Evolution Can't Go Backward

By Jeanna Bryner, Senior Writer

posted: 23 September 2009 04:21 pm ET

In a kind of evolutionary bridge-burning, once a gene has morphed into its current state, the road back gets blocked, new research suggests. So there's no easy way to turn back.

"Evolutionary biologists have long been fascinated by whether evolution can go backwards," said study researcher Joe Thornton of the University of Oregon's Center for Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. "But the issue has remained unresolved, because we seldom know exactly what features our ancestors had, or the mechanisms by which they evolved into their modern forms."

Thornton's team solved this problem by looking at evolution at the molecular level, where they could figure out the steps taken between the ancestral form of a protein and its successor.

Their results, detailed in the Sept. 24 issue of the journal Nature, reveal that over long time scales certain genetic blockades arise that make it nearly impossible to transform a modern protein into its ancestral state, even if ancient environmental pressures were to exist.

"This is the best demonstration of the molecular foundations of evolutionary irreversibility that I have ever read," said Michael Rose, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Irvine, who was not involved in the current study.

Turning back the genetic clock

The team looked at the so-called glucocorticoid receptor, a protein that binds with the hormone cortisol and regulates stress responses, immunity and other bodily processes in humans.

They knew that during a relatively short stint more than 400 million years ago, that receptor gained its current abilities from its ancestral state, which was sensitive to another hormone.

So Thornton's team created both forms of the protein. "We resurrected the first protein to have the modern function and from just before that the last protein to have the ancestral function," Thornton said.

They found seven key mutations that together gave the ancient protein its updated function. To figure out if they could coax the modern protein into its former function, the researchers reversed those seven key mutations.

"We expected to get the ancestral function back out of it," Thornton said during a telephone interview. "But instead we got a dead protein. It didn't work at all. It was completely non-functional."

Burning bridges

Here's what they suggest is behind the phenomenon: As the ancient protein evolved, five other mutations made subtle changes in the protein's structure that were incompatible with the primordial form.

"Suppose you're redecorating your bedroom — first you move the bed, then you put the dresser where the bed used to be," Thornton said. "If you decide you want to move the bed back, you can't do it unless you get that dresser out of the way first."

He added, "The restrictive mutations in the GR (glucocorticoid receptor) prevented evolutionary reversal in the same way."

This same restrictive process might not occur over shorter time scales, as Rose has found in his research.

"What this new Nature publication shows is that on a much longer time-scale (more than a million generations), it is harder to get evolution to reverse itself," Rose told LiveScience. "This is how evolutionists explain things like the failure to reverse-evolve gills in whales or dolphins. Too many generations have elapsed since the ancestors of the Cetaceans had functional gills as adults."

Thornton hopes to study the reversibility of evolution in other proteins. "I expect that this will be a fairly general observation that other proteins and other traits will often be irreversible," he said.

Bloody man found next to dead prostitute

By Wu Shen | 2009-9-21

A 21-YEAR-OLD suspect has been arrested after being found in bed and covered in blood next to a prostitute he allegedly stabbed dead in Minhang District, prosecutors said yesterday.

Xu Lishi, from Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, was a former restaurant worker who became depressed after gambling away his life savings of 30,000 yuan (US$4,392), prosecutors said.

Xu confessed that he had killed the prostitute with a fruit knife on August 17. "I wanted to commit suicide but didn't want to be lonely, so found someone to die with me," Xu told prosecutors.

With the last of his money, he bought a knife in a supermarket and had a last supper in a small restaurant in Qibao area, prosecutors said.

He went into an unnamed salon about 10pm and chose a young prostitute at random.

"I didn't intend to have sex with her. I just wanted to die with her," Xu said. He grabbed her by the neck, but "the more she struggled, the harder I strangled her, until she lost consciousness," Xu said.

Then he took out his knife and stabbed her in the stomach. "When I saw the blood coming out, I stabbed myself and lost consciousness," Xu told police.

Both were sent to hospital, where the prostitute died.

Vacant pet store filled with dead animals

Published: 22 Sep 09 07:17 CET

A chance look by police into an abandoned pet store in western Sweden revealed a gruesome discovery.

