Quantum Security System To Be Tested

A portable system that will allow electronic messages to be transmitted to and from satellites in absolute secrecy has now been built by researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The researchers will test the system to send quantum information 10 kilometres through horizontal free space at the start of September. Air density at this at this level approaches that experienced when transmitting information to a satellite 300 kilometres above the Earth.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991214

/. Thread on Microsoft Security

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/30/2247211

Parasitic Computing

Siphoning the computational power of the Internet, U.S. scientists have figured out a way to induce unwitting Web servers across the world to perform mathematical calculations. Researchers at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana solved a complex math problem with the unauthorized help of computers in North America, Europe and Asia. Using a remote server, the team divided the problem into packages, each associated with a potential answer. The bits were then hidden inside components of the standard transmission control protocol of the Internet, and sent on their merry way.
http://fyi.cnn.com/2001/TECH/internet/08/29/stealth.computing/index.html

Cool Exhibition of High Speed Photography

The flash unit discharged twice as the water balloon was being punctured, once during the puncture and again as the water flooded the table. JoLynn took this photograph as part of a 4H-sponsored course in high-speed imaging at the Edgerton Explorit Center. She is an 8th grader at Walnut Middle School in Grand Island, Nebraska...
http://www.pacsci.org/public/education/gallery/high_speed_photos/student_photos.html

Scramjet Tested Successfully

The Sacramento Bee is running this story about the first powered device to achieve "hypersonic" speeds in the Earths atmosphere. In a series of DARPA-sponsored tests, at Arnold Air Force Base in Tennessee, a scramjet engine, encased in a titanium projectile, was fired from a 130-foot cannon, at an initial velocity of Mach 7.1. The scramjets engines then ignited, and the object moved another 260 feet, in just 30 milliseconds, before it came to rest in a series of steel plates designed to halt the flight. Peak acceleration: about 10,000 Gs. Elapsed time, including cigarettes & pillowtalk: less than a second.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/28/1551229

Peru to Charge Fujimori

Prosecutors were given the green light by Perus Congress to charge former President Alberto Fujimori with crimes against humanity, a move officials hope will step up pressure on Japan to force the exiled leader to face justice. In a special session Monday night Congress voted 75 to 0 to lift Fujimoris constitutional immunity, opening the way for prosecutors to file charges of homicide and forced disappearances for two massacres committed by a paramilitary death squad.
http://news.excite.ca/news/ap/010828/06/int-peru-fujimori

/. Thread on IBMs Molecular Computer Initiative

Yahoo has reports that IBM researchers have created the first ever single molecule computer circuits which may someday lead to a new class of smaller and faster computers that consume less power than todays machines. The IBM team made a `` voltage inverter -- one of the three fundamental logic circuits that are the basis for all of todays computers -- from a carbon nanotube, a tube-shaped molecule of carbon atoms that is 100,000 times thinner than a human hair. IBM scientists will present the achievement today at the 222nd National Meeting of the American Chemical Society being held in Chicago and it appears in the web edition of the ACS journal Nano Letters.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/26/1954243

New algorithms speed molecular simulations

Biologists and computer scientists have joined forces to create new algorithms that allow supercomputers to model molecular activity on an unprecedented scale. The technique could enable medical researchers to better predict the impact of drugs on cells "in silico", i.e. before any experiments on cells or animals. The researchers, led by a team at the University of California, San Diego, used a recent mathematical discovery to accelerate hugely the speed at which supercomputers can process the data needed to simulate electrostatic atomic interactions.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991179

Detecting Dark Matter

Telescopes may soon be able to "see" the Universes dark matter - all that stuff in space that does not emit any light. Astronomers have succeeded in locating and weighing a galaxy cluster solely by the effect its gravity has on light from more distant objects. Within a decade, their work could lead to a 3D map of the Universes dark matter, which outweighs visible stars and galaxies by at least a factor of 10. The astronomers exploited the phenomenon of "gravitational lensing", in which light from very distant galaxies is distorted by the gravity of massive objects situated in a direct line between them and Earth. The shape and extent of the distortion tell you about the location and mass of the intervening matter.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991187

