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New Mars Discoveries Startle Scientists
Aired June 01, 2002 - 13:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
ANNOUNCER: Today, on NEXT@CNN: A discovery on Mars that could make it easier for humans to explore the Red Planet.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: If there's water, why wasn't there life?
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ANNOUNCER: Will our next big discovery be evidence of life?
It looks like the scene of a Holocaust. The remains of a once- thriving town, victim of an underground fire.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I can feel it. My feet are getting very, very hot.
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ANNOUNCER: We'll take you to a disaster that has been 40 years in the making.
And you do the math. The average cell phone customer gets a new phone every two years, and by the year 2007, there could be 1.7 billion customers. What happens to all the unwanted phones?
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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Throwing them out will ultimately create a health risk.
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ANNOUNCER: So, what else can you do with an old cell phone? Stay tuned. All that and more on NEXT.
JAMES HATTORI, HOST: Welcome to NEXT@CNN, this week from the Chabot Space and Science Center in the hills of Oakland, California. Hi, everybody, I'm James Hattori.
You can't tell just by looking, even with the telescopes here, but up on Mars, just beneath the surface, lies what some scientists are calling buried treasure. NASA's Odyssey spacecraft has detected large amounts of hydrogen on the planet. It's strong and convincing evidence that there's ice there too. And, as Ann Kellan tells us, it raises intriguing new questions about the possibility of life on the Red Planet.
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ANN KELLAN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Purple marks the spot. The evidence that there's lots of water on Mars, a potential boon for future space exploration.
BILL FELDMAN: We knew that it was there. We just didn't know that it was going to be that much. So we are ecstatic.
KELLAN: Substantial amounts of hydrogen were found at the Mars poles. This NASA image highlights those areas in blue and purple. Scientists suspect hydrogen in these quantities means water, and lots of it.
Actually, scientists think it's water ice, mixed with dirt and rocks, one to two feet underground. From on board the unmanned Mars Odyssey spacecraft, instruments that measure gamma rays and neutrons made the discovery.
We've all seen earlier images of the Mars surface, which show valleys and canyons. They look like dry river beds, and suggest evidence that this ice trapped underground could have once existed on its surface.
Could Mars have had oceans like Earth?
JIM BELL, NASA: Mars was, perhaps, much more like the Earth a long time ago early in its history. The atmospheric pressure may have been higher, the temperature may have been warmer, and liquid water may have been stable on its surface.
KELLAN: One astronomer says this is probably just the tip of the Martian iceberg, speculating icy layers could go as much as one mile deep.
Are they sure it's water ice?
FELDMAN: In the north and south, there's so much of it there, it could be nothing else but water ice.
KELLAN: Today, Mars is a cold, dry, hostile environment, with no atmosphere, no rain to replenish surface water, but the potential of so much underground water expands the scope for space exploration.
Imagine using Mars as a stop-over point for water and refueling. As for determining whether life ever existed on Mars...
FELDMAN: It would be very, very exciting if we found life. You know, the old question, are we alone?
KELLAN: To answer that, NASA says it would take sending a robot to the Red Planet, to scoop up and bring samples back to Earth to study. Even though NASA's talked about it, no such missions are planned. But at least now, thanks to Odyssey, they're getting some good maps of where to look.
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HATTORI: You can find more about the Mars Discovery on our Web site, cnn.com/next.
Back here on earth, the federal government this week announced a landmark deal to prevent drilling off the Florida Gulf Coast. It will buy back oil and gas leases off Pensacola, and buy mineral rights covering nearly 800,000 acres of the Everglades. Florida Governor Jeb Bush calls the $335 million agreement, "historic."
Another landmark deal, this one in California, promises to turn a 16,000-acre visual oddity into a lush natural habitat. Here's Rusty Dornin.
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RUSTY DORNIN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): What is it? A question first-time air travelers often have flying into San Francisco when they spot the multi-colored mosaic of ponds at the tip of the bay. Since the days of the gold rush, salt has been harvested on 29,000 acres here.