When police entered the shop, located in an industrial area in Tjörn, north of Gothenburg on Sweden’s west coast, they found cages and aquaria filled with dead animals.

All of the animals had died of hunger and thirst.

Police were in the area looking into another matter when they were approached by a janitor who thought there was something strange about the Zoobutiken store.

Inside the shop, police found dead guinea pigs, rabbits, hamsters, and birds. Three small mice were still clinging to life and were given food by the police.

The pet store had been closed for a month, although it remains unknown how long it had been since someone had cared for the animals.

The owner of the store told the Göteborgs-Posten (GP) newspaper that she had been in contact with a woman who was supposed to take care of the animals after the store ceased operations.

“She obviously hasn’t bothered to do that. Right now I’m sad, disappointed, and really damn angry,” the owner told GP.

On Tuesday, police plan to look into how the case of animal cruelty should be dealt with from a legal perspective.

Slain girl on Bay Area rapper's MySpace

Carolyn Said, Chronicle Staff Writer

Monday, September 21, 2009

(09-20) 20:28 PDT -- Richard McCroskey of Castro Valley called himself "Syko Sam" and rapped about the thrill of killing people.

But the 20-year-old's message board on MySpace.com was dominated by a different theme - a teen girl from Virginia, Emma Niederbrock, lavishing him with affection.

"You are my one and only everything," wrote Niederbrock, who counted down the days until McCroskey planned to visit her.

Police said Sunday that the visit turned into a nightmare. They believe McCroskey flew to Virginia on Sept. 6 to see the girl, attended a "horrorcore" concert with her, and then killed her and three others in her home.

He was arrested Saturday at Richmond International Airport, police said, one day after the bodies were found decomposing in a home in Farmville, Va., and one day before his scheduled flight back to the Bay Area.

Richard Alden Samuel McCroskey III is set to be arraigned today on charges including murder.

"It's a horrific crime. It's hard to imagine what these people must have gone through," said police Sgt. Andy Ellington in a telephone interview from Farmville, a town of 7,200 with little violent crime. "It's a close-knit community and everybody knows everybody. It's just devastating."

Ellington said none of the victims had been positively identified, pending autopsies being performed in Richmond. But he said investigators believe the victims include McCroskey's girlfriend as well as Mark Niederbrock, a pastor at a Presbyterian church in the area who is identified in published reports as the girl's father.

Asked about a possible motive in the slaying, Ellington said, "I wish I knew." He noted that the suspect, asked how he committed the crime by a reporter, responded, "Jesus told me to do it."

Efforts to reach McCroskey's family in Castro Valley were unsuccessful on Sunday. Neighbors of a modest, ranch-style home where McCroskey lived said they never noticed anything troubling about the young man, his parents or his older sister.

A loner
McCroskey appeared to be a loner, they said, and always wore a hooded black sweatshirt.

On his MySpace page, the red-haired McCroskey posed with a skull-bedecked bandanna covering the lower part of his face. He described himself as a fan of the horrorcore genre, which glorifies violence with lyrics set to hip-hop beats.

McCroskey, saying he only recently began rapping, posted songs with lyrics such as "I've killed many people and I kill them real slow. It's the best feeling, watching their last breath."

A friend, Andres Shrim, a musician and the owner of Serial Killin Records in New Mexico, said he was shocked that McCroskey was accused of murder, calling him a "good kid."

Legitimate art form
He said horrorcore is a legitimate art form that reflects reality in the world and had nothing to do with the slayings.

"There's no difference from what we do than going out on a Friday night to the newest horror movie that came out, or turning on the news and hearing about brutal bloodshed and violence," Shrim said. If McCroskey is guilty, he said, "It was some other sort of circumstance. The kid did not have it easy in his life."

Shrim, who first met McCroskey in January while performing at a concert in Apple Valley (San Bernardino County), said McCroskey "was brilliant at Web design, graphics and all that. I commissioned him to do our Web site and to do some graphics work for us."

Shrim said McCroskey had stayed in Farmville with Emma Niederbrock and her mother, Debra Kelley, an associate professor of sociology and criminal justice studies at Longwood University. Kelley's home was the site of the killings, but it was not clear whether she was among the dead.

