Those resources can be solar - in July 2008, US Senator Harry Reid (Democrat, Nevada) called Nevada "the Saudi Arabia of solar energy;" or wind - before he soured on the topic, oil magnate T. Boone Pickens would say that "the US is the Saudi Arabia of wind power;" or lithium: Whenever the Bolivian government sponsors a press junket for journalists, a few hacks routinely come back and file stories using the phrase "Bolivia is the Saudi Arabia of lithium" - although that title rightfully belongs to Chile, if you want to split hairs about it.

Now the US Army has called Afghanistan "the Saudi Arabia of lithium."

Last week, the Pentagon officially announced that roughly $1 trillion (€810bn) of as-yet untapped mineral resources have been discovered in the war-torn nation. "There is stunning potential here," said General David Petraeus, commander of the US Central Command, in a press conference.

According to The New York Times, the deposits include "huge veins" of iron, copper, cobalt, gold, lithium and others. All in a country that has the lowest cement production in the world.

"This will become the backbone of the Afghan economy," added Jamil Jumriamy, representative of the ministry of mines, at the conference.

While it will take time to see whether these resources cure or cause more problems, there is no reason for the US military to keep alive lame clichés.

The metaphor "the Saudi Arabia of fill-in-the-blank" needs to be retired, and in its place a more mythological locale needs to be used. Some might be tempted to use "Asgard," or "Atlantis," but I lean towards "El Dorado," South America's legendary lost city of gold - as in "Afghanistan is the El Dorado of lithium."

While El Dorado's connotations might not be the best - it was never found after all - it certainly has less active socio-political turmoil associated with it.

The US Department of Agriculture's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) issued a bulletin in early June warning the Mid- and Southwest States that large grasshopper outbreaks are expected this spring and summer.

"These estimates are based on the unusually high population of adult grasshoppers in these States at the end of the summer of 2009, indicating that a large number of eggs may have been laid," says APHIS in a release.

Since America's native locust, the Rocky Mountain locust, has long gone extinct, this cannot be properly called a locust infestation - thankfully avoiding the theological baggage an Old Testament-style "plague of locusts" brings with it - but the effects could be about the same:
Grasshopper eat about half their bodyweight per day, and if foliage is unavailable, the grasshoppers will eat wood and paint.

According to APHIS, grasshopper outbreaks can destroy 80% of the forage in areas as large as 2,000 square miles.

Last summer, The Wall Street Journal reports, one Wyoming rancher had everything on his 10,000 acres - including his wife's lilac bushes - devoured by a horde of the critters. Without grass, the rancher had to sell his cattle earlier and lighter, and the resulting total profit loss tallied about $30,000 (€25,182).

It is uncertain yet whether this pertains to the grasshoppers' swarming in America, but researchers at UK's University of Cambridge have discovered that when the desert locusts of Africa swarm, even though the bugs' bodies shrink somewhat, their brains grow by 30%, especially the areas for learning and information processing.

Cambridge's scientists say this happens to prevent cannibalism - their bigger brains enable the locusts to identify between friend and food during the high-density mayhem of the swarm - unlike, say, sharks during a feeding frenzy who become so crazed, they attack and eat each other.

Grasshopper swarms like the current one APHIS is warning about are cyclical, building to a peak, then quiet for two or three years after.

Perhaps some insect neurologist will be able to find a way to convince grasshoppers that they themselves are tasty and delicious next time they plan to take the plains.

Recently, though, I discovered that leftist philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek has, in various forums, called ecology the "new opium for the masses." He says, "Ideology addresses real problems, but mystifies them."

At a lecture in Greece, Žižek noted, "The underlying message of this predominant ecological ideology is... any change can only be a change for the worse."

The philosopher argues against the notion that nature would be a perfect, healthy system if it were not for humans' disrupting influence.

This idea of nature as some pristine ideal will keep us from dealing with the problems at hand. "What is wrong I think is the... principal position... that there is something like 'nature,' which we humans... disturbed," he says.

At another point, Žižek expands on his themes: "While one cannot be sure what the ultimate result of humanity's interventions into the geo-sphere will be, one thing is sure: if humanity were to stop abruptly its immense industrial activity and let nature on Earth take its balanced course, the result would have been a total breakdown, an imaginable catastrophe."