Now, Cargill, the only producer of salt from seawater, will sell half to the state and federal government. The aim? Return it to marshland.
LORI JOHNSON, CARGILL SALT: It's a huge portion of the bay shoreline, and we're talking about restoration on the scale of something like the Everglades, but we're talking about it in the middle of seven million people.
DORNIN: A $100 million deal that environmentalists say is worth every penny.
DEBBIE DRAKE, ENVIRONMENTALIST: Basically, San Francisco Bay is a site of international significance. There are over a million shore birds who stop in San Francisco Bay as they travel along the Pacific flyway.
DORNIN: To make salt, salt water is moved from the bay through evaporation ponds over a five-year period, then close to harvest. It's so briny, it turns pink.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The color that you see is from a halyphitic bacteria, or salt-loving bacteria that lends the brine that pink coral color.
DORNIN (on camera): And no other wildlife, though, can live in here?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Right, it's too salty for any other wildlife. DORNIN (voice-over): The salt is then scraped off the evaporated beds, and piled high for refinement.
JOHNSON: We think that we can produce almost as much salt as we're doing today on one-third of what we're operating on.
DORNIN: Wildlife now thrives on the less saline ponds, where there are plenty of fish and insects.
(on camera): Many of these salt ponds have been a source of food for birds and other wildlife for more than 150 years, which is why restoration won't be done overnight. It could take 10 to 20 years.
(voice-over): Time for the birds and other wildlife to adapt.
(on camera): So, are we going to see it looking much like this, probably?
DRAKE: Much more like this, and less like the open water. The salt ponds have, as you can see, less vegetation, and the tidal marsh is really more about more vegetation, mud flats.
DORNIN (voice-over): More vegetation means a better filtering system for tidal waters from San Francisco Bay.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Oh, wait a minute. What do we have here?
DORNIN: It will also open up miles of trails, giving bird and other wildlife lovers a lot more places to flock.
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HATTORI: This next story is about an enduring environmental tragedy. Forty years ago, a fire broke out in a small Pennsylvania town. It's still burning today. It has outlasted eight presidents, the Vietnam War and the fall of the Berlin Wall. And, it is slowly killing the community. Jeanne Meserve reports from Centralia, Pennsylvania.
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JEANNE MESERVE, CNN CORRESOPNDENT (voice-over): It is like stepping onto another planet. Gases and steam plume around you. The ground is warm. So hot in some places, it acts like a giant pressure cooker.
MATT LIVINGOOD, GEOLOGIST: And the shermagite binds together these rocks and it's very brittle.
MESERVE: Shermagite is usually found in volcanic areas, but this is Central Pennsylvania. No volcanoes here, just a mine fire, a very hot mine fire.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This is a coal steam, and it is the Buck Mountain vein. It happens to be the one burning over in Centralia.
MESERVE: This coal is not the common butuminous variety, but anthracite, an even better fuel.
(on camera): So it is like a big furnace?
GIL WISWALL, WEST CHESTER UNIVERSITY: Exactly,. If you've ever seen a coal fire burning in a stove, coal stove, heating a home -- it's very much like a big hot furnace.
MESERVE (voice-over): You can see steam and gases, including deadly carbon monoxide, venting to the surface right next to what's left of Centralia. Not much is left.
This was Centralia in the 1980s, a town of 1,500. This is Centralia now, population about 15.
TOM DEMPSEY, FORMER CENTRALIA RESIDENT: It was a viable community, it was a self-contained community at one time. Had its own school district. Had its own stores, hotels, post office, bank, railroad, street car system at one time, and it's hard to imagine when you look around that all this stuff was here, but it was all here.
MESERVE: A handful of residents resisted a federal buyout program, and ignore the state's claim of eminent domain. One of them is the town's mayor, 86-year-old Lamar Mervine.
(on camera): Do you think you will ever leave?
MAYOR LAMAR MERVINE, CENTRALIA, PENNSYLVANIA: Yeah, when the undertaker comes, I hope.
MESERVE: But not before then?
MERVINE: But not before.