DMCA To Be Exported

While Russian graduate student Dmitry Sklyarov potentially faces five years in prison under the first criminal prosecution of a controversial new US law, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) passed at the request of Hollywood in 1998, its backers are now busily exporting overseas its dangerous legal theories of excessive copyright protection at the price of civil liberties. Worldwide public intervention is immediately necessary to restore freedom of speech as a value promoted by free societies.
http://www.eff.org/alerts/20010816_eff_ftaa_alert.en.html

Fusion energy: The fast igniter shapes up

A main focus of work towards nuclear fusion reactors is inertial confinement fusion (ICF), which uses powerful energy beams, such as lasers, to compress and heat hydrogen fuel to fusion temperatures, and uses the inertia of the fuel itself to confine it long enough for fusion to occur. A modification of the fast igniter approach to ICF, reported this week, could be a significant advance towards efficient laser fusion ignition. The new system makes use of ultra-intense laser light with a novel compression geometry to achieve a laser driven implosion with picosecond fast heating by a laser pulse timed to coincide with peak compression.
http://www.nature.com/nature/links/010823/010823-4.html

Scary Amounts Of Power in MPAAs Hands

One recent Monday, my boyfriend and I returned home from a long weekend away. As usual, one of the first things we did was check our e-mail, only to discover, to our dismay, that Time-Warner Cable, our Internet service provider, had cut off access to our account sometime around midnight the Friday before. My boyfriend, a software engineer who takes his e-mail seriously, called the tech support line and was transferred to several people that evening, none of whom could help. All he could find out was that the account had been suspended for "security reasons." The next morning, we received an express-mailed letter from Time-Warner Cable, which stated that the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) had accused us of distributing copyrighted material. The MPAA had determined that someone, supposedly with an Internet protocol (IP) address assigned to our computer by Time-Warner at the time, had distributed the material on July 4. The part that got me was the second paragraph: "In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. Section 512, (ISP name) has removed or disabled access to that material."
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/08/23/pirate/index.html

The Life of a WWII Physicist

...I worked on developing a streamlined target, towed by airplanes, that could be maneuvered to simulate realistic fighter attacks while flying far enough below the tow plane to keep the plane safe from stray trainee bullets. In our first launch from a bomb bay, the target got jammed against the tow planes fuselage in such a way as to prevent the bomb-bay doors from closing. So we couldnt land. At the pilots insistence (I will not repeat his heated words), I dislodged the target by jumping on it while hanging from a bomb-bay rack and wearing a parachute, just in case. After that experience, we mounted the target externally and soon had a usable offset tow-target system...
http://physicstoday.org/pt/vol-54/iss-8/p40.html

Meteorite Crashes Into Ocean Near New Brunswick

A meteorite that apparently crashed into the ocean off New Brunswick early Sunday prompted a flood of calls to a Moncton newspaper. Most callers told a similar story. The entire sky lit up for a few seconds, as if during an incredible lightning storm or fireworks display, then a tadpole-shaped ball of fire flew through the sky and appeared to crash nearby. The fireball - seen from as far away as Halifax and Fredericton - appears to have travelled at a sharp downward trajectory, passing Sackville, N.B.
http://news.excite.ca/news/cp/010821/21/nb-residents-flood

Regina Amateur Astronomer Discovers Comet By Accident

Excellent story. This guy in Regina goes to a Star Party and at 4 a.m. accidently discovers a new comet.
http://news.excite.ca/news/cp/010821/21/regina-amateur-astronomer

Good Training Weapons Maintenance Advice

From Bu Jin Design.
http://www.bujindesign.com/faq-wooden.html

In Search of Antimatter

If equal amounts of matter and antimatter in fact existed, they would promptly combine and annihilate each other in a burst of energy. Indeed, a particle and its antiparticle are equal yet opposite in every way and should behave similarly. Physicists call this property symmetry. The fundamental symmetries of nature include charge and parity, or handedness. So an electron should behave the same way as a positron (its antiparticle), just as a particle in a right-handed coordinate system should do the same things if viewed in a three-dimensional mirror, thereby putting it in a left-handed system. Because our matter-dominated universe exists, though, physicists have been looking for situations in which particles and their antiparticles break from symmetry.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/explorations/2001/082001antimatter/

