38 Topics For IELTS Reading BBC NEWS

Collected By: Nam Đỗ | IELTS Sharer Collected By: Nam Đỗ | IELTS Sharer CONTENTS Topic Improve your memory in 40 seconds Topic Is another human living inside you? Topic The best (and worst) ways to spot a liar Topic How to learn 30 languages Topic The mystery of the female orgasm 13 Topic The suprising downsides of being clever 19 Topic Why babies laugh out loud 23 Topic Why we intiutively believe we have free will? 25 Topic I can predict the weather with my nose 27 Topic 11 The geniuses who invented prothetic limbs 33 Topic 12 If alien life exists on exoplanets, how would we know? 36 Topic 13 To find aliens, we need to build a giant space parasol 37 Topic 14 What is it like to have never felt an emotion? 41 Topic 15 The submarines that revealed a mysterious world 45 Topic 16 The air that makes you fat 48 Topic 17 The future of medicine is testing our body fluids at home 51 Topic 18 Dose it pay to be kind to strangers 54 Topic 19 How much would you payt to live for an extra year 58 Topic 20 The secret codes you’re not meant to know 61 Topic 21 Are any foods safe to eat anymore? Here’s the truth 64 Topic 22 Is beer better (or worse) for you than wine? 68 Topic 23 Does mixing alcoholic drinks cause hangover? 71 Topic 24 Does coffee really sober you up when drunk 73 Topic 25 How to live forever 74 Topic 26 The real reason germs spread in the winter 77 Topic 27 Why we laugh inappropriately? 80 Topic 28 One of science’s most baffling question? Why we yawn 84 Topic 29 How muc would you pay to live for an extra year? 87 Topic 30 The nasa team keeping tabs on intergalatic death rays 90 Topic 31 The private investigator who spies using drones 92 Topic 32 Why women live longer than men? 95 Topic 33 Why the US hides 700 million barrels of oil underground 98 Topic 34 How you dismantle a nuclear submarine? 102 Topic 35 The secret of the desert aircraft “boneyards” 106 Topic 36 The dystopian lake filled by the world’s tech lust 110 Topic 37 Have you ever felt “Solastalgia”? 113 Topic 38 Wernher von Braun’s Bold plan for space exploration 115 Collected By: Nam Đỗ | IELTS Sharer Topic Improve your memory in 40 seconds Ever had the feeling your past is slipping away? There’s a simple trick that should reinforce your recollections By David Robson 11 November 2015 Have you ever seen or heard something amazing – a scene in a film, a joke or a song – only to forget it later on? Instead of the crystal clear images you wanted to recall, you’re instead left with scraps of images and mangled sentences, or more frustratingly still, nothing at all Even monumental events, like meeting a film star, can sometimes fade surprisingly quickly There may be a disarmingly simple way to cement those memories, however According to research by Chris Bird at the University of Sussex, all it requires is a few seconds of your time and a bit of imagination Bird recently asked some students to lie in a brain scanner and view a series of short clips from YouTube (involving, for example, neighbours playing practical jokes on each other) Straight after some of the clips, they were given 40 seconds to replay the scene in their minds and describe it to themselves For the others, they just moved onto a new video By simply describing the event to themselves, they were able to remember twice as many details a week or two later It turned out that simply describing the event to themselves massively improved their chances of remembering it accurately a week or so later: on average, they were able to remember twice as many details Want to prove it for yourself? Take a look at the short video below to test this simple principle of memory improvement, and you will see how powerful it can be Bird also found that his brain scans appeared to reflect the strength of the memory: when the activity during their descriptions closely mirrored the activation as they watched the video itself, the students seemed to have built particularly strong foundations for later recall That may, perhaps, be a sign of just how much effort and detail they were imagining as they described the scene It could also be that it allowed the students to peg the events to other memories; one student compared a character in the clips to James Bond, for instance – instantly making him more memorable In other words, if you want to make sure something sticks in your mind, just take a minute or so to describe it to yourself, consciously and deliberately picking the most vivid details Bạn đến BD IELTS Club để tìm nhiều tài liệu P a g e | 122 Collected By: Nam Đỗ | IELTS Sharer Bird can see how it might be particularly important in the courtroom “The findings have implications for any situation where accurate recall of an event is critical, such as witnessing an accident or crime,” he says “Memory for the event will be significantly improved if the witness rehearses the sequence of events as soon as possible afterwards.” But it could be equally helpful for anyone hoping to cling to something worth remembering Interested to learn more ways to boost your memory? Here are BBC Future's guides on "How to learn like a memory champion" and "How to learn 30 languages" Topic Is another human living inside you? You may think your body and mind are your own In fact, you are a fusion of many organisms - including, potentially, another person Words by David Robson, photography by Ariko Inaoka By David Robson 18 September 2015 Once upon a time, your origins were easy to understand Your dad met your mum, they had some fun, and from a tiny fertilised egg you emerged kicking and screaming into the world You are half your mum, half your dad – and 100% yourself Except, that simple tale has now become a lot more complicated Besides your genes from parents, you are a mosaic of viruses, bacteria – and potentially, other humans Indeed, if you are a twin, you are particularly likely to be carrying bits of your sibling within your body and brain Stranger still, they may be influencing how you act “A very large number of different human and non-human individuals are struggling inside us for control “ “Humans are not unitary individuals but superorganisms,” says Peter Kramer at the University of Padua “A very large number of different human and non-human individuals are all incessantly struggling inside us for control.” Together with Paola Bressan, he recently wrote a paper in the journal Perspectives in Psychological Science, calling for psychologists and psychiatrists to appreciate the ways this may influence our behaviour That may sound alarming, but it has long been known that our bodies are really a mishmash of many different organisms Microbes in your gut can produce neurotransmitters that alter your mood; some scientists have even proposed that the microbes may sway your appetite, so that you crave their favourite food An infection of a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii, meanwhile, might just lead you to your death In nature, the microbe warps rats’ brains so that they are attracted to cats, which will then offer a cosy home for it to reproduce But humans can be infected and subjected to the same kind of mind control too: the microbe seems to make someone risky, and increases the chance they will suffer from schizophrenia or suicidal depression Currently, around a third of British meat carries this parasite, for instance – despite the fact an infection could contribute to these mental illnesses “We should stop this,” says Kramer Infiltrating siblings In this light, it becomes clear that our actions are not entirely our own It’s enough to make you question your sense of identity, but the idea of infiltration becomes even more eerie Bạn đến BD IELTS Club để tìm nhiều tài liệu P a g e | 122 Collected By: Nam Đỗ | IELTS Sharer when you realise that your brain has not just been invaded by tiny microbes – but also by other human beings Even non-conjoined twins could be sharing organs without realising it The most visible example might be a case of conjoined twins sharing a brain, says Kramer, but even regular twins could have shared organs without realising it During early development, cells can be passed between twins or triplets Once considered a rare occurrence, we now know it is surprisingly common Around 8% of non-identical twins and 21% of triplets, for example, have not one, but two blood groups: one produced by their own cells, and one produced by “alien” cells absorbed