The American medical experiments that the Nazis used as a defense onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The American medical experiments that the Nazis used as a defense

You know you're doing something wrong when the Nazis use your behavior as proof that they weren't doing anything wrong. Or do you? The Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study became a focal point for debates over the ethics of experimenting on prisoners. Guess which side won.

The Stateville Penitentiary Malaria Study was prompted by the need to get effective anti-malarial drugs to troops fighting in the Pacific during World War II. Animals were proving inadequate for testing purposes, but few people would volunteer to take untested drugs.

So prisoners were told they could potentially shave years off their sentences, earn privileges and get special treatment, if they took part in the study. But they also might die of a fatal heart attack, after experiencing a 106 degree fever.

Prisoners seemed to be an ideal model. Not only could their behavior be controlled, they could be monitored all day. And no one particularly cared if they died. The prisoners were promised that time spent working on the study could significantly reduce their sentences, and so 441 inmates signed a paper stating, "I assume all the risks of this experiment," and started in.

On the first day, they were to receive ten bites from a mosquito (some prisoners sharing the same mosquito). Mosquito wrangling was tough, and eventually no one was left at the lab except one doctor, the inmate being bitten, and Nathan Leopold - the "famous" criminal who, with the help of his friend Richard Loeb, kidnapped and killed a fourteen-year-old boy for the thrill of it. Leopold acted as a medical assistant and volunteer throughout the experiment.

Many of the inmates acted as assistants and volunteers in the experiment. They monitored each other, administered the anti-malarial drugs, and nursed each other when they experienced 106 degree malarial fevers. They had a harder time nursing each other through the heart attacks that one of the drugs caused. One inmate died, although at the time his death was attributed to natural causes. It's possible that the heart attack that eventually killed Leopold was a result of the drugs he took during the study.

Publicly, though, the study was a great success. It continued for nearly thirty years, at that prison alone, and articles about it in the 1940s praised the practicality of the study and the patriotism of the prisoners.

Then came the Nuremburg Trials. Doctors were put on trial for experimenting on interned prisoners at concentration camps. They argued that their experiments were no different from the prisoner studies. The Stateville Penitentiary study was specifically mentioned by the defense team for the Naizis.

The prosecution looked at the study in a completely different light, and argued that, among other things, the consent forms that the prisoners signed showed that the study was substantially different than the experiments conducted by the Nazis. The defense argued that the prison study was so like the experiments done at the camps that no one could condemn the Nazi doctors, and the prosecution argued that it was so unlike their experiments that the Nazi doctors had to be condemned.

Only the argument made by the defense held up in court, and in American public opinion. Prison medical research flourished in the next three decades, in part because of a report published by the vice-president of the university system that had run the experiments. Public opinion was slow to turn, and it was only in the 1970s that medical experimentation on prisoners was deemed unethical, as prisoners were unable to give free consent.

Via NCBI, Making Willing Bodies.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com The American medical experiments that the Nazis used as a defense

Dolph Lundgren leading a robot army against zombies just seems unfair onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Dolph Lundgren leading a robot army against zombies just seems unfair

I mean, come on. Robots versus zombies seems like a pretty fair fight. But the trailer for the new movie Battle of the Damned — and I use the word "movie" loosely — stars Lundgren teaming up with the robots, and I'm pretty sure the living dead should crawl back in their graves if they don't want their decaying asses kicked.

I mean, once Dolph Lundgren teaches a robot that its mission is to "FUCK THEM UP" it's game over for "them," whether they're zombies, ninjas or anything. Dolph Lungren > pretty much everything; Dolph Lundgren + robot > definitely everything.

[Via Geeks of Doom]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Dolph Lundgren leading a robot army against zombies just seems unfair

Does this bomb smell like chloroform? onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Does this bomb smell like chloroform?

Once upon a time, when the airplane and the bomb were both new technologies, people looked into using them to make war "humane." And in a 1928 issue of Popular Mechanics, writers speculated about what that would mean.

Would you like to live in a world where you could just wake up and belong to another nation? I don't mean figuratively. Popular Mechanics explains:

A thousand airplanes, each carrying five pounds of chloroform, could put the inhabitants of cities as large as Chicago or New York to sleep in a few moments - and similarly, planes flying above trenches might induce peaceful slumber in whole battalions of soldiers. They could be awakened having suffered relatively little harm.