MESERVE (voice-over): While the town has withered, the fire has spread, affecting about 350 acres thus far. And at 40, it's still young. Experts guess it could burn for another 100 years.
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ANNOUNCER: Ahead on NEXT@CNN, e-mail in the workplace. Could Big Brother be screening your messages?
And later, a look at the digital magic behind the making of "Star Wars: Attack of the Clones." That and much more, coming up on NEXT.
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HATTORI: For a lot of people, cell phones are indispensable tools, but they've also become disposable commodities. We're talking trash. Consider this: The U.S. has 137 million cell phone subscribers alone. By the year 2007, there could be 1.5 billion users worldwide. That's a lot of phones headed for the garbage, and as Natalie Pawelski reports, overcrowded landfills are just the beginning.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE) NATALIE PAWELSKI, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): We asked around the newsroom for people's old cell phones, and in just two days collected about 50 of them. Americans will soon be ditching about 130 million mobile phones every year, according to a new study by an environmental research group called Inform.
JOANNA UNDERWOOD, INFORM: That's about 65,000 tons of cell phones, and ultimately they are thrown away.
PAWELSKI: With manufacturers offering a steady stream of newer, smaller, more multi-tasking models, the average customer gets a new wireless phone every 18 to 24 months.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Ten years ago, you know, they weighed two pounds. And now, they weigh three ounces.
SHERYL SELLWAY: But it's just like wearing old clothes. You want the latest and the greatest, right? So, it's the same with a phone.
PAWELSKI: But there is a hang-up.
UNDERWOOD: Cell phones, as small as they are and as innocent as they look, contain a very wide variety of toxic chemicals.
PAWELSKI: Here's the 411 -- cell phones' toxic chemicals range from arsenic to lead to zinc, including several substances that have been linked to health problems. It's not considered a danger for people using cell phones, but it's also not the kind of stuff you want building up in landfills.
(on camera): So if you've got an old cell phone that you don't use anymore, but you don't want to throw out -- one option is to donate it. Verizon's Hope Line program, for example, accepts any make and model of old cell phone. The phones are refurbished, and then donated to battered women's shelters.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: The program has gone national since last November, and in that time we have collected over 150,000 phones.
PAWELSKI (voice-over): The cell phone industry's trade group says its members have really been pushing this kind of recycling program in the last two or three years, but it's not clear how much of a dent they're making. Inform estimates that by 2005 there will be 500 million old cell phones gathering dust, without a plan to deal with them. That's a lot of phones to put on hold.
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HATTORI: Another indispensible communications tool: E-mail. If you have ever had the sneaking suspicion somebody was in your in-box, you may be right. Not only are more employers scrutinizing e-mails, they're also zapping messages you may not even know about.
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HATTORI (voice-over): If you work on a computer, get used to it. There's no such thing as private e-mail on a company system.
SHARI STEELE, ELECTRONIC FREEDOM FOUNDATION: Legally, they are not required to tell you if they are monitoring the e-mail. Legally, the equipment that you are using when you are at work belongs to your employer. And, therefore, the employer can do whatever they want to with the equipment.
JEFF SMITH, CHAIRMAN & CEO, TUMBLEWEED: Well, it's not "1984." It's 2002. And, yes, this is Big Brother.
HATTORI: Jeff Smith should know. His firm, Tumbleweed, makes e- mail-monitoring software used by 100 of the Fortune 500 corporations.
SMITH: You are getting a look behind the scenes here, I suppose.
HATTORI: Companies can customize the software to identify senders and scan for keywords that send up a red flag.
SMITH: And so here we could say, let's look in the subject line for any message that includes any combination of the following words.
HATTORI (on camera): And you can dictate the words?
SMITH: Sure.
HATTORI (voice-over): You could also choose from a set of keywords associated with, say, viruses or unsolicited e-mail, spam.
SMITH: "Absolutely free": guaranteed, basically, that it's going to be a spam message.
HATTORI: Once a policy is set, the company determines what happens next: Quarantine the e-mail for review by a human, divert, or the euphemistic drop.