from their twin They are, in other words, a chimera – a fusion of two bodies – and it may occur in many organs, including the brain Developing together in the womb, twins may swap cells, making them even closer than we'd previously realised (Credit: Ariko Inaoka) Brothers from another mother Women accidentally carrying a "twin's" child Lydia Fairchild’s paternity test was meant to be straightforward, proving to the courts that her two sons’ father was the person she said he was When the test came back, however, Fairchild herself came up as a blank: there was no trace of her DNA in her own children The courts threatened to convict her of illegal surrogacy – they assumed it was a scam to gain benefits Luckily, at around the same time, a scientific paper reported a similar case in which a woman was apparently not the biological mother of two of her three children The reason was that she was a chimera: a case in which two twins had merged into one body early in development Being the product of two different cell lines, some of her eggs carried a genome that was different from the rest of the body Needless to say, the discovery has caused Fairchild to question her own identity “Telling my sons about this was the hardest part because I felt that part of me hadn't passed on to them,” she told the website Jezebel “I thought, ‘Oh, I wonder if they'll really feel that I'm not quite their real mother somehow because the genes that I should've given to them, I didn't give to them.’” A chimera brain could have serious consequences For instance, we know that the arrangement of different brain regions can be crucial for its function – but the presence of foreign tissue, being directed by different genes carrying a different blueprint, may throw that intricate design into disarray This may explain, for instance, why twins are less likely to be right-handed – a simple trait that normally relies on the relative organisation of the right and the left hemispheres Perhaps chimerism has upset the balance Even if you not think you ever had a twin, there are many other ways you might be invaded by another human’s cells It’s possible, for instance, that you started off as two foetuses in the womb, but the twins merged during early development Since it occurs at such an early age of development, the cells can become incorporated into the tissue and seem to develop normally, yet they are carrying another person’s genetic blueprint “You look like one person, but you have the cells of another person in you – effectively, you have always been two people,” says Kramer In one extreme case, a woman was surprised to be told that she was not the biological mother of her two children (See “Brother from another mother”, left) Alternatively, cells from an older sibling might stay around the mother’s body, only to find their way into your body after you are conceived Bạn đến BD IELTS Club để tìm nhiều tài liệu P a g e | 122 Collected By: Nam Đỗ | IELTS Sharer However it happens, it’s perfectly plausible that tissue from another human could cause the brain to develop in unexpected ways, says Lee Nelson from the University of Washington She’s currently examining whether cells from the mother herself may be implanted in the baby brain “A difference in the amount, cell type, or the time during development at which the cells were acquired could all result in abnormalities,” she says Nelson has found that even as an adult, you are not immune from human invaders A couple of years ago, Nelson and William Chan at the University of Alberta in Edmonton took slices of women’s brain tissue and screened their genome for signs of the Y-chromosome Around 63% were harbouring male cells “Not only did we find male DNA in female human brains as a general observation, we found it to be present in multiple brain regions,” says Chan In other words, their brains were speckled with cells from a man’s body One logical conclusion is that it came from a baby: somehow, her own son’s stem cells had made it through the placenta and lodged in her brain Strangely, this seemed to decrease the chances that the mother would subsequently develop Alzheimer’s – though exactly why remains a mystery Some researchers are even beginning to wonder whether these cells might influence a mother’s mindset during pregnancy Our knowledge of the human “superorganism” is still in its infancy, so many of the consequences are purely theoretical at the moment Kramer and Bressan's aim with their paper was not to give definitive answers, but to enlighten other psychologists and psychiatrists about the many entities that make us who we are today “We cannot understand human behaviour by considering only one or the other individual,” Kramer says “Ultimately, we must understand them all to understand how ‘we’ behave.” For instance, scientists often compare sets of twins to understand the origins of behaviour, but the fact that even non-identical twins may have swapped bits of brain tissue might have muddied those results We should be particularly careful when using these twin studies to compare conditions such as schizophrenia that may arise from faulty brain organisation, Bressan and Kramer say In general, however, we shouldn’t feel hostile towards these invaders – after all, they made you who you are today “I think it is now clear that our natural immigrants are with us for the long-term, for better or for worse,” says Nelson “And I would think “for better” outweighs ‘for worse’.” Topic The best (and worst) ways to spot a liar Forget body language or eye movements There are much better ways to identify the deceitful By David Robson September 2015 Thomas Ormerod’s team of security officers faced a seemingly impossible task At airports across Europe, they were asked to interview passengers on their history and travel plans Ormerod had planted a handful of people arriving at security with a false history, and a made-up future – and his team had to guess who they were In fact, just one in 1000 of the people they interviewed would be deceiving them Identifying the liar should have been about as easy as finding a needle in a haystack Using previous methods of lie detection, you might as well just flip a coin Bạn đến BD IELTS Club để tìm nhiều tài liệu P a g e | 122 Collected By: Nam Đỗ | IELTS Sharer So, what did they do? One option would be to focus on body language or eye movements, right? It would have been a bad idea Study after study has found that attempts – even by trained police officers – to read lies from body language and facial expressions are more often little better than chance According to one study, just 50 out of 20,000 people managed to make a correct judgement with more than 80% accuracy Most people might as well just flip a coin Ormerod’s team tried something different – and managed to identify the fake passengers in the vast majority of cases Their secret? To throw away many of the accepted cues to deception and start anew with some startlingly straightforward techniques When it comes to spotting liars, the eyes don't have it (Credit: Thinkstock) Over the last few years, deception research has been plagued by disappointing results Most previous work had focused on reading a liar’s intentions via their body language or from their face – blushing cheeks, a nervous laugh, darting eyes The most famous example is Bill Clinton touching his nose when he denied his affair with Monica Lewinsky – taken at the time to be a sure sign he was lying The idea, says Timothy Levine at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, was that the act of lying provokes some strong emotions – nerves, guilt, perhaps even exhilaration at the challenge – that are difficult to contain Even if we think we have a poker face, we might still give away tiny flickers of movement known as “microexpressions” that might give the game away, they claimed The problem is the huge variety of human behaviour – there is no universal dictionary of body language Yet the more psychologists looked, the more elusive any reliable cues appeared to be The problem is the huge variety of human behaviour With familiarity, you might be able to spot someone’s tics whenever they are telling the truth, but others will probably act very differently; there is no universal dictionary of body language “There are no consistent signs that always arise alongside deception,” says Ormerod, who is based at the University of Sussex “I giggle nervously, others