Alternately, they could be either puzzled by the faint smell of chloroform being carried away on the wind, or die like butterflies in a killing jar. Those who awakened might still be inclined to fight - especially in cities like Chicago and New York. Chloroform was used as an early anesthesia, but it was abandoned as soon as alternate methods were found. People who had just a bit too much went into heart and respiratory failure as the drug depressed their nervous system. Soon chloroform was used almost exclusively to kill insects for collections and to kidnap ladies in 1930s movies.

The idea of the chloroform bomb was revived, lately, in a booklet sponsored by Al Qaeda, but it was meant a localized way to do damage, not a form of "peaceful" warfare that could subdue cities. So it looks like we'll be able to sleep soundly knowing that enemy soldiers aren't taking selfies next to our unconscious bodies for a bit longer.

Via The Amazing Weapons That Never Were, NY Daily News.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Does this bomb smell like chloroform?

Geologists find diamond-producing rocks in Antarctica onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Geologists find diamond-producing rocks in Antarctica

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For the first time ever, geologists working in Antarctica have found a type of rock that's known to bear diamonds — a discovery that could expose the polar continent to opportunistic prospectors.

Called kimberlite, it's a volcanic rock named after the town of Kimberley in South Africa, where the discovery of an 83.5-carat (16.7 g) diamond in 1871 kick-started a diamond rush. These rocks appear in vertical structures called kimberlite pipes — the single most important source of mined diamonds today. The rocks were found around Mount Meredith in the Prince Charles Mountains.

The geologists who discovered the kimberlite samples didn't find any diamonds, but they're now wondering if the icy continent contains vast mineral riches.

Antarctica is currently off limits to mining. In 1991, 50 signatories signed the Antarctic Treaty, an environmental accord that's set to expire in 2041. The treaty was put in place as a way to preserve the continent for scientific research and wildlife. The accord, which is only binding to the 50 nations who signed it (including the US and China), is expected to be extended when it expires.

But as Reuters reports, that's no guarantee:

"We do not know what the Treaty Parties' views will be on mining after 2041 or what technologies might exist that could make extraction of Antarctic minerals economically viable," said Kevin Hughes, of the Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research.

Mr Riley said there was a fine line between geological mapping and prospecting with an eye to mining. Nations including Russia, Ukraine and China have been more active in surveying Antarctica in recent years.

Indeed, if there's diamonds in them thar icy hills, it won't be easy to extract. The geologists who conducted the study doubt that the find could be commercially viable, citing Antarctica's remoteness, cold, and winter darkness. But where there's a will — or profit — there's a way.

Read the entire study at Nature Communications: "The discovery of kimberlites in Antarctica extends the vast Gondwanan Cretaceous province."

Related: Canada says it owns the North Pole

Image: NASA

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Geologists find diamond-producing rocks in Antarctica

Science student invents the perfect coffee mug onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Science student invents the perfect coffee mug

Scientists love coffee. More than anyone else, by some surveys. So in a way, it makes perfect sense that they would be responsible for what could be the greatest coffee-related invention since coffee-alcohol: a mug that keeps coffee hot – but not too hot – for hours on end.

Above: A 3-D printed model of the forthcoming "Temperfect" mug, with stainless steel veneer

The vessel, which is branded as the "Temperfect" mug, is the brainchild of Logan Maxwell, who came up with the idea as an undergrad at North Carolina State University. Any old thermos can keep a hot beverage hot, but as anyone whose melted off the roof of their mouth while sipping at a scalding cup of coffee will tell you, hotter is not necessarily better. Maxwell tells io9 the Temperfect mug is engineered to bring scalding beverages to a hot-but-drinkable temperature and keep it there.