He notes, " 'Nature' on Earth is already to such an extent 'adapted' to human interventions; the human 'pollutions' are already to such an extent included into the shaky and fragile balance of the 'natural' reproduction on Earth, that its cessation would cause a catastrophic imbalance."

Because he is a philosopher and not an engineer or technician, Žižek can only offer a philosophical answer: "Indeed, what we need is ecology without nature: the ultimate obstacle to protecting nature is the very notion of nature we rely on."
Žižek may not have an answer - but so far, neither does anyone else - but perhaps a new way of looking at things is a step in the right direction.

Or at least a fun way to pass the time.

HAVING TROUBLE getting your kids interested in science, specifically chemistry? Tell them it's bad for them, and the government has banned it!

Okay, The Golden Book of Chemistry Experiments (GBCE), written by Robert Brent, with excellent illustrations by Harry Lazarus, is not really banned: Original published by Golden Press in 1960, the book's copyright was not renewed since its last printing in 1971 - the edition I used to own - and is now sadly out of print.

Not that any publisher would touch this book these days: With more than 200 experiments to choose from, the GBCE expects junior chemists to be able to work around flame, be capable enough to carefully break glass pipettes, and maybe even make their own hydrogen or chlorine gas.

Of course GBCE warns, "Be careful not to breathe fumes!"

Absolutely none of this would pass any of the super-sensitive child safety regulations on the books these days.

But you can still get a copy of this fabulous primer via the website About.com. The site's chemistry editor, Anne Marie Helmenstine, has provided a link to a free pdf of the GBCE.

"For the aspiring chemist who can adhere to the safety precautions, this remains one of the best do-it-yourself chemistry books around," she writes.

One commenter at About.com, Jerry Svoboda, writes, "I learned to think for myself, how to get things done."

Blogger Chris Brunner goes farther, noting, "This book is... the bible for any young chemist-in-training."

"Comparable chemistry books sold today are designed for parents as much as for kids, offering the wan pleasures of experiments that require no glass pieces and no open flames and use only environmentally safe materials," laments Ken Silverstein, author of the non-fiction book The Radioactive Boy Scout, about a boy inspired by the GBCE to build his own nuclear reactor.

"The Golden Book, by contrast, promised to open the doors to a brave new world. It was the era of JFK and the New Frontier, of satellite launches and the race to the moon. The sky truly was the limit," notes Silverstein.

"Chemistry is one of the most important of all sciences for human welfare," the GBCE emphasizes in its introduction. "Chemistry means the difference between poverty and starvation and the abundant life."

And gosh, who wants kids to know about that?

The President's Mars plan has its detractors, but it can be hard to tell whether the objections are due to genuine concerns over untested technologies, or are politically motivated.

"The President's new plan... [pins] our hopes for success on unproven, commercial companies," said one Senator after Obama's speech.

Mars Needs Americans!
Early in the film Fight Club, the narrator, in a combination of cynicism and prescience, says,
"When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks."

And why not? If there are no rules keeping corporate entities from naming the baseball stadiums they buy or build, why can't they name the spoils of their intergalactic efforts?

The privatization of space travel is something that should have started ages ago.

One of my childhood heroes, the second man on the moon, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, backs the President's plans, and wrote in USA Today, "It is important that the system we develop is capable of enabling broader commercial markets. To do this, the future plan should include the development of a reusable, space plane-like runway lander as the next generation of crew carrying space transport."

Which is great - especially if you are familiar with Tom Wolfe's excellent history of the early days of the "space race," The Right Stuff.

Wolfe wrote that what the US Air Force was working on at the time of Sputnik was exactly that: a series of super-high altitude rocket jets leading up to one that could enter the vacuum of space and glide to a return.

That program was sidetracked and eternally paused, as the US chased the brute force tactics of big rockets to get a man on the moon first.

Photos: NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Paramount Pictures

At the end of March, the Hangzhou, China-based Zhejiang Geely Holding Group (ZGH) agreed to buy Volvo from Ford for $1.8bn (€1.34bn), $1.6bn of that in cash. ZGH's subsidiary, Geely Automotive Holdings is the twelfth-largest car maker in China, but that nation's second largest privately-owned auto manufacturer.