Shrim said McCroskey, Niederbrock and her best friend took a road trip to a Sept. 12 horrorcore festival in Michigan called Strictly for the Wicked, with the girlfriend's parents acting as drivers.

Shrim said his girlfriend received an urgent call a few days later from the mother of Niederbrock's female friend, saying she hadn't heard from her daughter. Neither the two girls nor McCroskey responded to phone calls, text messages or e-mails, Shrim said.

"I got very concerned because it was definitely not in these girls' nature to not answer," he said.

Victims found
Shrim said he contacted police Friday, asking them to check at Kelley's house.

Ellington said the four victims were found Friday afternoon when a person asked officers to conduct a welfare check at the home.

"When officers arrived at the house, they noticed a distinct odor that they recognized as possibly being decaying bodies," Ellington said. "They made entry and observed three bodies on the floor."

The officers found the fourth body, Ellington said, after obtaining a search warrant.

McCroskey was arrested at about 11:30 a.m. Saturday at the airport. Ellington said he was sleeping in a chair in the baggage claim area.

On Sunday, someone apparently accessed McCroskey's MySpace page and deleted many messages, including those from Niederbrock.

"I know my mind works weird," she wrote, "cause I always expect the worst, but I'm trying sooo hard not to with you cause I know you'd never hurt me."

Open-door morgue leaves bodies up for grabs

KATE BENSON
September 21, 2009

SECURITY at one of Sydney's biggest hospitals is so lax that anyone can walk into the morgue and claim a body without showing identification, prompting fears that corpses could be wrongly removed or defiled.

Undertakers have blasted Royal North Shore Hospital for its cavalier attitude to security, saying it showed management had ''integrity and moral issues''.

The hospital was the only one in Sydney where it was possible for members of the public to enter the mortuary's freezer, which stores up to 10 bodies, and ''help themselves'', the secretary of the Funeral Industry Association, Graham Stewart, said yesterday.

He said undertakers were in fear that the wrong body could be buried or cremated before hospital staff had checked the paperwork, a particular concern for Jews or Muslims, who must usually be buried within 24 hours of death, or on days when two people with the same surname were in the morgue.

''It's been going on for years and it's appalling, but the health department told us not to complain to the hospital because they could make things worse for us,'' Mr Stewart said.

At other hospitals, undertakers were required to submit detailed paperwork at the medical records office before being escorted to the mortuary by a porter and monitored by a morgue attendant while they removed the body.

''Not at Royal North Shore,'' the proprietor of Mannings Funerals, John Manning, said yesterday.

''Anyone can walk in there, pick up a body without any paperwork and nobody would be any the wiser.''

The morgue, which can be entered via an unlocked door off the emergency department car park, is staffed by an attendant but many undertakers contacted by the Herald said they regularly arrived to find it empty or the attendant busy in an adjacent office.

One, who did not want to be named, said he visited the morgue recently while the attendant was eating lunch at a desk around the corner from the freezer. A buzzer attached to the door heralded his arrival, but the attendant did not acknowledge it, allowing the undertaker to enter the freezer, remove a body and leave without being sighted or have his paperwork checked.

''I was aghast … at the ease with which we were able to do this. There are no locked doors, no checks, no security cameras. It is my opinion that a body could easily be stolen and I'm surprised that it hasn't happened already.''

Mr Stewart said the situation was unacceptable.

''Families have a right to feel that every check and balance is in place for their loved ones. There are no shortcuts. This hospital has a real issue with integrity and morals.''

The president of the Funeral Directors' Association of NSW, Ken Chapman, said he did not believe a lack of security was normal practice at Royal North Shore but agreed it was possible a body could be removed and buried before the relevant paperwork was processed.

''That would be a very big concern,'' he said.

A spokeswoman for the hospital said security had been reviewed five months ago, but there had been no complaints about access to the mortuary.

However, she said new locks would be fitted this week to ensure the mortuary doors locked automatically in response to the Herald's inquiries.

''The people in the morgue are still very much patients of this hospital and we should be looking after them properly,'' she said.

''We can all cut corners but the staff have now been reminded that it's important to stick to the rules - and we do want to emphasise that nothing untoward has been reported to us.''