"[Drink] anything above 140° [Fahrenheit] and one can risk burns," he tells io9. The Temperfect is designed to bring coffee or tea (which are typically brewed at around 200 °F) to an ideal drinking temperature in about two minutes, and keep it there for hours on end. Compare that to your standard vacuum-insulated mug (which can keep the beverage dangerously hot up to an hour after being filled) or the typical ceramic mug (which cools to quickly to enjoy much longer than maybe 20 minutes):

See the Ahhh...zone? That's where your coffee wants to be. Your conventional insulated mug prevents heat loss by sandwiching a vacuum between two walls. The Temperfect works in a similar fashion, but adds a third wall to the mix. Like a regular thermos, the Temperfect has a vacuum between its outer and middle walls, but between its middle and inner walls is a non-toxic chemical that Maxwell calls "Material X" (labeled in the animation below as "Temperfect insulation") that melts at 140° Fahrenheit. (Maxwell wouldn't tell us what Material X is, but assured us that it is a food-safe, non-toxic substance. "You literally could eat it if you wanted to," he says, "although I'm sure it wouldn't be too tasty."):

At room temperature, Material X is a solid, but pour a hot beverage into the mug and it quickly absorbs any excess heat, becoming a liquid while rapidly dropping the temperature of your brew. The excess heat is stored in Material X, and dissipates back into the coffee as it cools. The so-called "phase change" mug resembles similar prototypes first cooked up in the 1960s that never made it to market due to manufacturing hangups. Maxwell's colleague, an engineer by the name of Dean Verhoeven, went ahead and solved the manufacturing problem, and, thanks to a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign, the pair has more than enough cash to fund the initial production run of their mug, the temperature-time curve of which they say will resemble this recent prototype's:

That's three-hour layover in your beverage's perfect temperature zone. Not too shabby.

You can learn more about the mugs at on Maxwell and Verhoeven's Kickstarter page. It's already well-past funded, but it's your best bet if you want to score a Temperfect from the first production run.

[Via The Abstract]

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Science student invents the perfect coffee mug

Scientists have created remote controlled cyborg sperm onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Scientists have created remote controlled cyborg sperm

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Looking to take advantage of sperm's awesome swimming ability, researchers have cyborg-ized bull semen by positioning them inside tiny metal cylinders that can be steered with magnets. This means we now have a way to control a cell's direction inside the body — a breakthrough that could lead to efficient microscopic robots.

To make the "biohybrid micro-robot," Oliver Schmidt and colleagues captured and trapped bull sperm inside magnetic microtubes a mere 50x8 microns in size. The head of the sperm rests inside the metallic device, while the tail, or flagellum, remains outside.

With the mobility aspect taken care of, the researchers were able to orient the microtubes using external magnetic fields. The process works similarly to how a compass needle aligns with Earth's magnetic field.

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According to the researchers, this option is attractive because the biohybrid micro-robots are harmless to the human body, they provide their own power, and they can swim through viscous liquids.

"The combination of a biological power source and a microdevice is a compelling approach to the development of new microrobotic devices with fascinating future application," write the researchers in the study.

Read the entire study at Advanced Materials: "Development of a Sperm-Flagella Driven Micro-Bio-Robot".

Images: Schmidt et al./Advanced Materials.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Scientists have created remote controlled cyborg sperm

A Nobel winner has declared a boycott of top science journals, including Nature, Cell, and Science. onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com A Nobel winner has declared a boycott of top science journals, including Nature, Cell, and Science.

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A Nobel winner has declared a boycott of top science journals, including Nature, Cell, and Science. Biologist Randy Schekman says leading academic journals are distorting the scientific process, encouraging trendy research, and taking bribes. It's a "tyranny," he says, that must be broken.

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com A Nobel winner has declared a boycott of top science journals, including Nature, Cell, and Science.

We who spoke LOLcat now speak Doge onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com We who spoke LOLcat now speak Doge

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In the internet meme war between cats and dogs, the dogs are currently winning. The "doge" meme features an image (often of an adorable shiba dog), annotated with distinctive phrases representing the thoughts of the dog — or the dragon, or whatever is being depicted. What has the internet gained in its move from LOLcats to doges?

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Obviously, doges share a lot with LOLcats. Both come in the form of easily-shared images with brief jokes on them, written in a distinctive, non-grammatical style. Know Your Meme has a terrific history of the doge meme, which, like the LOLcat originated with the cute picture of a specific animal and then exploded from there.