SMITH: We refer to the big bit bucket in the sky.
HATTORI (on camera): So, how common is e-mail monitoring? Well, according to an industry survey last year, nearly 47 percent of large corporations reviewed and stored e-mail messages, three times more companies than in 1997. What can't be quantified is the number of e- mail messages mistakenly screened out. This is a memo that somebody in our company got. And it's completely innocuous.
(voice-over): We showed Smith an e-mail that got bounced back to the sender by his software: a memo arranging a meeting for a charity fund-raiser. It did have dollar signs and financial company names.
SMITH: And so it could have been it was kicked out for compliance violation.
HATTORI (on camera): The program thought it talking about a business deal.
SMITH: Right. Or, alternatively, the software could have concluded that it was spam. HATTORI (voice-over): Legitimate concerns and a hard line administered by software.
James Hattori, CNN, San Francisco.
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ANNOUNCER: Coming up, stranded sea lions, dying dolphins. Something strange is happening on the California coast. We'll tell you why.
Also, as summer vacation season approaches, we'll look at your odds of becoming shark bait.
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HATTORI: There's something in the water off Southern California that's killing hundreds of sea creatures, but it's not pollution, or anything man-made. As Frank Buckley reports, it's a rare natural phenomenon working its way through the food chain, that could even affect humans.
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FRANK BUCKLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): A California sea lion lies stranded on a beach in L.A., near death. It is suffering from domoic acid poisoning. Over the past couple of months, Peter Wallerstein of the Whale Rescue Team has seen hundreds of such animals on Southern California beaches.
PETER WALLERSTEIN, WHALE RESCUE TEAM: There's something going on in their brain. The neurotoxins in their brain, they're up on their foreflippers. They're doing the head bobbing, total disorientation.
BUCKLEY: Dazed dolphins have also died on the coast, along with pelicans. Some of the animals also exhibiting odd or extremely rare behavior. Some sea lions, for example, mammals that don't attack humans unless provoked, have gone after surfers and kayakers.
Surfer Sean Loye says he got these scars after a sea lion came after him.
SEAN LOYE, SURFER: At first when I saw it, I thought it was pretty cool. I mean, surfing with a sea lion that big is pretty cool, but then it just attacked me, and I was scared out of my mind.
BUCKLEY: What's happening, say experts, is an unexplained and sudden bloom of single-celled plankton in the waters off California.
DR. JOHN HEYNING, L.A. COUNTY NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM: The ocean is really a soup of microscopic organisms.
BUCKLEY: Dr. John Heyning, the curator of mammals at the L.A. County Natural History Museum says that in high enough concentrations, the domoic acid in the plankton causes neurological damage to the animals that eat it. And as it passes up the food chain, everything is affected.
HEYNING: So, from this microscopic organism, this diatom, you go to fish, then you go to pelicans, marine mammals and all kinds of other animals, anything that might eat something that has eaten this.
BUCKLEY (on camera): It's not just marine life that's affected by the domoic acid. In fact, human beings have suffered domoic acid poisoning. Some human beings have even died. That's why state health officials here in California have warned people not to eat things like mussels and clams and other shellfish caught off of California's coast by recreational fishermen.
(voice-over): The deaths of several people in Canada in the late 1980s were blamed on domoic acid. No humans have died in the current bloom.
But nowhere is the effect on marine life more evident than at the Marine Mammal Care Center in San Pedro, California. In a normal year, they handle a handful of domoic acid cases. This year, they've taken in close to 180 animals.
JACKIE JAAKOLA, DIRECTOR, MARINE MAMMAL CARE CENTER: It's very draining on all of our resources. We've brought in about 70 new volunteers in the last few months, and we're spending thousands of dollars on these animals, even a day, just to provide them with their fluids.
BUCKLEY: Experts believe the phenomenon is naturally occurring. They do not believe human factors, like pollution, are to blame. But they are studying it closely, to make sure. And while hundreds of sea lions, dolphins and birds are dying from the disease, scientists are not worried about a die-off of any populations.