Good Cassini/Voyager/Saturn Article

The Cassini-Huygens mission of NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) will reach Saturn on July 1, 2004. Cassini will be the first craft to orbit Saturn, and a half year after it arrives, its piggybacked Huygens probe will descend onto Saturns moon Titan. With the probe, scientists will be able to answer questions remaining from the earlier explorations.
http://www.cosmiverse.com/space08210102.html

Salon Commentary on .NET

Microsofts .NET plan, which some observers see as part of a comprehensive strategy to battle AOL Time Warner for mastery of the online universe, is built on the premise that users will allow the consolidation of their personal information on centralized Microsoft server computers. The payoff is supposed to be "seamless" access to a vast array of online services. But to critics, the consolidation of e-mail, instant messaging and other goodies in the hands of Microsoft -- beyond, obviously, sounding antitrust alarms -- would make everyone more dependent on Microsofts software infrastructure. And that infrastructure is already prone to virus attacks and other weaknesses that the rest of the Net has so far managed to evolve strong defenses against.
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/08/21/hotmail/index.html

Contact Addresses Regarding FTAA

...These measures, based on the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) give far too much power to publishers, at the expense of individuals rights. The DMCA itself is already under legal challenge in the US, has gravely chilled scientists and computer security researchers freedom of expression around the world for fear of being prosecuted in the US, and resulted in the arrest of a Russian programmer. The FTAA provisions, which serve no one but American corporate copyright interests, are even more overbroad than those of the DMCA.
http://www.steenerson.com/IPcontact.htm

MIT & HP To Develop Quantum Computer

The project, announced last week, is part of a $25 million, five-year alliance launched in June 2000. Researchers at HP Labs in Palo Alto, California and Bristol, England will work with their counterparts in MITs Media Lab, including Neil Gershenfeld and Isaac Chuang. Gershenfeld and Chuang are described as pioneers by HP in its press release, because of their past work in actually building and operating a simple quantum computer.
http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/ptech/08/20/quantum.computer.idg/

NIST Special Publication on Intrusion Detection Systems

Intrusion detection systems (IDSs) are software or hardware systems that automate the process of monitoring the events occurring in a computer system or network, analyzing them for signs of security problems. As network attacks have increased in number and severity over the past few years, intrusion detection systems have become a necessary addition to the security infrastructure of most organizations. This guidance document is intended as a primer in intrusion detection, developed for those who need to understand what security goals intrusion detection mechanisms serve, how to select and configure intrusion detection systems for their specific system and network environments, how to manage the output of intrusion detection systems, and how to integrate intrusion detection functions with the rest of the organizational security infrastructure. References to other information sources are also provided for the reader who requires specialized or more detailed advice on specific intrusion detection issues.
http://cryptome.org/sp800-31.htm

Star Trek Shields to Protect Supertanks

Each vehicle would be covered in smart armour using electrical fields, instead of thick metal, to give protection against anti-tank weapons. The technology, which is being perfected by defence researchers on both sides of the Atlantic, would transform armoured-vehicle construction.
http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,539143,00.html

Cloned KFC

Once a chicken with desirable traits has been bred or genetically engineered, tens of thousands of eggs, which will hatch into identical copies, could roll off the production lines every hour. Billions of clones could be produced each year to supply chicken farms with birds that all grow at the same rate, have the same amount of meat and taste the same.
Sun, which complained about Microsoft having Java in Windows, is now complaining about Microsoft not having Java in Windows. Sun is publicly demanding that Microsoft support Java, and is writing its own Java Virtual Machine for Windows just in case Micros