Volunteers find decapitated animals on beach

Saturday, September 19, 2009

HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY (Bay News 9) -- Volunteers cleaning up the Hillsborough County side of the Courtney Campbell Causeway made a gruesome discovery Saturday.

While picking up trash, they found mutilated animal carcasses on a secluded beach.

Volunteer Christina Kugeares found some of the carcasses. Along with a headless goat, there was a decapitated duck and hen.

"I was horrified. I know this stuff happens," Kugeares said. "Honestly, I didn't think that it was happening here in the Tampa Bay area."

Organizers say this is not the first time something like this has been found in the area.

"It was a little unusual, but I can't say it's the first time we've found this out here," said cleanup organizer Christine Commerce.

The Tampa Police Department says it can only speculate as to what was done here. Ritual animal sacrifice is constitutionally protected.

The International Coastal Cleanup is an annual event held by Keep Hillsborough County Beautiful. Last year they say they found a live guinea pig on Apollo Beach.

There are dozens of International Coastal Cleanup sites around Hillsborough County, with a few thousand volunteers cleaning up around 50,000 pounds of trash.

5 men accused of blowing up turtle

Posted at: 09/20/2009 12:05 AM
Updated at: 09/22/2009 2:33 PM
By: Kumi Tucker

KNOX - Five men from the town of Knox are accused of making their own bombs.

Authorities say the men strapped an explosive to a turtle and blew it up, and captured it all on video tape.

You can see the men joking about what they're about to do. They talk about putting the video on YouTube and show the explosives they mean to use to blow up the snapping turtle.

VIDEOTAPE:

"We'll do it. We'll put it on the ground then."
"Because all the force goes up, makes sense."
"I mean, you're not going to blow up the ground."
"We'll put the fuse in his mouth."
They tape the explosive to the turtle and joke about the imminent death.

VIDEOTAPE:

"He's going to be done soon. Think he has any last words?"
"Take that out of his mouth. He might say something."
Authorities say the men who thought this was so much fun are 25-year-old Jeffrey Robert and 22-year-old Michael Robert of 851 Knox Cave Rd. and 26-year-old Tyson Pincher, 21-year-old James Pincher and 17-year-old Seth Pincher of 864 Knox Cave Rd.

Authorities say they executed a search warrant Friday night at the Pincher home.

"We also found chemicals in the house that are illegal for the average person to possess such as chloroform, bottles of chloroform, illegal handguns, sawed-off shotguns, fireworks. It's unbelievable what we pulled out of this house tonight. The scary thing is that these pipe bombs were very well-made and capable of doing a lot of damage," said Albany County Undersheriff Craig Apple.

On the tape, one of the men even puts a line on the turtle's tail.

VIDEOTAPE:

"Don't you want to see him squirming around before he blows up?"
All five are facing charges of felony criminal possession of a weapon, conspiracy and torturing an animal. They were taken to Albany County Jail in lieu of bail.

Investigators are looking into what the men may have been planning with the explosives and weapons.

Officials with the SPCA call this demented and sadistic behavior. Torturing an animal is a misdemeanor, not a felony, and they hope the laws will be strengthened.

"It's very important to document animal cruelty offenses in people under the age of 30, because the FBI has tracked animal cruelty offenders and have shown that every serial killer in the United States in recent history has abused animals when they were younger," said Mathew Tully of the Schenectady County SPCA.

Tully said Buster's Law does not apply in this case because that generally deals with companion animals and this was a wild snapping turtle.

German teen who attacked school awakes from coma

By BRIGITTE CASPARY, Associated Press Writer Brigitte Caspary, Associated Press Writer – Mon Sep 21, 11:26 am ET

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090921/ap_on_re_eu/eu_germany_school_attack;_ylt=Aol7vKz4QQwtXvaDHyDPKpCGWo14;_ylu=X3oDMTJyb2I2NDg3BGFzc2V0A2FwLzIwMDkwOTIxL2V1X2dlcm1hbnlfc2Nob29sX2F0dGFjawRjcG9zAzUEcG9zAzUEc2VjA3luX3RvcF9zdG9yaWVzBHNsawNnZXJtYW50ZWVud2g-

ANSBACH, Germany – A German teenager who wounded nine students and a teacher in a terrifying ax and arson attack on his school was motivated by a "hatred for humanity" and had been planning the rampage since April, officials said Monday.