Still, the volunteers at the Marine Mammal Care Center are trying their best to save each life, returning the animals to the ocean once their work is done, once the animals are able to return safely back to where they belong.
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HATTORI: Our finned and feathered friends aren't the only one perhaps a little unnerved at the beach these days. Some people are worried about being caught up in the middle of a real-life scene from the movie "Jaws." So far this year, there have been about a dozen shark attacks, but considering that millions of people swim at U.S. oceans, the odds of you becoming fish food are miniscule. Mark Potter helps put things in perspective.
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MARK POTTER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): At the Mote Marine Laboratory in Sarasota, Florida, scientists struggle with the carcass of a nearly 200-pound mako shark caught by fishermen in Brazil. Researchers are trying to learn more about sharks, hoping to better understand and protect the ocean predators that have drawn so much public attention and inspired so much fear, especially last summer. Last year, many swimmers thought twice about entering the surf. It all began in July, with the attack on 8-year-old Jessie Arbogast, whose arm was severed by a bull shark near Pensacola. The story of his uncle wrestling the shark to shore to retrieve the arm flashed around the world. Virtually every shark bite since then received widespread coverage. "TIME" magazine trumpeted "The Summer of the Shark."
SAMUEL GRUBER: It was really a media-generated event. Actually, the shark attacks were down a bit, but the numbers are not significant. So, your odds went from about one in 4,300,000 to one in 4,297,000. There's no difference between those odds, of course.
POTTER: According to the international shark attack file, worldwide there were 76 unprovoked shark attacks last year, down from 85 the year before. The five shark attack fatalities worldwide were down from 12 in the year 2000. Surfers, many in Florida, suffered nearly half the shark bite total, bites that may have been accidental.
JOSE CASTRO, MOTE MARINE LABORATORY: Well, most cases are probably mistaken identity. They perceive the person to be a fish, and they grab it. And they grab a hand or a foot that flashes in front of them. The cases of sharks deliberately feeding on people, attacking and feeding on people are very, very rare. They may involve, you know, bull sharks or tiger sharks, but those are rather rare.
POTTER (on camera): Now when the mistake occurs, is it usually one bite?
CASTRO: Most of the time with small sharks, usually it's a one- bite affair. You know, the shark grabs a hand or a foot and realizes it's not the small fish it's looking for and it lets go when it sees it's dealing with a large animal.
POTTER (voice-over): Over the years, reported shark attacks have increased. Scientists say it's not that sharks are more aggressive, but that millions more people are entering the water. Fear of the sea, they argue, is unwarranted, although some caution is in order.
(on camera): Shark experts advise swimmers to use common sense. For example, don't swim at night or at dawn or dusk when sharks are more active and have a sensory advantage. Don't swim alone or in areas where there are fishermen and a lot of bait fish. Beware of murky water. And of course, if you see a shark, don't mess with it.
(voice-over): Inevitably, more shark attacks on humans will occur, but scientists hope these relatively rare events can be kept in perspective. The biggest victims, they claim, are the sharks themselves, important predators, killed by the millions every year around the world.
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HATTORI: In fact, one scientist estimates 100 million sharks are killed every year. Stay with us. We'll be right back after a break and a check of the day's top stories from the CNN news room.
ANNOUNCER: Just ahead, a behind-the-scenes look at "Attack of the Clones."
And scientists try to resurrect the extinct Tasmanian tiger. Those stories and much more when NEXT@CNN returns. Stay with us.
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HATTORI: Welcome back. You may be among the millions of people who have already seen the new Star Wars movie, "Attack of the Clones." But have you seen how filmmakers created that big fight scene? I didn't think so. Well, recently two of the digital artists at George Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic gave "NEXT" a behind-the-scenes peek.
