The major failure of air-traffic control yesterday was yet another sign that our outdated radar-based system needs to be replaced with a sleek new satellite-based one, right? That's the logical progression of much of the coverage out there.

The reality is that, yes, the system needs to be replaced. But yesterday's failure was a high-tech one that could afflict a system based on satellites, too.

The problem wasn't directly related to radar, but with the National Airspace Data Interchange Network, a system for processing flight plans and information for all flights in the country. It failed in both of its locations: Salt Lake City and Atlanta. This meant that automated regional FAA systems couldn't process flight information. As a result, controllers had to enter information manually. This caused delays that rippled across the country. "A satellite-based system would have had the same problem," R. John Hansman, an MIT aerospace and air traffic control expert, wrote to me this afternoon.

The Federal Aviation Administration hopes to roll out a Global Positioning System-based control system, called Next Generation or NextGen, in stages. By 2020 most planes will carry a cockpit gadget that continuously broadcasts the planes' GPS-derived location, altitude, and speed to ground controllers. In later years, the system will extend so that this information is picked up by other planes, too, so that pilots can gain more control over their routing and spacing. As they beam their position information to one another they'll be able, to some extent, to self-navigate. However, there will always be an FAA air-traffic system keeping track. It's unlikely that pilots will ever be permitted to make all takeoff, routing, and landing decisions entirely by themselves in the event of failures of national air-traffic computers, as happened yesterday.

An experimental drug that mimics the effect of steroids, such as testosterone, without many of the harmful side effects is freely available online, according to new research. A group from the German Sport University Cologne in Germany detected the compound in a product called Andarine, available online for $100 and labeled as green tea extracts and face moisturizer. The research appears in the current issue of the journal Drug Testing and Analysis.

Known as selective androgen receptor modulators, or SARMs, the drugs are being developed for diseases such as muscle-wasting and osteoporosis. The World Anti-Doping Agency, an international, independent organization based in Lausanne, Switzerland, that coordinates anti-doping regulations across sports, banned the drugs last year, before any of them were approved for medical use, in recognition of the molecules' potential allure to sports dopers, and athletes' willingness to take even experimental compounds. Since then, the agency has quietly been working with scientists across the globe to develop new tests to detect illegal use of the compounds.

According to a previous TR article on sports doping,

These drugs represent "a whole new horizon for anabolic therapies, and the potential for abuse will be exceedingly high," says William Evans, director of the Nutrition, Metabolism, and Exercise Laboratory at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences.

SARMs work similarly to testosterone but in a more targeted way. "They are effective by binding to the steroid receptor in only specific tissue, like muscle," says Evans, who is also a scientific advisor to GTx, a company developing the drugs. "They are not steroid drugs, but they produce the anabolic effect of the steroids." GTx, based in Memphis, TN, has shown in a clinical trial that one compound being developed for muscle wasting and bone loss can significantly boost lean muscle mass in older people.

According to a press release from the journal,

Mario Thevis, Ph.D., and colleagues, analyzed the advertised substance using state-of-the-art mass spectrometric approaches with high resolution/high accuracy (tandem) mass spectrometry. "One unit (30 mL) was purchased online and delivered in a box labeled to contain face moisturizer and green tea extract. The sealed bottle did not declare any content and no further documents accompanied package," said Dr. Thevis. He went on to explain that LC-MS(/MS) analysis of this solution revealed the presence of S-4 at approximately 150 mg/mL with equal amounts in each container, yielding a total of 4.5 g of the SARM. The active ingredient was identified and characterized by a) its elemental composition (as determined by high resolution/high accuracy mass spectrometry, b) comparison to synthesized reference material regarding retention time and product ion mass spectrum, and c) elucidation of its mass spectrometric behavior. Besides the detection of the active ingredient S-4, a significant amount of byproduct was observed.

"Major concerns result from these findings," explained Dr. Thevis. "This product with considerable anabolic properties is readily available without sufficient research on its undesirable effects; this is especially significant where uncontrolled dosing is applied and drug impurities with unknown effects are present in considerable amounts as observed in the studied material."

The issue was recently addressed at the Conference of Parties to the International Convention against Doping in Sport, held October 26-28, 2009 at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) headquarters in Paris. WADA President John Fahey said that government agencies will need to adopt laws and regulations to combat the trafficking and supply of illegal substances in order to rid sport of doping.

The ease of purchasing SARMs as a performance-enhancing drug supports the need to make early implementation of screening for emerging therapeutic compounds a routine part of sports drug testing. "Our study demonstrates once more that the misuse of therapeutics without clinical approval by athletes cannot be dismissed," Dr. Thevis concludes.

Credit: Jon Rafman/Google

The folks at NPR's Picture Show blog have collected a slideshow of beautiful, wistful, dramatic moments on the street caught by Google's Street View. In 2007, Google sent cars carrying an eyelike sphere fitted with nine cameras to capture images for its Street View application. In the blog they jokingly compare the Internet giant to some of the greats of street photography, but looking at the collection of accidental images makes you wonder.

The NPR story was inspired by this essay by Montreal artist Jon Rafman about curating screenshots from the web service. The essay makes a case for Street View as an art project and a cultural text in whose images we can read almost anything. Photos of sprawled homeless people and buildings on fire suggest "a universe observed by the detached gaze of an indifferent Being. Its cameras witness but do not act in history," Rafman writes. "For all Google cares, the world could be absent of moral dimension." On the other hand, the cameras also captured small moments of joy on the sidewalk--a couple lifting their child off the ground by both her hands, for example. From the essay:

One year ago, I started collecting screen captures of Google Street Views from a range of Street View blogs and through my own hunting. This essay illustrates how my Street View collections reflect the excitement of exploring this new, virtual world. The world captured by Google appears to be more truthful and more transparent because of the weight accorded to external reality, the perception of a neutral, unbiased recording, and even the vastness of the project. At the same time, I acknowledge that this way of photographing creates a cultural text like any other, a structured and structuring space whose codes and meaning the artist and the curator of the images can assist in constructing or deciphering.

Credit: Jon Rafman/Google