Microsoft Trying to Kill Java Again

Sun, which complained about Microsoft having Java in Windows, is now complaining about Microsoft not having Java in Windows. Sun is publicly demanding that Microsoft support Java, and is writing its own Java Virtual Machine for Windows just in case Microsoft doesnt see the light. This is ludicrous. Sun looks stupid and Microsoft can point to its actions as simply being in accordance with the terms of their legal settlement. And while many XP users may load Suns JVM, most probably wont and Java will be seriously hurt as a de facto standard. A great irony here is that Sun is really getting the end it asked for, but didnt expect to achieve. The Java license agreement was written with Microsoft in mind and tested at great expense by the best legal minds in Silicon Valley. It was a trap set by Sun for Microsoft only Microsoft has turned the tables.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20010816.html

Pentagons Stealth Email

The Onion Routing solution, which follows much the same recipe as Zero Knowledges Freedom software and cypherpunk-developed mixmaster remailers, is to forward communications through a complicated network that bounces Internet packets around like pinballs and hides the origin and destination from all but the most determined eavesdroppers.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,46126,00.html

New Black Ops Spy Plane Uncovered

Soon to take to the air is the X-47A Pegasus. Shaped like a kite, the craft is to be tested at the Naval Weapons Center in China Lake, California.
http://www.space.com/php/multimedia/imagedisplay/img_display.php?pic=h_pegasus6_02.jpg

Berkeley Breathed Interview

Berkeley Breatheds wildly successful newspaper comic strip Bloom County was like no strip before or since. From its 1980 inception, Breathed changed hats on a regular basis: He was intermittently a political cartoonist, calling attention to feminist issues, SDI, cosmetic testing on animals, and pork-barrel politics. At other times, he was a social critic, making fun of artistic trends and celebrity foibles. Sometimes he was just plain whimsical, as his characters took dandelion breaks, explored closets full of anxieties, or created Star Trek fantasies to inhabit. Whatever mode he was in, Breathed was a success: Bloom County collections consistently hit bestseller lists, and he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1987 for editorial cartooning.
http://www.theonionavclub.com/avclub3728/avfeature_3728.html

Planetary System Found Similar to Ours

Astronomers have found a planetary system remarkably similar to the suns -- two planets traveling in circular orbits around a star in the Big Dipper. The star is similar to the sun in chemical composition, and astronomers say the circular paths and sizes of the two planets hint at the presence of smaller, Earth-like bodies in tighter orbits.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/A15988-2001Aug15.html

New Military Supercompooter

ASCI White was designed for the government by IBM Corp., which delivered it to Livermore last year in 28 tractor-trailers. The mammoth computer is 1,000 times more powerful than Deep Blue, which defeated chess grand master Garry Kasparov in 1997. The machine is networked to researchers at Livermore and the Sandia and Los Alamos national labs in New Mexico via an encrypted line. It went through months of testing and debugging before being dedicated Wednesday.
http://news.excite.ca/news/cp/010815/22/worlds-most-powerful

Dancing Around A Black Hole

A heavy Black Hole aggressively feeds on its surroundings. As the neighboring gas and stars finally spiral into the Black Hole, a large fraction of the infalling mass is transformed into pure energy. However, scientists do not yet understand exactly how, long before this dramatic event takes place, all that material is moved from the outer regions of the galaxy towards the central region. To better understand this, a team of French and Swiss astronomers carried out a series of trailblazing observations with the VLT Infrared Spectrometer And Array Camera (ISAAC) on the VLT 8.2-m ANTU telescope at the ESO Paranal Observatory.
http://www.cosmiverse.com/space08150103.html

Anonymous Online Speech Upheld in US

Pre-Paid said it needed to know the identities of the posters to determine whether they had revealed company trade secrets. However, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which represented the posters, argued they were merely exercising their First Amendment right to criticize the company, and Pre-Paid was trying to silence its detractors by bullying them. According to the EFF, Cabrinha ruled from the bench during a hearing Friday to quash a subpoena requiring Yahoo to turn over the names.
http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1005-200-6863061.html?tag=mn_hd

Professor to Speak About Cracking SDMI

A Princeton University professor plans to publicly detail on Wednesday how his research team disabled the music industrys latest anti-piracy technology after receiving assurances from the industry he would not be sued.
http://www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,46067,00.html