The new details came as the 18-year-old, who had been shot three times by police, was awakened Monday from a medically induced coma. Prosecutor Gudrun Lehnberger said the suspect was responsive but has not yet been questioned about Thursday's attack.

However, the roughly 80 pages of evidence recovered from the teenager's laptop included extensive information on his plans, much of it addressed to a female whose name was not released, said Juergen Krach, another prosecutor. Krach said investigators believe the addressee may be fictional, and the material was apparently not sent to anyone.

The teenager, who has not been named, wrote that his "goal was to kill as many students and teachers as possible and burn down the school," Lehnberger told reporters at a news conference.

"As a motive, he named his hatred for humanity and, above all, school," she said.

The assailant wrote that he was treated unfairly in and out of school and feared that he wouldn't meet the requirements for graduation Lehnberger said. She added that he had expressed a wish to die himself in the attack — "he didn't want to live any more."

Krach said the student wrote that his parents were not responsible for his planned actions, which he described in documents dating back to April, and also lamented that he wanted but apparently did not have a steady girlfriend.

Already in April, he used the word "Amok," or rampage, Krach said. In May, he turned his attention to weapons. In June, he chose the day for the attack and his clothing, and settled on the school's third story.

"What was decisive for him was there was a particularly large number of classrooms there," Krach said.

The assailant chose a T-shirt for the day with the words "Made in School" printed on it.

The documents — which had been deleted, but were retrieved by computer specialists — showed that he intended to draw students out of classrooms with burning objects and then attack them with handheld weapons such as an ax, officials said.

Last Thursday, he did just that. He climbed to the third story of the school in Ansbach, Bavaria, shortly after classes started, tossed Molotov cocktails into a classroom and then attacked students with an ax and knives as they fled.

Over 700 students fled the school in southern Germany, some leaving by an emergency staircase.

Police shot the assailant three times in the upper body, officials said Monday — correcting a previous statement that he was shot five times.

Two girls who suffered the most serious injuries were both out of critical condition, officials said. One girl suffered a blow to the head with an ax and the other had serious burns.

The high school reopened for classes on Monday after holding counseling sessions on Friday.

"We slowly want to return to normal," principal Franz Stark said.

The Ansbach attack was the second attack on a school in Germany this year, and took place just three days into Bavaria's new school year.

In March, 17-year-old Tim Kretschmer fatally shot 12 people at his former school in the southwestern town of Winnenden. He fled the building and killed three more people before turning the gun on himself.

That was the nation's second-worst school shooting. A 2002 shooting spree in Erfurt left 17 dead, including the gunman.

Krach, the state prosecutor, said the teenager who carried out the Ansbach attack mentioned Erfurt and may have been inspired by that spree.

After Kretschmer's attack in Winnenden, Germany moved to tighten checks on gun owners.

SJC OK’s secret use of GPS devices

Rules set for police to plant tracking devices in suspect’s vehicle

By John R. Ellement
Globe Staff / September 18, 2009

For the first time, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled yesterday that the state constitution allows police to break into a suspect’s car to secretly install tracking devices using a global positioning system, provided that authorities have a warrant before they do so.

In a unanimous ruling written by Justice Judith Cowin, the state’s highest court upheld the drug trafficking conviction of Everett H. Connolly, a Cape Cod man who was tracked by State Police in 2004 after they installed a GPS device in his minivan.

The court said that using GPS devices as an investigative tool, which can require police to secretly break into a vehicle to install the device, does not violate the ban on unreasonable search and seizure in the state’s Declaration of Rights.

“We hold that warrants for GPS monitoring of a vehicle may be issued,’’ Cowin wrote. “The Commonwealth must establish, before a magistrate . . . that GPS monitoring of the vehicle will produce evidence’’ that a crime has been committed or will be committed in the near future.

The SJC said the devices can be installed for up to 15 days before police must show why the devices need to remain in place. Generally, search warrants expire after seven days.

William Leahy, chief counsel for the Committee on Public Counsel Service, said the SJC clearly built a new wall of protection for individuals when it comes to government use of electronic monitoring devices.

