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Following on these earlier posts here and here, this Washington Post article reports on yesterday’s test of the unmanned X-43A “scramjet” that broke the aircraft speed record for the second time this year. The X-43A flew at nearly 10 times the speed of sound as scientists continue their quest for “hypersonic” flight.

This BBC News article describes something that Houston’s Katy Freeway commuters would support enthusiastically:

Commuters could soon be taking flying taxis to work instead of waiting in line for a street cab, experts suggest. British developers Avcen say Jetpods would enable quick, quiet and cheap travel to and from major cities.
The futuristic machines will undergo proof-of-concept flight tests in 2006 and could be ready for action by 2010.
As well as taxis, which would use a network of specially-built mini runways, there are military, medical and personal jet versions as well.
London-based Avcen say Jetpods would be able to travel the 24 miles from Woking, Surrey, to central London in just four minutes.
And because it could make so many trips, fares for a journey from Heathrow to central London could cost about £40 or £50.

Meanwhile, this Washington Post article reviews ongoing research into scramjet technology, which is already achieving incredible speed levels:

Next week, NASA plans to break the aircraft speed record for the second time in 7 1/2 months by flying its rocket-assisted X-43A scramjet craft 110,000 feet above the Pacific Ocean at speeds close to Mach 10 — about 7,200 mph, or 10 times the speed of sound.
The flight will last perhaps 10 seconds and end with the pilotless aircraft plunging to a watery grave 850 miles off the California coast. But even if the X-43A doesn’t set the record, it has already proved that the 40-year-old dream of “hypersonic” flight — using air-breathing engines to reach speeds above Mach 5 (3,800 mph) — has become reality.

Under NASA’s $250 million Hyper-X program, engineers at Langley Research Center here and the Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif., designed and built three aluminum scramjet aircraft, each one 12 feet long and weighing about 2,800 pounds. . .
[The second scamjet flight] on March 24, reached Mach 6.83 (5,200 mph), shattering the world speed record for air-breathing, non-rocket aircraft, previously held by a jet-powered missile. The highest speeds by manned aircraft were achieved by SR-71, the U.S. spy plane known as the “Blackbird,” capable of flying in excess of Mach 3 (2,300 mph).

On the heels of this earlier contribution to the University of Texas Medical School, Houston businessman and philanthropist George Mitchell has made a $1.25 million gift to provide initial funding for a massive project involving both UT and Texas A&M University that has a goal of building the world’s largest telescope on the Andes Mountains in Chile by 2015. If successful, the $400 million Giant Magellan Telescope is expected to collect 70 times more light than NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope and could produce images that are 10 times sharper.
The telescope’s six large mirrors will surround a seventh central mirror, all on a single mounting, and its light-collecting area would be twice the diameter of today’s largest telescopes. The world’s two largest optical telescopes ? each 33 feet in diameter ? operate at the W.M. Keck Observatory on the summit of Hawaii’s dormant Mauna Kea volcano.
Mr. Mitchell donated the money to Texas A&M University, which is his alma mater, and The University of Texas at Austin — which runs the McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains of far West Texas, which is the third largest telescope in the world — will match Mr. Mitchell’s contribution over the next two years. Other partners in the project are the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Harvard University, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Arizona and the University of Michigan.

In this Wall Street Journal ($) op-ed, novelist Herman Wouk addresses the serious implications arising from the fact that governmental funding of science research in America has become simply another political football. Mr. Wouk focuses on the poor political decisions that undermined the Texas Supercollider Project back in the early 1990’s:

Back in 1993, Congress abruptly killed the largest basic science project of all time, the Superconducting Super Collider in Texas. With three billion dollars already spent, and the project pretty much on time and on budget, our lawmakers cut off all funding, and voted another billion just to shut the project down. This bizarre abort sent a shock wave through the scientific world which has never entirely subsided. The event remains in controversy, but one undeniable outcome has been the diminished international repute of American science.
The Superconducting Super Collider would have been an oval tunnel 54 miles around, where some 10,000 magnets cooled by liquid helium would accelerate protons to collide almost at the speed of light, and thus to wrest from the subatomic debris a prime secret of nature: the Higgs boson, dubbed by one Nobel laureate the “God Particle,” a possible key to the final understanding of the universe. Ronald Reagan approved the project, George Bush senior sustained it, and it died under Bill Clinton. Today a powerful super collider in Geneva is being upgraded by a consortium of European physicists, intent on beating the world to the Higgs boson, with the Americans out of the picture.
* * *
Nevertheless, even Benjamin Franklin, a founding father and a one-man interface of science and politics, could not have foreseen how this loose play in American governance might one day affect world destiny, nor how the pace of scientific advancement would lethally accelerate in times to come. It is a long reach from the capture of a lightning spark in a Leyden jar in Philadelphia, to the dropping of a uranium bomb on Japan. Yet the same intellectual curiosity that moved Franklin to risk electrocution from the clouds motivated the British physicist James Chadwick to discover the neutron, and so to unlock the horrific energy in the atomic nucleus. And it motivated thousands of high-energy physicists to venture their careers and years of their lives on the Superconducting Super Collider, only to be stranded by Congress, high, dry and unemployed at a vast abandoned hole in Texas.
These scientists had been the darlings of Congressional budgeting ever since the end of World War II, when they delivered into President Truman’s hands a weapon new in human history. The president, an artilleryman in World War I, said of the bomb, “It was a bigger piece of artillery, so I used it.” It did stop the war at once, to be sure. The historical debate about his decision may never end, but the triumph of particle physics was brilliant, and the rise in its annual funding spectacular, until the ax rudely fell. One SSC physicist bitterly exclaimed on getting the word, “It’s the revenge of the C students.” A more philosophical colleague observed: “Well, our 50-year ride on the bomb is over.”

And then, with the wisdom of his almost 90 years, Mr. Wouk makes an insightful observation for us to ponder:

I go through the days with good cheer and jokes, aware of dark threats looming ahead for our little global home, probably beyond my time, but close enough. The prime task of today’s politicians, after getting themselves elected and re-elected, is to deal open-eyed and intelligently with those threats in the light of the best science. We who elect them bear the ultimate, inescapable responsibility to choose well.

Randall Parker over at FuturePundit has this excellent post that analyzes the Bush Administration’s proposed funding of research in the 2005 budget, to which he concludes:

The Bush Administation’s plans for research and development spending are short-sighted. Scientific advances can solve problems in ways that pay back orders of magnitude more than the original research will cost to fund. Budget deficits and huge unfunded liabilities for those who are going to become elderly in the coming decades combined with the threat of terrorism and the greater global competition for a limited supply of oil call for mammoth attempts to research and innovate our way to solutions.

Randall Parker over at FuturePundit points to an interesting Erin Anderssen and Anne McIlroy article in the Canadian Globe And Mail that summarizes recent research on child development and human violence. They report that Richard Tremblay has found that two year old babies are more physically aggressive than teenagers or adults but are simply too uncoordinated to do much damage to others:

Consequently, are human beings born pure, as Rousseau argued, and tainted by the world around them? Or do babies arrive bad, as St. Augustine wrote, and learn, for their own good, how to behave in society?
Richard Tremblay, an affable researcher at the University of Montreal who is considered one of the world leaders in aggression studies, sides with St. Augustine, whom he is fond of quoting.
Dr. Tremblay has thousands of research subjects, many studied over decades, to back him up: Aggressive behaviour, except in the rarest circumstances, is not acquired from life experience. It is a remnant of our evolutionary struggle to survive, a force we learn, with time and careful teaching, to master. And as if by some ideal plan, human beings are at their worst when they are at their weakest.
St. Augustine was obviously much closer to the truth.

Read the entire post, as Mr. Parker includes a number of interesting links relating to the subject of this research. Hat tip to Tyler Cowan at Marginal Revolutions for the link.