The Woohoo! Report

Photo: METEOTEK IES LA BISBAL SCHOOL/BARCROFT MEDIA

Teenagers armed with only a £56 camera and latex balloon have managed to take stunning pictures of space from 20-miles above Earth.

Proving that you don’t need Google’s billions or the BBC weather centre’s resources, the four Spanish students managed to send a camera-operated weather balloon into the stratosphere.

Taking atmospheric readings and photographs 20 miles above the ground, the Meteotek team of IES La Bisbal school in Catalonia completed their incredible experiment at the end of February this year.

Building the electronic sensor components from scratch, Gerard Marull Paretas, Sergi Saballs Vila, Marta­ Gasull Morcillo and Jaume Puigmiquel Casamort managed to send their heavy duty £43 latex balloon to the edge of space and take readings of its ascent.

Created by the four students under the guidance of teacher Jordi Fanals Oriol, the budding scientists, all aged 18-19, followed the progress of their balloon using high tech sensors communicating with Google Earth.

Team leader Gerard Marull, 18, said: “We were overwhelmed at our results, especially the photographs, to send our handmade craft to the edge of space is incredible.”

Completing their landmark experiment on February, the Meteotek team had to account for a wide variety of variables and rely on a lot of luck.

“The balloon we chose was inflated with helium to just over two metres and weighed just 1500 grams,” said Gerard. “It was able to carry the sensor equipment and digital Nikon camera which weighed 1.5kg.

“However, when we launched at 9.10am on that morning the critical point for the experiment was to see if the balloon would make it past 10,000m, or 30,000ft, which is the altitude that commercial airliners fly at.”

Due to the changing atmospheric pressures, the helium weather balloon carrying the meteorological equipment was expected to inflate to a maximum of nine and a half metres as it travelled upwards at 270 metres-per-minute.

“We took readings as the balloon rose and mapped its progress using Google Earth and the onboard radio receiver,” said Gerard.

“At over 100,000ft the balloon lost its inflation and the equipment was returned to the earth.

“We travelled 10km to find the sensors and photographic card, which was still emitting its signal, even though it had been exposed to the most extreme conditions.”

The pupils’ incredible school science project has already caught the attention of the University of Wyoming in the US.

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by Linton Weeks

Every year, John Brockman — who runs the nonprofit Edge Foundation in New York — asks a gaggle of forward-thinking people a provocative question.

This is the Edge Annual Question for 2009: “What will change everything?”

Writer David Bodanis suggests that some kind of massive technological failure would be game-changing. Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, says that reinventing industry to have less impact on the environment will alter the way we live. And Sherry Turkle, a psychologist at MIT, looks forward to the day when robots will serve as companions to humans. Here are a few other intriguing replies:

Climate

Stewart Brand, founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and co-founder of The Well online community: “Climate change is a global problem that cannot be fixed with global economics, which we have; it requires global governance, which we don’t have. Whole new modes of international discourse, agreement, and enforcement must be devised.

“How are responsibilities to be shared for legions of climate refugees? Who decides which geoengineering projects can go forward? Who pays for them? Who adjudicates compensation for those harmed? How are free-riders dealt with? Humans have managed commons before — fisheries, irrigation systems, fire regimes — but never on this scale. Global governance will change everything.”

Animal Feelings

April Gornik, New York artist: ” There is a growing scientific consensus that animals have emotions and feel pain. This awareness is going to effect change: better treatment of animals in agribusiness, research and our general interaction with them. It will change the way we eat, live and preserve the planet. We will eliminate the archaic tendency to base their treatment on an equation of their intelligence with ours. The measure of and self-congratulation for our own intelligence should have its basis in our moral behavior as well as our smarts.”

The Feeling That Things Will Inevitably Get Worse

Brian Eno, musician and recording producer: “What would change everything is not even a thought. It’s more of a feeling.

“Human development thus far has been fueled and guided by the feeling that things could be, and are probably going to be, better. The world was rich compared to its human population; there were new lands to conquer, new thoughts to nurture, and new resources to fuel it all. The great migrations of human history grew from the feeling that there was a better place, and the institutions of civilization grew out of the feeling that checks on pure individual selfishness would produce a better world for everyone involved in the long term.

“What if this feeling changes? What if it comes to feel like there isn’t a long term — or not one to look forward to? What if, instead of feeling that we are standing at the edge of a wild new continent full of promise and hazard, we start to feel that we’re on an overcrowded lifeboat in hostile waters, fighting to stay onboard, prepared to kill for the last scraps of food and water?”

The Eruption of New Religions

Joel Garreau, a staff writer at The Washington Post and author of Radical Evolution: “Financially, politically, climatically and technologically, the ground is moving beneath our feet. Our narratives of how the world works are not matching the facts. Yet humans are pattern-seeking, story-telling animals. Human beings cannot endure emptiness and desolation. We will always fill such a vacuum with meaning.”

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