Leahy said the SJC ruling also means that police must persuade a judge they have probable cause before the GPS devices can be installed. He said that will be a barrier to widespread use by law enforcement.

“It’s good for the public, and it’s good for the rule of law,’’ Leahy said. “I don’t think it is currently a frequent law enforcement tactic. But the important point now is that it is much less likely to become a frequent tactic.’’

Prosecutors agreed with Leahy and welcomed the SJC decision. They said the court spelled out what rules police must follow when they target a suspect, something that had been lacking.

“Police want to follow the rules,’’ said Berkshire District Attorney David Capeless, president of the Massachusetts District Attorneys Association. “They just want to know what the rules are and that they are clear. This is clear.’’

Cape and Islands District Attorney Michael O’Keefe, who prosecuted Connolly, pointed out that his office got a warrant when it went after the drug dealer in 2004.

The court said it upheld Connolly’s conviction because O’Keefe got the warrant.

O’Keefe also said he will tell police chiefs on the Cape that they should get a warrant before they install a GPS device on a vehicle.

“We are very careful about our use of any device that is intrusive of someone’s protected rights,’’ O’Keefe said, adding that law enforcement can readily live with the new rules. “It’s not an overly difficult process to deal with it.’’

Justices Ralph Gants, Robert Cordy, and Margot Botsford generally agreed with Cowin’s conclusion. But they said the SJC should also consider the right of the individual to be free from constant government monitoring.

“Our constitutional analysis should focus on the privacy interest at risk from contemporaneous GPS monitoring, not simply the property interest,’’ Gants wrote for the group.

In 2004 while sitting in his minivan, Connolly sold crack cocaine to an undercover officer in Harwich.

On Aug. 31, 2004, State Police installed the GPS device in Connolly’s van while it was parked at his apartment complex.

When he returned form New York, where police learned he obtained his cocaine, State Police stopped him on Route 6 and seized the van. Inside, they found a ball of cocaine weighing 124 grams.

Connolly was sentenced to 12 to 15 years in state prison by Barnstable Superior Court Judge Gary Nickerson.

“My client lost in this case because police had a warrant,’’ said Connolly’s appellate attorney, Ian Stone of Northampton.

Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine (Part 4)

By Nicholas Thompson

And Perimeter bought the Soviets time. After the US installed deadly accurate Pershing II missiles on German bases in December 1983, Kremlin military planners assumed they would have only 10 to 15 minutes from the moment radar picked up an attack until impact. Given the paranoia of the era, it is not unimaginable that a malfunctioning radar, a flock of geese that looked like an incoming warhead, or a misinterpreted American war exercise could have triggered a catastrophe. Indeed, all these events actually occurred at some point. If they had happened at the same time, Armageddon might have ensued.

Perimeter solved that problem. If Soviet radar picked up an ominous but ambiguous signal, the leaders could turn on Perimeter and wait. If it turned out to be geese, they could relax and Perimeter would stand down. Confirming actual detonations on Soviet soil is far easier than confirming distant launches. "That is why we have the system," Yarynich says. "To avoid a tragic mistake. "

The mistake that both Yarynich and his counterpart in the United States, Bruce Blair, want to avoid now is silence. It's long past time for the world to come to grips with Perimeter, they argue. The system may no longer be a central element of Russian strategy—US-based Russian arms expert Pavel Podvig calls it now "just another cog in the machine"—but Dead Hand is still armed.

To Blair, who today runs a think tank in Washington called the World Security Institute, such dismissals are unacceptable. Though neither he nor anyone in the US has up-to-the-minute information on Perimeter, he sees the Russians' refusal to retire it as yet another example of the insufficient reduction of forces on both sides. There is no reason, he says, to have thousands of armed missiles on something close to hair-trigger alert. Despite how far the world has come, there's still plenty of opportunity for colossal mistakes. When I talked to him recently, he spoke both in sorrow and in anger: "The Cold War is over. But we act the same way that we used to."

Yarynich, likewise, is committed to the principle that knowledge about nuclear command and control means safety. But he also believes that Perimeter can still serve a useful purpose. Yes, it was designed as a self-deterrent, and it filled that role well during the hottest days of the Cold War. But, he wonders, couldn't it now also play the traditional role of a doomsday device? Couldn't it deter future enemies if publicized?