become more serious, some make eye contact, some avoid it.” Levine agrees: “The evidence is pretty clear that there aren’t any reliable cues that distinguish truth and lies,” he says And although you may hear that our subconscious can spot these signs even if they seem to escape our awareness, this too seems to have been disproved Despite these damning results, our safety often still hinges on the existence of these mythical cues Consider the screening some passengers might face before a long-haul flight – a process Ormerod was asked to investigate in the run up to the 2012 Olympics Typically, he says, officers will use a “yes/no” questionnaire about the flyer’s intentions, and they are trained to observe “suspicious signs” (such as nervous body language) that might betray deception “It doesn’t give a chance to listen to what they say, and think about credibility, observe behaviour change – they are the critical aspects of deception detection,” he says The existing protocols are also prone to bias, he says – officers were more likely to find Bạn đến BD IELTS Club để tìm nhiều tài liệu P a g e | 122 Collected By: Nam Đỗ | IELTS Sharer suspicious signs in certain ethnic groups, for instance “The current method actually prevents deception detection,” he says If only body language revealed deception (Credit: Getty Images) Clearly, a new method is needed But given some of the dismal results from the lab, what should it be? Ormerod’s answer was disarmingly simple: shift the focus away from the subtle mannerisms to the words people are actually saying, gently probing the right pressure points to make the liar’s front crumble Ormerod and his colleague Coral Dando at the University of Wolverhampton identified a series of conversational principles that should increase your chances of uncovering deceit: Use open questions This forces the liar to expand on their tale until they become entrapped in their own web of deceit Employ the element of surprise Investigators should try to increase the liar’s “cognitive load” – such as by asking them unanticipated questions that might be slightly confusing, or asking them to report an event backwards in time – techniques that make it harder for them to maintain their façade Watch for small, verifiable details If a passenger says they are at the University of Oxford, ask them to tell you about their journey to work If you find a contradiction, though, don’t give yourself away – it’s better to allow the liar’s confidence to build as they rattle off more falsehoods, rather than correcting them Observe changes in confidence Watch carefully to see how a potential liar’s style changes when they are challenged: a liar may be just as verbose when they feel in charge of a conversation, but their comfort zone is limited and they may clam up if they feel like they are losing control Liar vs liar It takes one to know one Ironically, liars turn out to be better lie detectors Geoffrey Bird at University College London and colleagues recently set up a game in which subjects had to reveal true or false statements about themselves They were also asked to judge each other’s credibility It turned out that people who were better at telling fibs could also detect others’ tall tales, perhaps because they recognised the tricks The aim is a casual conversation rather than an intense interrogation Under this gentle pressure, however, the liar will give themselves away by contradicting their own story, or by becoming obviously evasive or erratic in their responses “The important thing is that there is no magic silver bullet; we are taking the best things and putting them together for a cognitive approach,” says Ormerod Bạn đến BD IELTS Club để tìm nhiều tài liệu P a g e | 122 Collected By: Nam Đỗ | IELTS Sharer A psychological experiment in an airport revealed new tricks to spot liars (Credit: Thinkstock) Ormerod openly admits his strategy might sound like common sense “A friend said that you are trying to patent the art of conversation,” he says But the results speak for themselves The team prepared a handful of fake passengers, with realistic tickets and travel documents They were given a week to prepare their story, and were then asked to line up with other, genuine passengers at airports across Europe Officers trained in Ormerod and Dando’s interviewing technique were more than 20 times more likely to detect these fake passengers than people using the suspicious signs, finding them 70% of the time “It’s really impressive,” says Levine, who was not involved in this study He thinks it is particularly important that they conducted the experiment in real airports “It’s the most realistic study around.” The art of persuasion Levine’s own experiments have proven similarly powerful Like Ormerod, he believes that clever interviews designed to reveal holes in a liar’s story are far better than trying to identify tell-tale signs in body language He recently set up a trivia game, in which undergraduates played in pairs for a cash prize of $5 for each correct answer they gave Unknown to the students, their partners were actors, and when the game master temporarily left the room, the actor would suggest that they quickly peek at the answers to cheat on the game A handful of the students took him up on the offer One expert was even correct 100% of the time, across 33 interviews Afterwards, the students were all questioned by real federal agents about whether or not they had cheated Using tactical questions to probe their stories – without focusing on body language or other cues – they managed to find the cheaters with more than 90% accuracy; one expert was even correct 100% of the time, across 33 interviews – a staggering result that towers above the accuracy of body language analyses Importantly, a follow-up study found that even novices managed to achieve nearly 80% accuracy, simply by using the right, open-ended questions that asked, for instance, how their partner would tell the story Are police any better at spotting lying suspects than anyone else? (Credit: Thinkstock) Bạn đến BD IELTS Club để tìm nhiều tài liệu P a g e | 122 Collected By: Nam Đỗ | IELTS Sharer Indeed, often the investigators persuaded the cheaters to openly admit their misdeed “The experts were fabulously good at this,” says Levine Their secret was a simple trick known to masters in the art of persuasion: they would open the conversation by asking the students how honest they were Simply getting them to say they told the truth primed them to be more candid later “People want to think of being honest, and this ties them into being cooperative,” says Levine “Even the people who weren’t honest had difficulty pretending to be cooperative [after this], so for the most part you could see who was faking it.” Another trick is to ask people how honest they are Clearly, such tricks may already be used by some expert detectives – but given the folklore surrounding body language, it’s worth emphasising just how powerful persuasion can be compared to the dubious science of body language Despite their successes, Ormerod and Levine are both keen that others attempt to replicate and expand on their findings, to make sure that they stand up in different situations “We should watch out for big sweeping claims,” says Levine Although the techniques will primarily help law enforcement, the same principles might just help you hunt out the liars in your own life “I it with kids all the time,” Ormerod says The main thing to remember is to keep an open mind and not to jump to early conclusions: just because someone looks nervous, or struggles to remember a crucial detail, does not mean they are guilty Instead, you should be looking for more general inconsistencies There is no fool-proof form of lie detection, but using a little tact, intelligence, and persuasion, you can hope that eventually, the truth will out Topic How to learn 30 languages Some people can speak a seemingly impossible number of tongues How they manage it, asks David Robson, and what can we learn from them?  