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UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This represents before. This is what we were given to start with by a team of people at the ranch that was closely directed by George, and approved by him as being the shot that he'd like to see in the movie. It's one step past a story board. We can extract the actual camera that was used to create this animatic shot and use it to drive a motion control camera to shoot the ground element. That's what this represents.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: This combination of a few elements they shot on set, a lot of computer generated landscapes and backdrops, some photographs that were shot out in the Southwest, in Utah. So a bunch of different elements. But yeah, they all had to be brought together to create this kind of world that didn't exist.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: We used these blue lines as sort of rails through the virtual environment. We define a start point and an end point in 3-D space and tell the computer to fly the plane along that path. So when each of these missiles droids had to explode, we had to use dynamic simulation software. That software allows us to assign physical properties to each piece of the machine here and define things like gravity, how thick the atmosphere is, how much mass is on a particular piece, and place explosions, virtual explosions, on particular points on the model.
This represents the first pass on the explosions of the missile droids and we've got the attack gunships blocked in there as well as -- the crowd team puts in what you see back here. Hundreds of battle droids, other vehicles to help fill out the battle. Again, more work done, adding in pyrotechnics that are shot here (UNINTELLIGIBLE) against blue screen.
Then smoke elements are added and every other aspect of the shot is continuing to be polished and refined. Here's a comparison between how an animator views a shot and then how the finished shot actually ends up in the movie. I think all in all there were over 200 separate elements that need to be combined by a compositor. This particular shot is 112 frames, and there's 24 frames in a second. So just a few seconds, six seconds. There's 2,100 shots, I believe, in the movie.
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HATTORI: So maybe you got fed up with "Star Wars" after Episode 1? Or you can't get enough after seeing Episode 2. Either way, you'll probably want to check out how some online movie makers are making a farce of the force. Bruce Francis has that story.
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BRUCE FRANCIS, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Luke. Leia. Chewy.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Hi, it's Stacy.
FRANCIS: Stacy?
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You know, why don't you just talk? All the other robots talk, it's not like it's that hard.
FRANCIS: "Pink 5" is one of the most popular Star Wars fan films on i-film, a site that recently hosted a festival of some 39 short films inspired by and some parodies of "Star Wars." Like "Beer Wars." And a genre bending American jedi in which a teenage Obi wan Kenobi goes to an American high school to conquer a force more powerful than the force.
YODA: One more obstacle to overcome and a jedi will you be. Get laid you must.
FRANCIS: And of course, gangsta wars rap. This short was part of a similar festival on Adam Films.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: A jedi's gotta do what a jedi's gotta do...
FRANCIS: Can't choose? Maybe the Darth Vader psychic hotline knows what you want. Be careful. He's no Miss Cleo.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Your sad devotion to 1-800 lines hasn't helped you conjure up any decent advice or given you clairvoyance enough to...
DARTH VADER: I find your lack of faith disturbing. Next caller.
FRANCIS: Many fan films aren't parodies at all. They're worshipful riffs on George Lucas' myths. While some may lack the Hollywood polish of the original, they've got all the passion. There are sophisticated graphics, snazzy light saber battles, plenty of know-it-all jedis, and smearing platitudes from the dark side.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The force is strong with you. But you are not strong with the force.
FRANCIS: For the bandwidth challenged among us, there's even a text-based version. These characters are two dimensional and proud of it. As for Stacy, she just snagged a date with Han Solo and she is stoked. Take that, Princess Leia! UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: You know, too bad for princess queen bitch of the universe, who like totally acts like she's not into him, and everybody knows better.
FRANCIS: And who knows better than George Lucas? Fans can decide for themselves.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
For most of us, thinking ahead is maybe that meeting next week or an upcoming vacation, but some people are firm believers in looking way ahead. In fact, they think it's a productive philosophical exercise, in theory. Take a couple of minutes and check out this week's "Nothing but Net."
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(voice-over): Stewart Brand is betting that time is on his side. As co-creator of a foundation dedicated to long-term thinking, Brand doesn't believe in wrist watches. He prefers a clock that measures time in 10,000 year increments.
STEWART BRAND, LONGNOW FOUNDATION: It gives permission to think long-term. It's a real mechanical thing, a physical thing.