With the Volvo acquisition, for the first time a Chinese company is now in charge of a worldwide automobile brand. ZGH expects to sell 200,000 cars/year in China, and intends to open a Volvo plant there in the future. ZGH also expects Volvo's European division to be selling 600,000/year to Europe and North America.

Ford paid $6.4bn to acquire Sweden-based Volvo in 1999. Ford's strategy now is to divest itself of non-core units: Starting in 2007, the company sold off its high-end - and expensively purchased - Jaguar and Aston Martin lines.

One brand Ford will probably never let go of, though, is Mustang - a line practically synonymous with the company.

Although he passed away at the beginning of March, the death of Donald Frey, the Mustang's chief designer, was not publicized more widely until the end of the month: The New York Times obituary appeared the same day as the Volvo deal was announced. Born in 1923, Frey was 86 when he died.

Lee Iacocca and Donald Frey with their creation, 1964 (at right)

Called "Detroit's sharpest idea man," by Time magazine in 1967, Frey was so praised by car enthusiasts that at auto shows, he was treated like a movie star, autograph hounds included.

But in the early 1960s, smarting from the financial failure of the Edsel, Ford wasn't interested in a new sports car, and under the auspices of Ford's then-general manager (and future CEO of Chrysler) Lee Iacocca, Frey and his team worked in secret.

(Left) Frey at a speedway in the mid-1960s, watching product being tested

Frey had been partially inspired by his children, who told the engineer, "Dad, your cars stink. They have no pizazz."

"The whole project was bootlegged," Frey said in a 2004 interview with USA Today. "There was no official approval of this thing. We had to do it on a shoestring."

The rest is history.

HOLLYWOOD LOVES CARS, AND DETROIT LOVES HOLLYWOOD

It is ironic that Ford once owned Aston Martin, as the first time most people saw the Mustang, it was being torn apart by an Aston Martin.

While the Mustang was initially introduced at the 1964 World's Fair in New York City, it was through the medium of film that even more potential customers got a look at the sportscar: Iacocca had finagled the vehicle's appearance in what was then "the next" James Bond film, Goldfinger, offering the producers several autos to use.

The Mustang is driven by one of those beautiful and unfortunate women who routinely fall for the superspy, and at one point, Bond uses his MI6-tricked out Aston Martin to shred the Mustang's side panels and tires.

Thankfully, Steve McQueen showed up a few years later with the police thriller Bullitt and set all that right, with an incredible chase through the streets of San Francisco: McQueen's Mustang Fastback chasing a 1968 Dodge Charger.

Not to be outdone, several years after that, the producers of the James Bond films put 007 behind the wheel of the 1971 Mustang for Diamonds Are Forever.

Vroooom! (Those were the days...)

[Photos courtesy of Ford Motors]

IT WAS a great piece of legermain and the more I examined it, the more I appreciated it.

In mid-March, one news story was picked up by the various services of the blogosphere, and spread quite quickly: In all cases, the lede was about the hypothetical Nemesis star, a red dwarf in our immediate galactic area that supposedly exerts a level of gravitational force on the debris floating about the Oort Cloud, which surrounds our solar system.

Every 26m to 65m years, Nemesis unwittingly sends a comet or asteroid at the Earth, blasting everything into extinction.

This is all hypothetical, you understand, no one is really certain what wiped out the dinosaurs. But these stories are great propaganda for the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite telescope program, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) latest project.

But WISE, usually mentioned in the final third of those various news stories I mentioned, is already fascinating enough: it does not need the bells and whistles of the alleged comet-murder of the dinosaurs for added public interest.

Not that I can blame NASA: slap a dinosaur on it, and the public comes running - myself included, no matter what it is .

Honestly, though, I'm glad the dinosaurs got killed: because if they didn't die, I wouldn't have fine petrochemical-based products to make my 21st century life so enjoyable.

EYE IN THE SKY
And speaking of 21st century products, the WISE telescope mission is pretty darn cool: Launched in December, made operational in January, WISE will take a photo every 11 seconds for a total of 1.5m snapshots of deep space.

Run by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, over the six to 10 months of its mission, until the satellite's coolant runs out, WISE will take images in the 3 to 25 micrometre wavelength range of 99% of the sky with its infrared cameras.

The coolant is imperative, as the telescope is infrared, and needs to be cooler than the objects being photographed.

So if there is a Nemesis star out in the Oort, WISE should be able to pick it up.