If you recall, this was the original LOLcat, asking, "I CAN HAZ CHEEZBURGER?" That image is all but forgotten, though the Cheezburger meme has become (literally) a media empire devoted to fun stuff online.

Below you can see the original doge, a beautiful Shiba who is the color of a Twinkie. He still lingers in many doge memes, though he's slowly being phased out of newer ones like the Smaug doge at the top of this post.

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Also like LOLcats, doges have a distinctive font and style. LOLcats use a blocky, mostly all-caps font, with statements appearing either at the top of the image or the bottom — or both. Generally, a LOLcat statement is something you're supposed to imagine the cat (or whatever) saying out loud, or it functions as a caption. Doge images feature comic sans, often in different sizes and colors, positioned around the subject of the photo. They are intended to be like thoughts, floating around in the mind of the doge — or in the mind of the person looking at it.

Such linguisticks

Just as certain words recur in LOLcat pictures — everything from LOL and "I can haz" to "I'm in ur" and grumpy cat's many sayings — the doge has verbal tics. Saying "wow" is practically compulsory. As is remarking on how everything is really, really . . . something. "So" and "very" and "such" and "much" will begin many doge-speak phrases.

LOLcat has been around long enough to turn into its own language, with a vocabulary so large that it's come to encompass many ideas, and even a few non-cat animals like the walrus with his bukkit. Though dogs do not really exist in the LOLcat universe, God (I mean Ceiling Cat) does — there's even a Bible written entirely in LOLcat.

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Still, doge is developing its own grammatical quirks and visual style that take us in a very different direction from LOLcats. Doges don't make pronouncements. They make vague, impressionistically connected comments. The doge often brings to mind the kinds of comments made by a stoner ("wow"), whereas there's no doubt that LOLcats are pretty much always drunks — and, as the popularity of Grumpy Cat makes clear, they're mean drunks to boot.

And I'm not the only one who has noticed this sea change in what our memes allow us to express.

Last week, I tweeted this:

And just like that, we all stopped speaking LOLcat and started speaking doge. Wow. Much changes. Very linguistic trends.

— Annalee Newitz (@Annaleen) December 3, 2013

It got re-tweeted and commented on almost 40 thousand times, which is a lot for a humble science journalist like myself. Then it got picked up on the Lingua Fandom Tumblr, where it garnered almost 23 thousand notes (wow! such comments!). On that Tumblr, cinquespotted observed that doge may be linguistically simpler than LOLcat, but seems to express more complicated ideas:

I'm actually not convinced that doge is a more difficult syntax, actually; I think the opposite is true, at least from a purely grammatical/syntactical perspective . . .

Doge possesses no verbs, even after the markers (here, the intensifiers) are introduced. LOLcat, on the other hand, has at least four different identifiable verb forms; it has the copula, the present tense, the progressive, and a simplified past tense in which all endings are resolved to -ed (e.g. "i made you a cookie but i eated it")*.

(*—I'm aware that I'm mixing tense and aspect here, which is why I use "forms" and not either tense or aspect, as my aim is to show the variety of functions the verb can appear in within a LOLcat expression.)

On the other hand, LOLcat tends to not take compounds, be they compound nouns, adjective-noun pairs, or even non-compounded noun abstractions (i.e. in the LOLphilosophers meme, you would be more likely to see "im in ur base, challenging ur superstructure" than "im in ur episteme, exposin the prduction of scientifik knowlidg"). (Both dialects seem to eschew prepositional phrases equally so that's a draw.)

Basically—doge seems to have a simpler, or at least more regimented, grammatical structure than LOLcat, which in turn seems to allow it to explore more complex philosophical ideas.

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Doge has no verbs. Think about that. I'm sure it's already developing verbs as I write this, but the fundamental structure — such words! so thinking! wow! — is mostly nouns and adjectives. It's a meme of contemplation rather than action. Which makes sense, given that doge is supposed to capture the act of thinking.

Very change. So psychological theory.