/. Thread On 3D Games

Interesting discussion... from Stephensons Metaverse to a response from IDs John Carmack.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/13/1629258

Canadian Version of the DMCA

In order for Canada to be an important player in the emerging digital economy, the Copyright Act may need to be amended to ensure that it continues to be meaningful, clear and balanced. In particular, the examination of key digital copyright issues is necessary to fully realize the governments priority of promoting the dissemination of new and interesting content on-line, for and by Canadians. The departments believe it is now an opportune moment to initiate consultation with stakeholders on whether the Act should be amended to:
- set out a new exclusive right in favour of copyright owners, including performers and record producers, to make their works available on-line to the public;
- prevent the circumvention of technologies used to protect copyright material; and,
- prohibit tampering with rights management information.
http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/SSG/ip00001e.html

Majestic Review

...must...get...this...game...You only use 12% of your brain. Mind if we play with the rest?
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2001/08/10/majestic/index.html

Penny Arcade

Lots of funny stuff today. Tim, check this one.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view.php3

Eliza Eats Spam

Check this out. Remeber that old Eliza basic program? Somebodys ported it to perl and is using it to respond to spam. Source code included!
http://www.perlmonks.org/index.pl?node_id=103656&lastnode_id=104196

Windows 2020

Gates and his minions literally went underground in 2019 after the Supreme Court ruled against the company for the 1,249th time in the antitrust case that began in 1997. Authorities gave up trying to extract them after concluding that cracking open the bunker might hurt the people inside, who technically werent criminals because theyd never actually been charged.
http://latimes.com/technology/la-000064605aug09.story

Kurzweils AI Site

Check out the interactive Ramona engine.
http://www.kurzweilai.net

Kurzweils One Half An Arguement

Interesting response to Jaron Laniers One Half a Manifesto.

The brain is not one big neural net. It consists of hundreds of regions, each of which is organized differently, with different types of neurons, different types of signaling, and different patterns of interconnections. By and large, the algorithms are not the sequential, logical methods that are commonly used in digital computing. The brain tends to use self organizing, chaotic, holographic (i.e., information not in one place but distributed throughout a region), massively parallel, and digital controlled-analog methods. However, we have demonstrated in a wide range of projects the ability to understand these methods, and to extract them from the rapidly escalating knowledge of the brain and its organization.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/kurzweil//kurzweil_index.html

Exposing the Talibans

Social change: this is what the net is for.
A very courageous story.
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,45974,00.html

Bitchin Webserver!

Humanclock.com runs on a Radio Shack 2.4mhz TRS-80 Model 100 portable computer, using a stripped-down version of the Apache webserver software (version 100-BASIC.12 beta). The graphic files are stored on magnetic tape accessed via a modified Radio Shack personal cassette player (CAT NO. 14-1215). The webserver is powered by a 6 volt TRS-80 AC Adaptor (CAT NO. 26-3804). We take our web hosting very seriously at humanclock.com, therefore we have installed 4 "AA" batteries in the webserver in case of power failure. Whereas some battery backup systems last for only 20 minutes and cost hundreds of dollars, our power backup solution lasts for 20 hours and costs $2.49, (due to it being double coupon Tuesday). In the case of power outage however, it takes our webserver about one second to come back online, something that would take a common UNIX/NT system over two minutes.
http://www.humanclock.com/webserver.html

RC4 Broken

The problem lies with the RC4s Key Scheduling Algorithm, which is derived from a secret key, and is used to convert messages into code. The researchers found that, under certain circumstances, this process is predictable and discovered that with WEP they could reverse the process, discover the secret key and decipher all messages.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991114

Genetic Packaging More Important Than Once Thought

Allis, and others, think the newly identified switch may be a key part of the answer. Whats more, Allis believes the switch may be controlled by a heritable genetic code, separate to that found in DNA.
http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99991140

Software Innovation is Dying?