By David Robson 29 May 2015 Out on a sunny Berlin balcony, Tim Keeley and Daniel Krasa are firing words like bullets at each other First German, then Hindi, Nepali, Polish, Croatian, Mandarin and Thai – they’ve barely spoken one language before the conversation seamlessly melds into another Together, they pass through about 20 different languages or so in total Back inside, I find small groups exchanging tongue twisters Others are gathering in threes, preparing for a rapid-fire game that involves interpreting two different languages simultaneously It looks like the perfect recipe for a headache, but they are nonchalant “It’s quite a common situation for us,” a woman called Alisa tells me It can be difficult enough to learn one foreign tongue Yet I’m here in Berlin for the Polyglot Gathering, a meeting of 350 or so people who speak multiple languages – some as diverse as Manx, Klingon and Saami, the language of reindeer herders in Scandinavia Indeed, a surprising proportion of them are “hyperglots”, like Keeley and Krasa, who can speak at least 10 languages One of the most proficient linguists I meet here, Richard Simcott, leads a team of polyglots at a company called eModeration – and he uses about 30 languages himself With a modest knowledge of Italian and some rudimentary Danish, I feel somewhat out of place among the hyperglots But they say you should learn from the best, so I am here to try to discover their secrets Bạn đến BD IELTS Club để tìm nhiều tài liệu P a g e | 122 Collected By: Nam Đỗ | IELTS Sharer The Kara Sea area is now a target for oil and gas companies – and accidental drilling into such waste could, in principle, breach reactor containments or fuel rod cladding, and release radionuclides into the fishing grounds, warns Bellona's managing director Nils Bohmer Official submarine graveyards are much more visible: you can even see them on Google Maps or Google Earth Zoom in on America's biggest nuclear waste repository in Hanford, Washington, Sayda Bay in the arctic Kola Peninsula, or the shipyards near Vladivostok and you'll see them There are row after row of massive steel canisters, each around 12m long They are lined up in ranks in Hanford's long, earthen pits awaiting a future mass burial, sitting in regimented rows on a Sayda Bay dockside, or floating on the waters of the Sea of Japan, shackled to a pier at the Pavlovks sub base near Vladivostok Drained and removed These canisters are all that remain of hundreds of nuclear subs Known as "threecompartment units" they are the sealed, de-fuelled reactor blocks produced in a decommissioning process perfected at the US Department of Defense's Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Bremerton, Washington It’s a meticulous process First, the defunct sub is towed to a secure de-fuelling dock where its reactor compartment is drained of all liquids to expose its spent nuclear fuel assemblies Each assembly is then removed and placed in spent nuclear fuel casks and put on secure trains for disposal at a long-term waste storage and reprocessing plant In the US, this is the Naval Reactor Facility at the sprawling Idaho National Laboratory, and in Russia the Mayak plutonium production and reprocessing plant in Siberia is the final destination (Credit: Getty Images) Although the reactor machinery – steam generators, pumps, valves and piping – now contains no enriched uranium, the metals in it are rendered radioactive by decades of neutron bombardment shredding their atoms So after fuel removal, the sub is towed into dry dock where cutting tools and blowtorches are used to sever the reactor compartment, plus an emptied compartment either side of it, from the submarine's hull Then thick steel seals are welded to either end So the canisters are not merely receptacles: they are giant highpressure steel segments of the nuclear submarine itself – all that remains of it, in fact, as all nonradioactive submarine sections are then recycled Russia also uses this technique because the West feared that its less rigorous decommissioning processes risked fissile materials getting into unfriendly hands At Andreeva Bay, near Sayda, for instance, Russia still stores spent fuel from 90 subs from the 1960s and 1970s, for instance So in 2002, the G8 nations started a 10-year, $20bn programme to transfer Puget Sound's decommissioning knowhow to the Russian Federation That involved vastly improving technology and storage at their de-fuelling facility in Severodvinsk and their dismantling facility, and by building a land-based storage dock for the decommissioned reactors Bạn đến BD IELTS Club để tìm nhiều tài liệu P a g e 104 | 122 Collected By: Nam Đỗ | IELTS Sharer Floating menace Safer land-based storage matters because the reactor blocks had been left afloat at Sayda Bay, as the air-filled compartments either side of the reactor compartment provide buoyancy, says Bohmer But at Pavlovks, near Vladivostok, 54 of the canisters are still afloat and at the mercy of the weather Decommissioning this way is not always possible, however, says Bohmer Some Soviet subs had liquid metal cooled reactors – using a lead-bismuth mixture to remove heat from the core – rather than the common pressurised water reactor (PWR) In a cold, defunct reactor the lead-bismuth coolant freezes, turning it into an unwieldy solid block Bohmer says two such submarines are not yet decommissioned and have had to be moved to an extremely remote dockyard at Gremikha Bay – also on the Kola Peninsula – for safety's sake When nuclear submarines reach the end of their lives, some of their hulks remain dangerously radioactive (Credit: Science Photo Library) Using the three-compartment-unit method, Russia has so far decommissioned 120 nuclear submarines of the Northern Fleet and 75 subs from its Pacific Fleet In the US, meanwhile, 125 Cold War-era subs have been dismantled this way France, too, has used the same procedure In Britain, however, Royal Navy nuclear subs are designed so that the reactor module can be removed without having to sever compartments from the midsection "The reactor pressure vessel can be removed in one piece, encased, transported and stored," says a spokesman for the UK Ministry of Defence However Britain's plans to decommission 12 defunct submarines stored at Devonport in the south of England and seven at Rosyth in Scotland won't happen any time soon as the government still has to decide which of five possible UK sites will eventually store those pressure vessels and spent fuel This has raised community concerns as the numbers of defunct nuclear-fuelled subs is building up at Devonport and Rosyth, as BBC News reported last year Water fears Environmental groups have also raised concerns about fuel storage in the US The Idaho National Lab has been the ultimate destination for all US Navy high-level spent fuel since the first nuclear sub, USS Nautilus, was developed in 1953 "The prototype reactor for the USS Nautilus was tested at INL and since then every scrap of spent fuel from the nuclear navy has ended up in Idaho It is stored above the upstream end of the Snake River Aquifer, the second largest unified underground body of water on the North American continent," says Beatrice Brailsford of the Snake River Alliance, an environmental lobby group "The spent fuel is stored above ground, but the rest of the waste is buried above the aquifer and that practice may continue for another half century It is a source of concern for many people in Idaho." It's not only the aquifer's fresh water that's at risk: the state’s signature crop, potatoes, would also be affected Bạn đến BD IELTS Club để tìm nhiều tài liệu P a g e 105 | 122 Collected By: Nam Đỗ | IELTS Sharer (Credit: AFP/Getty Images) Even with high security, radioactive material can occasionally escape – sometimes in bizarre ways For instance both INL and Hanford have suffered unusual radiation leaks from tumbleweeds blowing into waste cooling ponds, picking up contaminated water, and then being blown over the facility's perimeter by the wind The expensive, long-term measures that have to be taken to render a defunct nuclear sub safe don’t seem to deter military planners from building more vessels "As far as the US is concerned there is no indication that the Navy believes nuclear submarines have been anything less than a stellar success and replacements for the major submarine classes are in the works." says Edwin Lyman, nuclear policy analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a pressure group, in Cambridge, Massachusetts The Russian Navy is planning to launch several new submarines (Credit: Science Photo Library) The US is not alone: Russia has four new nuclear subs under construction at Severodvinsk and may build a further eight before 2020 "Despite limited budgets Russia is committed to building up its nuclear