inside than a Boeing 747.
(on camera): Given all this flying space, 380 promoters giddily talked about on-board casinos and bistros and exercise rooms. Still there's nothing to stop a low cost airline from taking an airplane designed to handle 555 passengers and turning it into a flying sardine can seating nearly 800. But Airbus officials say the wider cabin means wider seats, even in economy. And since business and first class passengers pay the bulk of air transportation, airlines buying the 380's extra room might be induced to use some of it for luxurious extras.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Here's a shower and bathrooms.
BITTERMAN (voice-over): Airbus hopes to fly the 380 for the first time next year and deliver the first aircraft to a customer in 2006. Already though, airports are making large new investments to cope with the colossus. Authorities in New York voted to spend nearly $180 million to widen runways, strengthen taxiway bridges, and increase passenger handling capacity at Kennedy Airport. But, Airbus insists, given the increases in passenger volume, it's either spend for bigger planes or spend for more and bigger airports. For now, though, about the only ground handling problem the Airbus 380 has created is ground control as gawkers airlines turn out along the airship's low flying path to the assembly line.
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ANNOUNCER: Just ahead, more from the floor of this year's FIRST Robotics Competition, and a whole lot more. Stay with us.
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DAVID KIRKPATRICK, "FORTUNE" SENIOR EDITOR: A number of countries have realized the way they can bring their people into more affluence is to improve their educational systems and India's doing that, china's doing that. And the problem is that the United States educational system, in general is not improving, in particularly in science, math, and engineering. The concern is that manufacturing and design of the most sophisticated products, the world depends on, could start gravitating out of the United States. Microsoft now has research labs in China that they are so excited about the quality of the employee that they are getting there, that some of the researchers are getting promoted into operational jobs. We also have an increasing unemployment rate among engineers in the United States. So, it's hard to motivate kids to go into those fields, here. But the reality is they're going into those fields all over the rest of the world because they see it as a ticket out of No. 2 status.
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FEMI OKE, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It's called termite fishing, and it's an important skill for young chimpanzees to learn. Since the insects are so tasty, they're known as chimp bon bons. But, the young primates have different ways of developing their fishing finesse, using flexible sticks as tools. ELIZABETH V. LONSDORF, DEPT. OF ECOLOGY, EVOLUTION AND BEHAVIOR, UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA: Well, little girl chimps, at the termite mound, even at very young ages, tended to watch their mothers more and pay close attention while little boy chimps were off kind of playing around in the trees and doing somersault.
OKE: Lonsdorf spent four years observing dozens of young chimps at the Gombe National Park in Tanzania. Teachers of young human children see some parallels.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Boys tend to be, at this age, a little bit more playful, and the girls tend to be a little bit more grown up acting, and more responsible.
OKE: Lonsdorf says there's no right or wrong way to fish.
LONSDORF: I don't think so. I don't think it's better or worse for girls and boys to be good at different things. It's quite possible that male chimpanzees are better hunters and learn hunting better because that's what they do in adulthood.
OKE: The research in the journal "Nature" suggest these gender- based learning differences may go back to the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees.
I'm Femi Oke, and that's "Cool science."
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SIEBERG: Welcome back to NEXT@CNN. We're down here on the competition floor at the FIRST Robotics Competition. And joining me now, right now, is Greg Powers.
Greg, you guys are with New Technology High School in Napa, California and you're trying to stand out a little bit here, with these 7,000 high school students. Tell me about the outfit first.
GREG POWERS, NEW TECHNOLOGY HIGH SCHOOL: Well, you know, the sarongs really help us stand out. These were custom-made vests by one of our team members, the purple is a good touch, purple hair -- you do what you can.
SIEBERG: There are unique looks here.
POWERS: Yeah.
SIEBERG: At the FIRST Robotic Competition. Now tell me, what is your strategy going into this?
