The Dead Media Notebook (92 page)

From Angus Gulliver

Reading about the 1954 Timex Magnetic Disc Recorder, which Bill Burns suspects was never put into production, I can say with certainty that an earlier magnetic disc recorder, which is similar to the description of the Timex except it does not play 45’s, was put into production as early as 1950.

I recently acquired a Recordon, which was made by Thermionic Products of London. Capacitors inside are dated April 1950 and seem original, so I assume that the machine was built circa 1950. It was made under licence from the Brush Development Company of the USA, and the circuit is a fairly simple three valve (tube) affair not disimilar from simple tape recorders.

There is no power amplifier, the Recordon is clearly intended as an office dictation device with remote control and headphone level playback both available via the microphone with a foot switch as an extra option.

I received my Recordon without a mains cable, but a quick inspection of the circuit allowed me to construct a cable. The machine fired up immediately and after giving it a few minutes for the (original Cossor) valves to warm up I was able to replay a recording made on the machine almost 50 years ago.

The only disc I have, which was attached to the machine when I purchased it, contains a recording of a doctor dictating medical certificates to his secretary.

One is dated 27
^th
January 195? (a dropout muffles the final number) but other information on the disc (he mentions a flu epidemic) leads me to conclude that it is the early 50’s.

It seems somewhat remarkable, but the magnetic recording has survived almost 50 years in such good condition and with so few dropouts that the contents can be easily heard and understood today.

Apart from that last digit in the date every word can be discerned. The disc runs for about five minutes, and the fidelity is not very good - adequate for dictation and other voice recording but not suitable for music. The recording runs from the centre out towards the edge, with the quality getting better the closer to the edge the pickup gets.

The discs have ‘fold here’ dotted lines on them suggesting they can be mailed (as with the Timex discs) or stored in the machine’s lid. I have not tried the recording function because I do not wish to damage the information already on the disc. All in all it is a fascinating machine, but must have had a short production life once dictabelts and dictaphones hit their stride.

Source: Author’s personal experience

From Tim Pozar

USC neuroscientist finds signature of life on Mars in decades-old data

Experiments done more than two decades ago on Martian soil collected by the Viking Landers 1 and 2 provided evidence that life might exist on the Red Planet, says Joseph Miller, Ph.D., associate professor in the Department of Cell and Neurobiology at the Keck School of Medicine of the University of Southern California.

Miller recently did a re-analysis of data collected by the landers, and found that something in the collected soil was apparently metabolizing nutrients-and doing so with a distinct biological rhythm that, he says, can only be found in a living cell. Miller presented his findings today at an astrobiology symposium held during the International Society for Optical Engineering’s 46
^th
Annual Meeting.

In August and September of 1975, the Viking spacecraft were launched from Cape Canaveral. After travelling for nearly a year, each reached the atmosphere of Mars and the landers were deployed to the planet’s surface. Once there, they performed a series of experiments-including one in which a robotic arm scooped up samples of soil and deposited them in petri dishes, along with a drop of a nutrient solution that had been labeled with radioactive carbon.

The idea, explains Miller, was that if there were any living organisms in the sample, they would take up the carbon-labeled nutrients and process them, eventually releasing the radioactive carbon in a gas form. A radiation detector was set up near the covered dish, connected to it by a tube through which any released gases would travel.

And travel they did, says Miller. When the data were collected, the original researchers involved with the Viking expedition-Patricia Straat and Gilbert Levin-found definite evidence of gas release. It seemed they had indeed found life on Mars-but other scientists suggested that the release might be better explained as the result of chemical reactions with highly reactive compounds like superoxides and peroxides. Unable to prove that the gas was definitely being released by living organisms, the NASA scientists let the matter drop.

And so those tantalizing data sat, more or less undisturbed, until 1999. Miller, who had worked for NASA in the early 1980s, studying the effects of zero gravity on circadian rhythms in squirrel monkeys, began writing a proposal to NASA to do biology on future Mars expeditions. It was then that he saw a figure in a geophysical journal taken from the data from the Viking Lander 2 experiment-a figure that showed highly periodic gas release in Levin and Straat’s experiment.

Although the science of biological clocks hadn’t been advanced enough at the time of the Viking experiments to help the researchers make their case, it had come a long way in the intervening years. And Miller immediately knew he had something potentially exciting on his hands.

“I immediately got interested,” says Miller.

“So I asked NASA if I could look at the data.” It took a number of calls-and a good four months-to uncover what Miller was looking for. And when NASA found it, there was a problem.

“The data were on magnetic tapes, and written in a format so old that the programmers who knew it had died,” Miller said.

Eventually, NASA was able to recover the data from printouts, luckily preserved by Levin and Straat-and so, Miller was able to pore over the numbers. There were a lot of them-in fact, their analysis is still underway. But even after having crunched just 30 percent of the experiment’s data, Miller was able to find something remarkable-something, he says, that went unremarked-upon in the original papers.

“The signal itself not only had a circadian rhythm,” declares Miller, “but it had a precise circadian rhythm of 24.66 hours-which is particularly significant, because it’s the length of a Martian day.”

More specifically, says Miller, the fluctuations in gas emissions seem to be entrained to a 2 degrees C fluctuation inside the lander, which in turn reflected not-quite-total shielding from the 50 degrees C fluctuation in temperature that occurs daily on the surface of Mars. Temperature-entrained circadian rhythms, even to a mere 2-degree C fluctuation, have been observed repeatedly on earth.

As for the original concerns of the dubious chemists, who thought the same sort of signal could simply be coming from highly reactive, non-organic compounds in the soil, Miller says such a scenario would be almost impossible to imagine.

“For one thing,” he explains, “there has since been research that shows that superoxides exposed to an aqueous solution-like the nutrient solution in the experiment-will quickly be destroyed. And yet, the circadian rhythms from the Martian soil persisted for nine straight weeks.”

“There is no reason for a purely chemical reaction to be so strongly synchronized to such a small temperature fluctuation,” he adds.

“We think that in conjunction with the strong indications from Mars Observer images that show water flowed on the surface in the recent past, a lot of the necessary characteristics of life are there. I think back in 1976, the Viking researchers had an excellent reason to believe they’d discovered life; I’d say it was a good 75 percent certain. Now, with this discovery, I’d say it’s over 90 percent. And I think there are a lot of biologists who would agree with me.”

Source: University of Southern California press release