fleet again," says Bohmer China is doing likewise The submarine graveyards and spent fuel stores, it appears, will continue to be busy Topic 35 The secret of the desert aircraft “boneyards” What happens when an aircraft is no longer needed? In the desert dry of the southwestern US, vast ‘boneyards’ are homes to thousands of aircraft, Stephen Dowling writes   By Stephen Dowling 18 September 2014 If you find yourself driving down South Kolb Road in the Arizona city of Tucson, you’ll find the houses give way to a much more unusual view; rows of military aircraft, still and silent, spread out under the baking desert sun On and on, everything from enormous cargo lifters to lumbering bombers, Hercules freighters and the F-14 Tomcat fighters made famous in Top Gun This is Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, run by the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (309 AMARG) It’s home to some 4,400 aircraft, arranged over nearly 2,600 acres (10.5 sq km) Some look like they were parked only a few hours ago, others are swathed in protective coverings to keep out the sand and dust Inside the facilities' hangars, other planes have been reduced to crates of spare parts, waiting to be sent out to other bases in the US or across the world to help other aircraft take to the air again To those who work here, Davis-Monthan is known by a far less prosaic name, one more in keeping with the Wild West folklore from Arizona’s earlier days They call it The Boneyard Davis-Monthan is not the only aircraft boneyard in the world, but it is by far the biggest The climatic conditions in Arizona – dry heat, low humidity, little rain – mean aircraft take a lot longer to rust and degrade Bạn đến BD IELTS Club để tìm nhiều tài liệu P a g e 106 | 122 Collected By: Nam Đỗ | IELTS Sharer An aerial view of Davis-Monthan, including partly disassembled B-52 bombers (SPL) What’s more, underneath the top six inches of dirt topsoil is a clay-like sub layer called caliche This extremely hard subsoil allows the planes to be parked in the desert without the need to construct expensive new parking ramps, according to the 309 AMARG Planes are expensive things to build and maintain, but even at the end of their flying lives they still have their uses But it takes a lot of room – and a lot of money – to store these unused planes in the kind of hangars needed to keep them warm and dry It’s much cheaper to store them in the kind of conditions found in Tucson That’s the reason why many of the world’s biggest aircraft boneyards are found in the dry deserts of the south-western US But it’s not simply a case of landing a plane at Davis-Monthan, parking it in one of the rows and handing someone the keys Many of the aircraft are considered inactive, but have to be able to be brought back into service if need be That takes a lot of work Broken bombers The Boneyard’s workers have an exhaustive checklist Any planes that have served on aircraft carriers have to be thoroughly washed to get rid of corroding salt All aircraft have their fuel tanks and fuel lines drained, and flushed with a light, viscous oil similar to that used in sewing machines to ensure all the moving parts are lubricated Then they must have any explosive devices – such as the charges that activate ejection seats – safely removed Then, any ducts or inlets are covered with aluminium tape and the aircraft are painted over with a special easily strippable paint – two coats of black, and a final white layer to help deflect the fierce desert sun and keep the aircraft relatively cool Jets like these F/A-18s may be used to provide spare parts to keep other aircraft flying (US Air Force) Aircraft are kept at various levels of restoration – some are kept in as close-to-working order as possible if they are deemed to be needed to fly at a later date, while others are partially dismantled Some of the aircraft stored at Davis-Monthan include retired B-52 bombers, aircraft capable of carrying nuclear weapons As part of strategic arms limitation treaties with Bạn đến BD IELTS Club để tìm nhiều tài liệu P a g e 107 | 122 Collected By: Nam Đỗ | IELTS Sharer the Soviet Union, the B-52s were stored with their wings removed and placed next to the plane – allowing Soviet satellites to verify that the bombers had been taken out of service Others are used for spare parts, with the components sitting in the aircraft until they’re needed On site is a smelter, where some of the surplus aircraft are shredded and totally recycled And with the original assembly lines of most of these aircraft long-since mothballed, DavisMonthan is home to some 400,000 piece of tooling and machinery needed to create specific aircraft parts Aircraft all over the world, not just those flown by the US, contain parts from the base’s enormous stockpile Post-Soviet boneyards “As long as there are aircraft flying, military and commercial aircraft boneyards will always be necessary to keep other planes in the air,” says aviation author Nick Veronico, who has visited Davis-Monthan as well as the Mojave facility and other boneyards in the desert states After the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, irradiated Soviet helicopters like this Mil Mi-6 were stored in a giant boneyard (Phil Coomes/BBC) “Each of the storage yards typically performs a variety of functions from storing aircraft that are temporarily out of service but expected to return to the fleet, to reclaiming useable parts which are inspected, overhauled, and then held until needed by active aircraft, to dismantling of the aircraft carcasses These functions go hand-in-hand and are part of the lifecycle of an aircraft “I have flown on aircraft that have gone to the boneyard and provided parts to the fleet,” he says “I’ve had the opportunity to watch parts being removed from a plane, and then having flown on an aircraft flying with salvaged parts – the exact parts I saw being removed, preserved, and installed.” There are boneyards in Russia that contain some of the old Soviet Union’s military aircraft, but it’s fair to say the aircraft here are not in any fit state to return to the skies The former bomber base at Vozdvizhenka, some 60 miles north of Vladivostok in far-eastern Russia, used to be home to Soviet supersonic bombers After the end of the Cold War the aircraft were surplus to requirement – and simply left where they were parked The once-secretive base in now abandoned, and this ghostly bomber fleet now poses for photographers who clamber through the rusted fences Bạn đến BD IELTS Club để tìm nhiều tài liệu P a g e 108 | 122 Collected By: Nam Đỗ | IELTS Sharer At Mojave Airport, more than 1,000 airliners ended up in the California desert after their flying days (Getty Images) Another post-Soviet boneyard is in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone – the area evacuated after the 1986 nuclear disaster in Ukraine The vehicles used to help clean up the disaster area were contaminated with radiation A line of giant Soviet helicopters has been left to rust in the fields BBC News pictures editor Phil Coomes visited the site in 2006, on the 20th anniversary of the disaster “After the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, many of the contaminated vehicles used in the clean-up operation were placed in graveyards in the vast exclusion zone around the reactor Some remain there today,” he says “The largest graveyard, Rassokha, [is] where the remains of helicopters, military and civilian vehicles and fire engines are slowly rusting away It’s a vast site, but over the years parts have been reclaimed for spares but contamination levels vary, so souvenir hunters would be wise to keep away.” Despite the danger of radiation poisoning, many of the helicopters have been stripped of useful parts; their skeletal remains dwindle with every passing year In eastern California, Mojave Airport carries out a similar role for civilian aircraft that have reached the end of their operational lives Airliners have been flown here for decades, and stored in the dry desert heat until broken up for scrap Some aircraft end their days being hacked to pieces to be sold as scrap, like these Russianbuilt Ilyushins in Belarus (AFP/Getty Images) “Driving across California’s high desert, the airliner boneyard at Mojave airport is visible from miles away,” writes aviation photographer Troy Paiva, who photographed airliners here in the 1990s and 2000s before security