The Internet under its original design built a platform that induced lots of innovation in applications and content. And it did this by embracing an end-to-end principle, which meant that the network would remain as simple as possible and push all of the intelligence and, therefore, innovation to the end. This is the vision that is now enabled by a peer-to-peer architecture, and its the environment that has inspired the greatest amount of innovation around the Internet in its history. Now this architecture threatens existing interests, business interests and Hollywood interests, and in response to that threat there have been a number of changes that have occurred in both the technical and legal environment, aiming to undermine this platform for innovation, aiming to change it into a platform where its easier for certain interests to exercise control over innovation on that platform.
http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2001/08/07/lessig.html

FBI Hunts Code Red Writer

"We are very serious about finding the authors of Code Red and SirCam," the NIPCs Debra Weierman said. "Intentional transmission of worms or viruses across the Internet is a felony. This is a major offense, not some inconsequential lark."
Maybe if people would bother to close the holes caused by M$ products, this stuff wouldnt happen to begin with.
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,45956,00.html

Matrix 2 Delayed

In an interview with Sci Fi Wire, Joel Silver, producer of the two upcoming Matrix sequels, stated that the release of the first sequel, The Matrix Reloaded, likely wont happen until 2003. "Its going to be summer now, summer 2003," Silver said in an interview at the premiere for Osmosis Jones, in which he has a cameo role. But there are also rumors had The Matrix Reloaded opening as soon as Christmas 2002. And as for the release of The Matrix 3, Silver simply said, "Youll see."
http://www.dtheatre.com/read.php?sid=1493

/. Thread on Anti-Virus Viruses

Hmm... a virus that takes advantage of backdoors opened by other viral systems which then nuke the bad virus and repair the damage. Interesting idea.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/08/1311210&mode=thread

Toronto Heat Emergency

The citys heat alert was upgraded to a "heat emergency" Tuesday morning as residents awoke to yet another stifling summer day. A heat emergency is declared when there is a likelihood of more than 90 per cent that people will die from the heat, said Emergency Medical Services spokesman Dean Shaddock.
http://news.excite.ca/news/cp/010807/10/45-degree-threat

Human Cloning to be Attempted in US

An shocking announcement is set to be made at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington on Thursday: Up to 200 women will soon be impregnated with cloned embryos in the worlds first attempt to produce a human clone. The test is planned for November, possibly on a boat in international waters to avoid political interference. Scientists will use a technique similar to the one developed to produce Dolly the sheep.
http://www.cosmiverse.com/paranormal08070101.html

Good Diesel Sweeties Today

http://www.dieselsweeties.com/strips/sw216.shtml

/. Thread on Nanotech and the Law

http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/08/01/194208

Four Simple Cryptographic Attacks on HDCP

Intel has developed a new standard for device authentication and digital content encryption. It was developed specifically for encrypting uncompressed digital video on its way to a monitor (either a computer monitor or a television) specifically with DVI (digital video interface). It is, however, general enough to be used for other forms of digital information. The standard is availible from Digital Content Protection, LLC, a corporation formed to act as a holding company for the standard. My sources have told me that the MPAA has been pressuring the direct satellite services (DirecTV and the DishNetwork) to require that all movies be transmitted from the satellite set-top box to the monitor via DVI protected with HDCP. They believe it to be more secure than the existing high-definition analog connections. I respectfully must disagree.
http://cryptome.org/hdcp-4attacks.htm

Immortal Cancer Cells Subject of Film

On Oct. 4, 1951, Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore. Poor and black, the daughter of tobacco pickers in rural Virginia, and mother of five, the 31-year-old woman might have died in obscurity, forgotten by all but her immediate family and friends. Henrietta Lacks, who died in 1951, is the subject of Gilberts documentary. But Henrietta Lacks will live forever - in laboratories and research centers worldwide that use her unique, immortal cells for medical research. The cells of her cancer, known as HeLa cells, were the first human cells discovered to thrive and multiply outside the body, seemingly forever, allowing researchers to conduct experiments previously impossible. HeLa cells were instrumental in creating the polio vaccine and may, one day, help cure cancer. In what has become a billion-dollar industry, HeLa cells have traveled around the world and been shot into space.
http://www.hno.harvard.edu/gazette/2001/07.19/04-filmmaker.html