Still, it may be a difficult transition from LOLcat to doge. The usual meme generators are racing to keep up, and are offering doge meme generators that look suspiciously like LOLcat generators with LOLcat crossed out and Doge written in with crayon. Over at MemeGenerator, the Doge page offers you the distinctive LOLcat typeface, instead of comic sans, and only allows you to type in LOLcat regions of the photo — top and bottom, instead of in many sizes scattered randomly over the image:

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WeKnowMemes gets the scattered text right, but still gives you LOLcat font:

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It seems that the syntax of doge is easier to master than the style. WebRender is the preferred Doge generator of Reddit, for good reason — this one gets it right. You've got multiple colors, scattered blips in comic sans, and the result is a quick-and-dirty Doge.

The fact is that the doge meme is new enough that there aren't a lot of places online that will help you make your own doge — though there are a lot of arguments over what the hell this meme is, and how to pronounce it.

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It's not clear whether this meme is going to endure online and explode into the manyfold wonder of LOLcats, or if it's just the sort of meme that takes off and dies out the way "All your base" did a decade ago.

Over at The American Scholar, psychologist Jessica Love observes that both LOLcat and doge are part of a larger subset of grammatical humor:

According to one psychological theory, humor is fundamentally about detecting something that violates our expectations, but in a nonthreatening way. That's why someone getting mauled by a bear in a shopping mall is funny—unless it just happened to you. A hundred years from now, your descendants will find your mauling hilarious. Sorry, but it's true.

Given grammar's relatively low stakes, then, it is fodder for immediate humor . . . Our grammatical knowledge is so deeply ingrained in us that we can't help but detect these violations even when we're in some sense expecting them.

At least to my ear (and Laurel, a fellow psycholinguist, agrees), this brand of humor is at its keenest when the grammatical violation awkwardly disrupts—but doesn't break—the logic of the sentence. This means that some grammatical elements are riper for improvised manipulation than others. Subject-verb agreement, for instance, can often be violated without a great loss in comprehensibility (I is eating), as can past-tense regularization or double-irregularization (I maded that) and the grammatical distinction between count and mass nouns (I'll have all the cheeses! Just one chee for me.). In contrast, swapping around the logical operators if and then or and and or, for instance, would likely break the logic of the sentence, making that kind of spontaneous manipulation less likely.

Wow.

I have a feeling that doge might have the same potential to endure and grow as LOLcat for two simple reasons.

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One, LOLcat has always always left half the internet population out in the cold. Dog lovers have nothing to challenge the supremacy of the self-satisfied, grumpy, lazy, weird cat. Where are the monorail dogs and invisibl bike poodles? Nowhere. Until now. At last, we have doge.

And two, doge allows us to express something that LOLcat never did. LOLcats are devoted to abrupt exclamations, rude proclamations, and simple assertions. Doge lets us express our dreamy, muddled thoughts in all their complexity. They let us literally represent how a picture can be worth a thousand words, rather than just a brief LOL caption.

The doge is the antithesis of the LOLcat — the expansive wow to its greedy "can haz." Doges bring a subversive plurality to the LOLcat's stark, single statements. At last the dog lovers and philosophers among us have a meme of our own.

Annalee Newitz is the editor-in-chief of io9, and this is her column. She is also the author of Scatter, Adapt and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction.

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onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com We who spoke LOLcat now speak Doge

Canada says it owns the North Pole, despite not having a proper map onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Canada says it owns the North Pole, despite not having a proper map

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The Canadian government is claiming 463,323 square miles (1.2 million square kilometers) in the Arctic, a wide expanse of territory that includes the North Pole. Trouble is, Canada hasn't yet fully mapped the era, nor does it have the scientific evidence to back the claim.

Along with Russia and Denmark, Canada is currently in a mad territorial dash to claim all that juicy, globally-warmed area for itself. Because, you know, oil. Similar, but weaker, territorial claims are also being made by France and the United States.

In a characteristically belligerent gesture, Russia made a territorial overture back in October, saying it would restore a major Soviet-era military base in the Arctic; President Putin has angrily dismissed suggestions that the region should be placed under the jurisdiction of the international community.

And now Canada is making its moves, albeit through the UN-channel — and despite the country's own admission that it doesn't yet possess all the evidence required to make the claim. The submission, which the Canadian government says is preliminary, was made last week to the United Nations Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf. The federal government wants its scientists to finish mapping a giant undersea mountain range that Ottawa claims will secure the sea floor under the North Pole.