concerns made it a no-go area “The long rows of faded tails seem to stretch to the horizon.” The Royal Aeronautical Society’s Keith Hayward says aircraft are less of a headache to dismantle than other heavy transport “I’m not sure how easy an aeroplane is to dismantle, but what goes together comes apart, and there’s a lot less heavy or dangerous materials associated with aircraft than ships.” But as less and less recyclable metal goes into making modern planes, the epic scale of the desert boneyards may be reduced “In the future, the use of composites may make life more difficult to deal with final disposal, but there are industry protocols that are addressing the issue But bone-yard parking will still be useful when demand fluctuates Indeed, the numbers of parked airliners is often a good sign of slump or recovery, and is monitored by analysts.” Back in Tucson, the long rows of planes at Davis-Monthan sit in the Arizona heat For some, the sun-baked desert is a kind of aviation retirement home For others, their flying days are not quite over If you would like to comment on this article, or anything else you have seen on Future, head over to our Bạn đến BD IELTS Club để tìm nhiều tài liệu P a g e 109 | 122 Collected By: Nam Đỗ | IELTS Sharer Topic 36 The dystopian lake filled by the world’s tech lust Hidden in an unknown corner of Inner Mongolia is a toxic, nightmarish lake created by our thirst for smartphones, consumer gadgets and green tech, discovers Tim Maughan   By Tim Maughan April 2015 From where I'm standing, the city-sized Baogang Steel and Rare Earth complex dominates the horizon, its endless cooling towers and chimneys reaching up into grey, washed-out sky Between it and me, stretching into the distance, lies an artificial lake filled with a black, barely-liquid, toxic sludge Dozens of pipes line the shore, churning out a torrent of thick, black, chemical waste from the refineries that surround the lake The smell of sulphur and the roar of the pipes invades my senses It feels like hell on Earth Welcome to Baotou, the largest industrial city in Inner Mongolia I'm here with a group of architects and designers called the Unknown Fields Division, and this is the final stop on a three-week-long journey up the global supply chain, tracing back the route consumer goods take from China to our shops and homes, via container ships and factories You may not have heard of Baotou, but the mines and factories here help to keep our modern lives ticking It is one of the world’s biggest suppliers of “rare earth” minerals These elements can be found in everything from magnets in wind turbines and electric car motors, to the electronic guts of smartphones and flatscreen TVs In 2009 China produced 95% of the world's supply of these elements, and it's estimated that the Bayan Obo mines just north of Baotou contain 70% of the world's reserves But, as we would discover, at what cost? Element of success Rare earth minerals have played a key role in the transformation and explosive growth of China's world-beating economy over the last few decades It's clear from visiting Baotou that it's had a huge, transformative impact on the city too As the centre of this 21st Century goldrush, Baotou feels very much like a frontier town Workers in a factory in Shenzhen make MP3 players (Credit: Kate Davies/Unknown Fields) In 1950, before rare earth mining started in earnest, the city had a population of 97,000 Today, the population is more than two-and-a-half million There is only one reason for this huge influx of people - minerals As a result Baotou often feels stuck somewhere between a brave new world of opportunity presented by the global capitalism that depends on it, and the fading memories of Communism that still line its Soviet era boulevards Billboards for expensive American brands stand next to revolution-era propaganda murals, as the Bạn đến BD IELTS Club để tìm nhiều tài liệu P a g e 110 | 122 Collected By: Nam Đỗ | IELTS Sharer disinterested faces of Western supermodels gaze down on statues of Chairman Mao At night, multicoloured lights, glass-dyed by rare earth elements, line the larger roads, turning the city into a scene from the movie Tron, while the smaller side streets are filled with drunk, vomiting refinery workers that spill from bars and barbecue joints Even before getting to the toxic lake, the environmental impact the rare earth industry has had on the city is painfully clear At times it’s impossible to tell where the vast structure of the Baogang refineries complex ends and the city begins Massive pipes erupt from the ground and run along roadways and sidewalks, arching into the air to cross roads like bridges The streets here are wide, built to accommodate the constant stream of huge diesel-belching coal trucks that dwarf all other traffic A coal mine in Baotou (Credit: Liam Young/Unknown Fields) After it rains they plough, unstoppable, through roads flooded with water turned black by coal dust They line up by the sides of the road, queuing to turn into one of Baotou’s many coalburning power stations that sit unsettlingly close to freshly built apartment towers Everywhere you look, between the half-completed tower blocks and hastily thrown up multistorey parking lots, is a forest of flame-tipped refinery towers and endless electricity pylons The air is filled with a constant, ambient, smell of sulphur It’s the kind of industrial landscape that America and Europe has largely forgotten – at one time parts of Detroit or Sheffield must have looked and smelled like this Quiet plant One of our first visits in the city is to a processing plant that specialises mainly in producing cerium, one of the most abundant rare earth minerals Cerium has a huge number of commercial applications, from colouring glass to making catalytic converters The guide who shows us around the plant explains that they mainly produce cerium oxide, used to polish touchscreens on smartphones and tablets Inside a rare earth mineral processing plant (Credit: Kate Davies/Unknown Fields) As we are wandering through the factory’s hangar-like rooms, it’s impossible not to notice that something is missing Amongst the mazes of pipes, tanks, and centrifuges, there are no people In fact there’s no activity at all Apart from our voices, which echo through the huge sheds, the plant is silent It’s very obviously not operating When asked, our guide tells us the plant is closed for maintenance – but there’s no sign of that either: no maintenance crews, no cleaning or repairs being done When pushed further our guide gets suspicious, wonders why we are asking so many questions, and clams up It’s a behaviour we’ll encounter a lot in Baotou – a refusal to answer questions or stray off a strictly worded script Bạn đến BD IELTS Club để tìm nhiều tài liệu P a g e 111 | 122 Collected By: Nam Đỗ | IELTS Sharer As we leave, one of our party who has visited the area before suggests a possible explanation: could local industry be artificially controlling market scarcity of products like cerium oxide, in order to keep rare earth prices high? We can’t know for sure that this was the case the day we visited Yet it would not be unprecedented: in 2012, for example, the news agency Xinhua reported that China’s largest rare earth producer was suspending operations to prevent price drops One of Baotou’s other main exports is neodymium, another rare earth with a variety of applications Again it is used to dye glass, especially for making lasers, but perhaps its most important use is in making powerful yet lightweight magnets Neodymium magnets are used in consumer electronics items such as in-ear headphones, cellphone microphones, and computer hard-drives At the other end of the scale they are a vital component in large equipment that requires powerful magnetic fields, such as wind farm turbines and the motors that power the new generation of electric cars We’re shown around a neodymium magnet factory by a guide who seems more open than our friend at the cerium plant We’re even given some magnets to play with But again, when our questions stray too far from applications and to production and associated environmental costs, the answers are less forthcoming, and pretty soon the visit is over The refinement of rare earth minerals, like that done in this factory, can cause toxic byproducts (Credit: Kate Davies/Unknown Fields) The intriguing thing about both neodymium and cerium is that while