HATTORI: The clock is a project of the Longnow Foundation, whose Web site, longbets.org, is sort of a bulletin board for futurists.
BRAND: It forces people who are making a prediction to put it in basically (UNINTELLIGIBLE) terms, just as if it was a scientific hypothesis.
HATTORI: But the Web site is also part Vegas betting pit. You don't just make far-out predictions, you have to back them up, with a minimum of $1,000.
Of course the payout could take a very, very long time. Some wagers are more whimsical. Actor Ted Danson is betting the U.S. men's soccer team won't win the World Cup before the Red Sox win the World Series.
On the more serious side, author and futurist Ray Kurzweil put up $10,000, betting a computer would achieve human-level intelligence by the year 2029.
He's not sure whether the new age of computers will resemble the emotive replicants in the movie "Bladerunner" or the deceptive "Hal" in "2001: A Space Odyssey," but he says projects to model the human brain will make the smart computers possible.
RAY KURZWEIL, FUTURIST: But it's not some alien invasion of intelligent machines coming over the horizons to compete with us. It's emerging from within our civilization. HATTORI: Futurist and founder of the Lotus corporation, Mitch Kapor, says the brain as computer is only a metaphor. His $10,000 are on "no." Computers will never develop human smarts.
MITCH KAPOR, FUTURIST: We are undervaluing, underappreciating ourselves if we think a computer is going to pass us.
HATTORI: It's a timely debate for longbets.org.
KAPOR: It is a way to get us thinking about longer term issues, which we're just not good at in this society.
HATTORI: (UNINTELLIGIBLE)
KAPOR: It's TV.
(LAUGHTER)
Attention spans have been getting shorter and shorter.
BRAND: I think people are less comfortable now at thinking very far ahead, because they realize there's so much change going on. But what you can do to the long-term future is basically protect options.
HATTORI: And that's the ultimate payoff on longbets.org, debating options on issues that shape the future.
That's "Nothing but Net."
(END VIDEO CLIP)
As for the wagers, if and when a bet is settled, the money goes with interest accrued to the charity of the winner's choice. Assuming it's still around. For more on this and other stories on our program, check out our Web site, cnn.com/next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
HATTORI: In China, scientists are showing off their latest clone. And George Lucas had nothing to do with this one. This month- old calf is part of a project to preserve rare breeds of beef cattle. Researchers at the China Agricultural University say they've achieved a pregnancy rate of more than 50 percent in that program, and that's a breakthrough in a field where cloned and implanted organisms often fail to develop.
Scientists in Sidney, Australia are hoping to clone a different animal. If they succeed it would mean reviving a species that's been gone more than 60 years.
Gordon Robison has that story.
GORDON ROBISON, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It isn't exactly "Jurassic Park" but the principle is similar. The last known Tazmanian tiger died in 1936 and the species was officially declared extinct 16 years ago. Scientists at the Australian Museum say they may be able to change that.
MARK ARCHER, DIRECTOR, AUSTRALIAN MUSEUM: It was a miracle to the first place to find the DNA. It was a double miracle to find out that the DNA was sufficiently well-preserved to respond to PCR (ph). And in fact they worked extremely hard -- at first it didn't work. It was one of these classic try, try, and try again things.
ROBISON: Yes, preserved DNA. Some comes from this tiger fetus preserved since 1860. That's right, 1860. But the fetus is female and Archer says some of the necessary genetic structure occurs only in males. The breakthrough came when two scientists figured out how to extract the missing male DNA from tiger pelts at the museum.
ARCHER: I can tell you what. There was a lot of celebrations in the Australian Museum. We were delighted. It is a big breakthrough and we're very excited.
ROBISON: Archer stresses that this is only a first step. The museum has replicated only some of the Tazmanian tiger's genes. A much larger stock of genes and sequencing sections from the tiger's genome are needed before cloning can begin. Archer says that if all goes well, a Tazmanian tiger could successfully be cloned in perhaps 10 years.
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HATTORI: If all goes well, a new national park in Myanmar, the country once known as Burma, will help preserve that nation's wildlife as well as its indigenous people.