The Calgary Herald reports:

The undersea Lomonosov Ridge runs from near Ellesmere Island northward over the pole and would be the geological basis for a Canadian territorial claim. Scientists suggest it looks as if the ridge is connected to the Canadian land mass, but Canada has only done aerial surveys of the ridge once it gets past the pole.

"The reality is the Lomonosov Ridge wasn't fully mapped in the submissions that my department did," [Foreign Affairs Minister John] Baird said. "And, frankly, we think it's important when you do this extensive mapping, we wanted to get the entire Arctic map, including on the ridge."

Arctic experts point out that Russia and Denmark also argue the Lomonosov Ridge extends from their shores. International law expert Michael Byers points out the pole lies on the Danish side of the ridge. It also lies on the Danish side of a line that runs equidistant from Ellesmere Island and Greenland.

"In five or 10 or 20 years, we are going to have to admit that the North Pole is not Canadian," said Byers, who teaches at the University of British Columbia. "(Harper) does not want to be the prime minister seen publicly as having surrendered the North Pole, even if the scientific facts don't support a Canadian claim. What he's essentially doing here is holding this place, standing up for Canadian sovereignty, while in private he knows full well that position is untenable."

Interestingly, one possible outcome is that all three High Arctic neighbours will get sizeable chunks of the Lomonosov Ridge. If that should happen, Canada would still do well, as the ridge would be equally divided between the three countries, putting Canada's boundary 230 miles (370 km) past the North Pole.

Image: NASA

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com Canada says it owns the North Pole, despite not having a proper map

British Think Tank Revives 40-year-old Plan to Build Space Colonies onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com British Think Tank Revives 40-year-old Plan to Build Space Colonies

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The esteemed British Interplanetary Society is resurrecting an ambitious idea for creating giant orbiting homes in space. But to make it economically and technically feasible, it will have to rely on a plan devised by Gerard O'Neill back in the 1970s.

The BIS, as some of you may know, came up with a plan back in the 1930s to send a multi-stage rocket and a manned lander to the moon. It was eerily reminiscent of the Apollo Mission that came some 30 years later. This think tank has a history, so it would be smart to take these guys seriously.

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Now, as BBC Future reports, Jerry Stone of BIS's SPACE (Study Project Advancing Colony Engineering) is trying to do something similar — to show that building a very large space colony is technically feasible. The plan would call for space-based human habitats consisting of giant rotating spaceships containing landscaped biospheres that can house up to 10 million people. The scheme is commonly referred to as an O'Neill cylinder and similar to the ones portrayed in Babylon 5 and Elysium.

In terms of the technology required, we're almost there. Richard Hollingham explains:

O'Neill deliberately designed the structure using existing 1970s technology, materials and construction techniques, rather than adopting futuristic inventions. The hollow cylinder, for instance, was based on steel and aluminium. After detailed calculations, he claimed his concept was feasible at the time he published it.

Stone is bringing these plans up to date using today's technologies. Rather than building the shell from aluminium, for example, Stone argues tougher and lighter carbon composites could be used instead. Advances in solar cell and climate control technologies could also be used to make life easier and more comfortable in human space colonies.

One of the biggest theoretical challenges O'Neill faced was the effort and cost of construction. That, says Stone, will be solved when a new generation of much cheaper rocket launchers and spaceplanes has been developed, such as the UK-built Skyon. Using robot builders could also help.

"Ninety per cent of the material to build the colonies would come from the Moon," says Stone. "We know from Apollo there's silicon for the windows, and aluminium, iron and magnesium for the main structure. There's even oxygen in the lunar soil."

Related: The Skylon space plane | Meet the people who want to build our first starship

Quite obviously, the BIS doesn't have the means to fund such a project, but Stone is hoping that a consortium of corporations and/or some adventurous multi-billionaires will chip in.

Read more at BBC Future where Hollingham describes the plan and the O'Neill Cylinders in much greater detail.

Images: Elysium, NASA Ames Research Center

onlinecollegedegreee.blogspot.com British Think Tank Revives 40-year-old Plan to Build Space Colonies