they’re called rare earth minerals, they're actually fairly common Neodymium is no rarer than copper or nickel and quite evenly distributed throughout the world’s crust While China produces 90% of the global market’s neodymium, only 30% of the world’s deposits are located there Arguably, what makes it, and cerium, scarce enough to be profitable are the hugely hazardous and toxic process needed to extract them from ore and to refine them into usable products For example, cerium is extracted by crushing mineral mixtures and dissolving them in sulphuric and nitric acid, and this has to be done on a huge industrial scale, resulting in a vast amount of poisonous waste as a byproduct It could be argued that China’s dominance of the rare earth market is less about geology and far more about the country’s willingness to take an environmental hit that other nations shy away from (Credit: Liam Young/Unknown Fields) And there’s no better place to understand China’s true sacrifice than the shores of Baotou toxic lake Apparently created by damming a river and flooding what was once farm land, the Bạn đến BD IELTS Club để tìm nhiều tài liệu P a g e 112 | 122 Collected By: Nam Đỗ | IELTS Sharer lake is a “tailings pond”: a dumping ground for waste byproducts It takes just 20 minutes to reach the lake by car from the centre of the city, passing through abandoned countryside dominated by the industrial architecture on the horizon Earlier reports claim the lake is guarded by the military, but we see no sign We pass a shack that was presumably a guard hut at one point but it’s abandoned now; whoever was here left in a hurry, leaving their bedding, cooking stove, and instant noodle packets behind when they did (Credit: Liam Young/Unknown Fields) We reached the shore, and looked across the lake I’d seen some photos before I left for Inner Mongolia, but nothing prepared me for the sight It’s a truly alien environment, dystopian and horrifying The thought that it is man-made depressed and terrified me, as did the realisation that this was the byproduct not just of the consumer electronics in my pocket, but also green technologies like wind turbines and electric cars that we get so smugly excited about in the West Unsure of quite how to react, I take photos and shoot video on my cerium polished iPhone You can see the lake on Google Maps, and that hints at the scale Zoom in far enough and you can make out the dozens of pipes that line the shore Unknown Fields’ Liam Young collected some samples of the waste and took it back to the UK to be tested “The clay we collected from the toxic lake tested at around three times background radiation,” he later tells me Watch the black byproduct of rare earth mining pouring into the lake at Baotao (Credit: Richard John Seymour/Unknown Fields) Unknown Fields has an unusual plan for the stuff “We are using this radioactive clay to make a series of ceramic vessels modelled on traditional Ming vases,” Young explains, “each proportioned based on the amount of toxic waste produced by the rare earth minerals used in a particular tech gadget.” The idea is to illustrate the impact our consumer goods have on the environment, even when that environment might be unseen and thousands of miles away After seeing the impact of rare earth mining myself, it’s impossible to view the gadgets I use everyday in the same way As I watched Apple announce their smart watch recently, a thought crossed my mind: once we made watches with minerals mined from the Earth and treated them like precious heirlooms; now we use even rarer minerals and we'll want to update them yearly Technology companies continually urge us to upgrade; to buy the newest tablet or phone But I cannot forget that it all begins in a place like Bautou, and a terrible toxic lake that stretches to the horizon Topic 37 Have you ever felt “Solastalgia”? Ever feel unease that the natural environment around you is changing for the worse? There’s a word for that Bạn đến BD IELTS Club để tìm nhiều tài liệu P a g e 113 | 122 Collected By: Nam Đỗ | IELTS Sharer Every few months, Oxford Dictionaries makes global headlines when it adds new words to its online vocabulary – the most recent updates include ‘hangry’ (anger resulting from hunger) and ‘manspreading’ (sitting with legs wide apart) At the same time, researchers are coining new words that never quite make it into the popular lexicon – but perhaps they should While you won’t find it in the Oxford English Dictionary, philosopher Glenn Albrecht once coined one such word while working at the University of Newcastle in Australia 'Solastalgia’ – a portmanteau of the words ‘solace’ and ‘nostalgia’ – is used not just in academia but more widely, in clinical psychology and health policy in Australia, as well as by US researchers looking into the effects of wildfires in California It describes the feeling of distress associated with environmental change close to your home, explains Albrecht Ever felt distress that the natural world around you was changing for the worse? That's solastalgia (Credit: Thinkstock) Solastalgia is when your endemic sense of place is being violated – Glenn Albrecht, philosopher While at the University of Newcastle, he was contacted by local people concerned about opencast coal mining and power station pollution “People would ring me at work pleading for help with their cause Their distress about the threats to their identity and well-being over the phone was palpable.” These calls, and seeing the effects of mining on the landscape, led him to create the word “Solastalgia is when your endemic sense of place is being violated.” Medical journal The Lancet’s 2015 Health and Climate Change report discusses how solastalgia is connected to ‘dis-ease,’ or a lack of ease due to a hostile environment that a person is powerless to anything about Meanwhile, Justin Lawson from Melbourne’s Deakin University explains solastalgia in less academic terms, saying The Eagles’ song No More Walks in the Wood can help people understand it, which laments the disappearance of a forest associated with powerful memories “It really is about redefining our emotional responses to a landscape that has changed within a lifetime.” Bạn đến BD IELTS Club để tìm nhiều tài liệu P a g e 114 | 122 Collected By: Nam Đỗ | IELTS Sharer "No more walks in the wood / The trees have all been cut down", sang The Eagles (Credit: Phil Hearing/Flickr/CC BY 2.0) It really is about redefining our emotional responses to a landscape that has changed – Justin Lawson, researcher These changes to the landscape can come from natural processes (such as drought and bushfires) or human-induced processes such as climate change and urbanisation Like Albrecht, Lawson and his team are working on other terms to encapsulate these thoughts and feelings But, while Albrecht is combining words that are predominately derived from Latin or Greek roots, Lawson is looking to indigenous cultures and their languages “to find a voice that discusses our relationship with nature in a more comprehensive manner.” Solastalgia is not just a first-world concept Sri Warsini, a researcher at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia is looking into instances of solastalgia that occur in developing countries such as Indonesia, following natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions, finding that the loss of housing, livestock and farmland, and the ongoing danger of living in a disaster-prone area, challenge a person’s sense of place and identity and can lead to depression Yet, despite its meaning, the man who coined solastalgia isn’t despairing “I am an optimistic person and I a lot to reverse the push for development that will create more climate change and by implication, more solastalgia,” concludes Albrecht Topic 38 Wernher von Braun’s Bold plan for space exploration The man who designed the V2 rocket also helped America reach the Moon And he had a plan for deeper space exploration that was ahead of its time, it appears On March 1955, 42 million Americans – around a quarter of the total US population at the time – tuned in to watch a new Disney TV series It featured no dancing mice, princesses in peril or orphaned ungulates Man in Space was fronted by a handsome, warm and engaging rocket engineer setting out his vision for the future exploration of the cosmos Surrounded by beautifully sculpted spacecraft models and futuristic artwork, Wernher von Braun