Here's Gary Strieker.
GARY STRIEKER, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): For years it's been known for a harsh military dictatorship, a struggling political opposition, and seemingly endless civil war. But for wildlife scientists, Myanmar, still known to many as Burma, is a special place unlike any other in the region, much of it still wild, nearly half of it covered by forest.
ALAN RABINOWITZ, WILDLIFE CONSERVATION SOCIETY: Burma was probably the most diverse country zoologically than any other place in the entire region. By 1995 we had no idea what was still left there.
STRIEKER: Finding out what is still there has been a mission for Alan Rabinowitz, a scientist with the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society.
In his new book, "Beyond the Last Village," he details his 500- mile expedition on foot into the farthest reaches of northern Myanmar, exploring a lost world virtually unknown to outsiders, where he found animals like the blue sheep and the black barking deer, that were never previously recorded in the country.
RABINOWITZ: The most exciting discovery was a species called the leaf deer, which was a completely new deer species to science.
STRIEKER: He also made contact with lost cultures in remote valleys.
RABINOWITZ: Tribal groups with names like Alu and Rawan, and the Tarone (ph), which are the only Mongoloid stock of pygmies in the world, and they're going extinct.
STRIEKER: The expedition eventually resulted in the declaration of a new national park in the far north, which will help save the people as well as the wildlife there. And it made an important point.
RABINOWITZ: It showed that the age of discovery, contrary to what many people think, is far from being over on the land surfaces of the earth. There's still lots of places, lots of new things to discover, even larger mammal species.
STRIEKER: Rabinowitz is now a conservation adviser to Myanmar's government, which he says has nothing to do with politics.
RABINOWITZ: The Burmese government and the Burmese people feel that their wildness helps define their culture and them as a people. And that makes conservation, actually, both an enjoyable and an easy task in that country.
STRIEKER: The people of Myanmar, he says, are very proud of their wilderness. And they want to protect it.
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HATTORI: Finally this week, spring is almost running out. Have you done your annual sprucing up around the house yet? If you're one of those who doesn't do windows and you have a lot of windows to do, plus about $25,000 to spare, Andrew Brown has got an invention for you.
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ANDREW BROWN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): It's called cleanbot, a machine that stays glued to a pane of glass while it removes dirt, then, aided by suction pads, crawls along to the next window and gobbles up more gunge. The inventers of cleanbot claim they're offering a more efficient and safer alternative to gondolas (ph), metal platforms that carry cleaners up and down buildings.
S.K. TSO: We know it's not a very safe sort of environment for these people to work in.
BROWN: Scientists at Hong Kong City University spent three years developing cleanbot and have already identified a local firm ready to build it commercially. A basic bot runs about $25,000, although prices vary widely depending on a customer's requirements. Bots are controlled remotely by trained operators but are said to be less manpower intensive than gondolas (ph).
(on camera): Basically for every bot that you buy, you can eliminate one window cleaning job. Potentially bad news for the guys in the gondola, but the bots are part of a lean, clean operation.
(voice-over): Hollywood has already examined what might happen when cleaning jobs get wiped out by new technology.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You're trying to tell us that we're going to be replaced by robots?
BROWN: It may not turn out this bad. Some inventors would like to see cleaners become masters of their own destiny, pushing the buttons that bring these machines to life.
TSO: They have to be trained up to do more interesting and perhaps even more fascinating jobs.
BROWN: Scientists still to be sure water and compressed air for the suction pads can be delivered to a clean bot hundreds of meters above the ground. And the machine needs electricity, so somehow they have to generate power as well as firm orders. Without committed customers, this project won't wash.
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HATTORI: Details, details. At least he doesn't take a lunch break. We are going to take a break. We're out of time.
If you get a chance, let us know how we're doing. You can e-mail us. Our address is next@cnn.com.
Thanks so much for joining us this week. Thanks to our friends here at the Chabot Space and Science center in Oakland, California. For all of us on the sci-tech beat, I'm James Hattori. We'll see you next time.
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