MUSIC: "Our World" theme
Straight ahead on "Our World" ... Invasive species taking hold in a warmer Antarctica ... Science toys make learning fun (or playtime educational) ... and toxics testing without animals ...
ZERHOUNI: "Could you end up with molecular signatures that will be predictive of human toxicology, in ways that you just can't do in animal testing today?"
Testing toxics, Blu-Ray wins the high-def format battle, and more. I'm Art Chimes. Welcome to VOA's science and technology magazine, "Our World."
The space shuttle Atlantis returned to Earth on Wednesday, ending a 13-day mission to the International Space Station.
NASA-TV: "Nose gear touch down. rolling out on runway 15 at the Kennedy Space Center, wrapping up a 5.3 million mile [8.5 million kilometer] mission to expand the global village of space."
The biggest part of this latest shuttle mission was delivery and installation of the European Space Agency's Columbus science lab to the International Space Station. A few hours after landing, astronaut Stan Love talked about being part of the space station's role in science research.
LOVE: "One of the things the station hasn't been able to do yet as much as we had wanted was science. And its a privilege to me to have been part of this wonderful team that's put a dedicated science laboratory up on space station, and put some new instruments on the outside of it to do the work that station was intended for."
Atlantis landed just two days after another shuttle, , was moved to the launch pad ahead of a mission set to begin on March 11. The seven-man shuttle crew will be delivering Japanese and Canadian components to the space station.
The high-definition video-disk format war effectively ended this week when Toshiba announced it was pulling the plug on its HD DVD format, leaving the market to Blu-Ray, the competing format developed by Sony.
To help us understand the difference between the two formats and what Toshiba's move will mean for the hi-def video marketplace, I spoke with PC Magazine editor in chief Lance Ulanoff:
ULANOFF: "Most people point to the difference in the amount of storage space. Blu-Ray could [store] 50 gigabytes; HD DVD could do about 30. Beyond that, no significant technical differences. So it really came down to marketing, partnerships and availability."
Q: Partnerships with the film studios, basically?
ULANOFF: "Right."
Q: Well, this sounds an awful lot like the VHS-Beta [home video format] war of, I guess, the 1970s. Is that a good comparison?
ULANOFF: "Yeah. It was widely accepted that Betamax was the superior format. And many people say Blu-Ray is supposedly the superior format and now it's won. I kinda disagree in that there's very little difference between the two formats. But beyond that the analogy is quite good. In much the same way, the industry realized that it doesn't matter which is the superior technology. What matters is, which will people buy."
Q: So was the difference the alignment of the movie studios?
ULANOFF: "That was one part of it. Understand that Sony owns a movie studio, so that gave them a leg up already. But there was also the partnership for distribution. Things really began to fall apart for Toshiba and the HD DVD guys when Warner Bros. walked away at the beginning of January. That was followed by Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Netflix, and others walking away from the HD DVD format. So suddenly, all their major distribution partners said nah, you know, this isn't working for us."
Q: In your post on PCMag.com you're writing about how the Sony video game console, the PS3, was playing a role in this. How does that work?
ULANOFF: "Sony got really beat up last year for the PS3. One, it seemed too big, it was too expensive, it wasn't selling well. And it had this Blu-Ray player in it. You know, what the heck were people going to do with that? Nobody had Blu-Ray discs. Well, now that seems like a stroke of genius because that helped seed the Blu-Ray technology into probably over a million American homes. And that may have made all the difference."
Q: DVD has been a worldwide standard, although you do have the region coding. Is that going to be the same situation with Blu-Ray?