addressed the viewer, talking through his plan for a practical passenger rocket achievable, he claimed, within 10 years The programme included spellbinding dramatic animations and a suspenseful orchestral score, full-sized spacesuits and detailed diagrams Ten years earlier, von Braun had been leading the development of Hitler’s V2 rockets – ballistic missiles built by slave labour and targeted at civilians across Europe Now he was the poster child for the American space programme and being welcomed into homes across the nation The rockets von Braun built for the Nazis became the first stage of the American space programme (Credit: Science Photo Library) Bạn đến BD IELTS Club để tìm nhiều tài liệu P a g e 115 | 122 Collected By: Nam Đỗ | IELTS Sharer Opinion on the German rocket engineer is probably even more divided today than it was in the 1950s Some historians suggest he was an amoral opportunist – exploiting Hitler’s desire for a futuristic weapon, to further his own ambitions for space exploration For many others he remains a hero – a space visionary that won the race to the Moon and presented America with a roadmap to the stars Whatever you feel about the man, the fact is that 60 years after those first broadcasts people still refer to the von Braun Paradigm Put simply, it’s the steps the engineer set out to take mankind into space, with a shuttle and a space station, followed by missions to the Moon and Mars He was obsessed with the Moon, that was his childhood ambition – Michael Neufeld “What he was trying to was lay out an architecture for how spaceflight might be possible,” explains Michael Neufeld, senior curator at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC and author of three books and numerous articles on von Braun “He was obsessed with the Moon, that was his childhood ambition.” “The plan was very influential in the 60s and it lived on,” Neufeld says “When going straight to the Moon became the project he was enthused by that and didn’t necessarily adhere to this rigid shuttle, Moon, Mars scheme but for a lot of engineers at Nasa that was the logical programme for human space exploration.” Shuttle without a station Throughout the 1960s, von Braun pursued the development of the giant Saturn rocket that would take men to the Moon But, in the minds of some in the American space agency, this was just a diversion “Nasa kept trying to come back to the script,” says Neufeld “At the end of the 60s, the Space Task Group tried to recommend to [President] Nixon that we need to build a space shuttle and a space station and then we’ll prepare for expeditions back to the Moon and onto Mars.” After Nasa landed astronauts on the Moon, the agency's budgets were slashed (Credit: Nasa/Getty Images) With the Moon race won and space budgets slashed, all that emerged was the space shuttle programme – a reusable vehicle conceived to service a space station But without a space station “Not so much a space policy as an excuse not to have one,” says Neufeld However, the von Braun Paradigm remained close to the hearts of many Von Braun died of cancer aged 65 in 1977, four years before the first Space Shuttle flight But his plan lived on “Nasa returned to the idea of a space station and then President Bush stood on the steps of this museum in 1989 and said we’re going back to the Moon and Mars,” says Neufeld “That also was a failure.” Our charter is to continue what he began – Les Johnson Bạn đến BD IELTS Club để tìm nhiều tài liệu P a g e 116 | 122 Collected By: Nam Đỗ | IELTS Sharer In the minds of many, however, von Braun’s stepping-stones to Mars have never gone away “Nasa keeps coming back to it,” says Neufeld “’What we now?’ is a perennial problem with Nasa because the future of human spaceflight has been a lot less than the dreams of the believers.” But there are still plenty of believers out there and, right now, they perhaps have every reason to feel optimistic In fact there is still a whole department at Nasa dedicated to these future footsteps Von Braun became enthused with a plan to land on the Moon, but he had envisaged it being part of a great plan (Credit: Science Photo Library) “Von Braun started this office back in the 1960s,” says Les Johnson, technical advisor for advanced concepts at Nasa’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama and owner of a DVD copy of the original Disney series “Our charter is to continue what he began – it is a direct linear descendent of what he did.” “I have a conference report from 1964 looking beyond the Moon – and this was before even Project Gemini – and he was already telling his folks to start planning that Mars trip,” says Johnson “If I was to compare it to what we today, most of the issues we’re wrestling with were things he outlined in 1964.” Strong leadership The parallels are striking Johnson’s office has recently been grappling with the challenges of building the new Space Launch System (SLS) – the first rocket since von Braun’s Saturn capable of taking humans beyond low-Earth orbit and, potentially back to the Moon and onto Mars Johnson believes that as well as von Braun’s visionary concepts we should also admire his leadership “Whenever you have a team of people working towards a common objective – whether that’s a team of 10 in a small business or tens of thousands with project Apollo to go to the Moon – you’ve got to have someone who keeps it all on track, who has that big vision,” says Johnson The Space Shuttle was built without the space station it was designed to resupply being in orbit (Credit: Nasa/Getty Images) “It’s the difference between a leader and a manager, unless you have a leader articulating the vision, the manager doesn’t have anything to manage.” Bạn đến BD IELTS Club để tìm nhiều tài liệu P a g e 117 | 122 Collected By: Nam Đỗ | IELTS Sharer If you ignore the inconvenient truth that America jumped a couple of steps by going to the Moon early, it now appears we are back on track with the von Braun Paradigm We have done the shuttle and space station, now we push on to the Moon and Mars This was certainly the official narrative during last year’s launch of the new Orion spacecraft and when I visited the factory where the SLS is taking shape The new head of the European Space Agency, Jan Worner, also told BBC Future recently of his vision for a village on the Moon Unlike in von Braun’s day any deep space exploration is likely to be international in nature In fact Johnson too, has something of the visionary about him “Space is the future,” he tells me “We’ve got to move out, we’ve got to explore and move beyond the Earth.” Johnson cautions, however, about the whole vision thing “A person who’s a visionary is a single point failure, so I’m always nervous when someone says ‘the great leader will get us out of this’.” And, realistically, unlike in von Braun’s day any deep space exploration is likely to be international in nature – involving the US, Europe, Russia, Japan, Canada and maybe even China and India A shared vision is likely to be a much more solid foundation for the future It is, nevertheless, remarkable that we are still talking about von Braun 60 years after those Disney shows and almost 40 years after his death Even private space rivals Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk refer to von Braun and his name was invoked recently in their recent ‘mine is bigger than yours’ spat over who has built the best reusable rocket Any future space stations are likely to be the product of complex international cooperation (Credit: Esa/Nasa/Getty Images) “I’m surprised he’s not been forgotten more,” admits Neufeld “It’s partly the space visionary dimension and partly the Nazi question – either he’s a bad Nazi or he’s our space hero, it’s hard to hold in your head that he could be both of them simultaneously.” “He was the space populariser of the 50s and 60s,” says Neufeld “He remains among space buffs the one with a vision for a future space programme.” Wernher von Braun would doubtless be pleased people are still following his vision but even more pleased that a Mars mission is a serious prospect As someone who understood the price of these gargantuan undertakings, however, he would also probably point out that no mission to the Moon or Mars is yet properly funded Still, to adopt that old Disney adage: When you wish upon a star, your dreams come true Eventually Bạn đến BD IELTS Club để tìm nhiều tài liệu P a g e 118 | 122