POWERS: Right now we're trying to hang onto the bar every the match, you get 50 points. It's a pretty good clencher, it's hard to lose when you got that. As you can see, we're hanging on the bar right now, so that was good.
SIEBERG: All right, well have fun out there and maybe next year you can go with purple glasses and green hair. POWERS: I don't know -- that's -- you know...
SIEBERG: You think about it.
POWERS: All right.
SIEBERG: Greg Powers, thanks so much for joining us.
POWERS: Thanks.
SIEBERG: It's not even out of the test phase yet, but Google's new e-mail service is already under fire from privacy advocates. Gmail will give users a gigabyte of storage space for free, but the catch is the service will scan user's e-mail messages for keywords and deliver specially targeted advertising. That prompted California State Senator Liz Figueroa to draft a bill that would block the service. Now Google has told reporters it's considering changes to Gmail based on feedback from testers, as well as privacy groups.
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ANNOUNCER: Still to come, these eagle chicks may not be old enough to fly, but they did anyway in a project designed to help their species survive. We'll explain.
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SIEBERG: The pesticide DDT was banned in the United States more than 30 years ago, but some populations of bald eagles are still suffering from its effects. Rusty Dornin reports on a program that helps at-risk eggs hatch into healthy baby eaglets.
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RUSTY DORNIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): These two bald eagle chicks were stolen from their nest on Catalina Island off the coast of southern California in February. Bald eagle eggs here are contaminated with the now banned pesticide DDT, so the eggs were snatched and brought to the San Francisco zoo in a program to help them survive.
KATHY HOBSON, SAN FRANCISCO ZOO: They have thinner areas of the shell, not the whole shell, but thinner areas, so that they dry out very quickly and the embryo dies, so we have to put them in very high humidity incubators.
DORNIN: Bird keeper, Kathy Hobson, has spent many a sleepless night tending the eggs until they hatched. Now, it's time to send the chicks home.
Wildlife biologist Peter Sharpe will put the chicks back in the nest, pick up the dummy eggs he put there in February, and hope the eagles will be none the wiser.
First he feeds the chicks.
PETER SHARPE, WILDLIFE BIOLOGIST: So, I really don't want to feed it too much.
DORNIN: Then it's a safety check with the helicopter crew and lift-off with Sharpe, birds in hand, dangling 100 feet below the helicopter.
In this bird's-eye view of the descent from the camera on Sharpe's helmet, you can see the nest perched high above the Pacific. After landing in the next while the exchange is being make, the female bird, angry at the intrusion, dive bombs within a few feet of Sharpe.
SHARPE: And, she was circling around pretty closely the whole time.
DORNIN: Even the airlift helicopter pilot, who donated the flight, was a little worried.
GLENN SMITH, AIRLIFT HELICOPTERS: The male was up about where we were in the helicopter, and he got awfully close.
DORNIN: Then the second chick is dropped at a nest on the other side of the island. All goes smoothly. They took ten fertile eggs from the nest this year, three hatched, two survived, and that's a good success rate.
(on camera): How long are you going to have to do this?
SHARPE: It's really unknown how long this project will have to go on. Right now, it could be another 50 to 100 years before the DDT contamination degrades naturally.
DORNIN (voice-over): Without the breeding program, there would be no bald eagles on Catalina Island. There were 15, now two more eaglets have landed.
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SIEBERG: Well, the researchers said the adult eagles accepted both chicks and are doing well. In case you're wondering, you can keep up with the project on the IWS website, including a web cam inside an eagle's nest. You can get there from our web website, that's at CNN.com/NEXT.
And that's all the time we have for now, but here's what's coming up next week:
Some very famous actors are lending their voices to an eye- popping animated film with a new twist. It's being put together thousands of miles from Hollywood. That's coming up on NEXT.
Until then, let us hear from you. You can e-mail us at NEXT@CNN.com. Thanks so much for joining us this week and thanks to all the folks here at the FIRST Robotics Competition. I'm Daniel Sieberg. We'll see you next time. TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
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