The waters of international conflict never stay calm for long. A recent case in point was the heated exchange between the Bush administration and Russian president Vladimir Putin over Georgia. "It's nonsense not to talk about Perimeter," Yarynich says. If the existence of the device isn't made public, he adds, "we have more risk in future crises. And crisis is inevitable."

As Yarynich describes Perimeter with pride, I challenge him with the classic critique of such systems: What if they fail? What if something goes wrong? What if a computer virus, earthquake, reactor meltdown, and power outage conspire to convince the system that war has begun?

Yarynich sips his beer and dismisses my concerns. Even given an unthinkable series of accidents, he reminds me, there would still be at least one human hand to prevent Perimeter from ending the world. Prior to 1985, he says, the Soviets designed several automatic systems that could launch counterattacks without any human involvement whatsoever. But all these devices were rejected by the high command. Perimeter, he points out, was never a truly autonomous doomsday device. "If there are explosions and all communications are broken," he says, "then the people in this facility can—I would like to underline can—launch."

Yes, I agree, a human could decide in the end not to press the button. But that person is a soldier, isolated in an underground bunker, surrounded by evidence that the enemy has just destroyed his homeland and everyone he knows. Sensors have gone off; timers are ticking. There's a checklist, and soldiers are trained to follow checklists.

Wouldn't any officer just launch? I ask Yarynich what he would do if he were alone in the bunker. He shakes his head. "I cannot say if I would push the button."

It might not actually be a button, he then explains. It could now be some kind of a key or other secure form of switch. He's not absolutely sure. After all, he says, Dead Hand is continuously being upgraded.

Senior editor Nicholas Thompson (nicholas_thompson@wired.com) is the author of The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War.

Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine (Part 3)

By Nicholas Thompson

Great Moments in Nuclear Game Theory

Permissive Action Links
When: 1960s
What: Midway through the Cold War, American leaders began to worry that a rogue US officer might launch a small, unauthorized strike, prompting massive retaliation. So in 1962, Robert McNamara ordered every nuclear weapon locked with numerical codes.
Effect: None. Irritated by the restriction, Strategic Air Command set all the codes to strings of zeros. The Defense Department didn't learn of the subterfuge until 1977.

US-Soviet Hotline
When: 1963
What: The USSR and US set up a direct line, reserved for emergencies. The goal was to prevent miscommunication about nuclear launches.
Effect: Unclear. To many it was a safeguard. But one Defense official in the 1970s hypothesized that the Soviet leader could authorize a small strike and then call to blame the launch on a renegade, saying, "But if you promise not to respond, I will order an absolute lockdown immediately."

Missile Defense
When: 1983
What: President Reagan proposed a system of nuclear weapons and lasers in space to shoot down enemy missiles. He considered it a tool for peace and promised to share the technology.
Effect: Destabilizing. The Soviets believed the true purpose of the "Star Wars" system was to back up a US first strike. The technology couldn't stop a massive Soviet launch, they figured, but it might thwart a weakened Soviet response.

Airborne Command Post
When: 1961-1990
What: For three decades, the US kept aircraft in the sky 24/7 that could communicate with missile silos and give the launch order if ground-based command centers were ever destroyed.
Effect: Stabilizing. Known as Looking Glass, it was the American equivalent of Perimeter, guaranteeing that the US could launch a counterattack. And the US told the Soviets all about it, ensuring that it served as a deterrent.

The first mention of a doomsday machine, according to P. D. Smith, author of Doomsday Men, was on an NBC radio broadcast in February 1950, when the atomic scientist Leo Szilard described a hypothetical system of hydrogen bombs that could cover the world in radioactive dust and end all human life. "Who would want to kill everybody on earth?" he asked rhetorically. Someone who wanted to deter an attacker. If Moscow were on the brink of military defeat, for example, it could halt an invasion by declaring, "We will detonate our H-bombs."

A decade and a half later, Stanley Kubrick's satirical masterpiece Dr. Strangelove permanently embedded the idea in the public imagination. In the movie, a rogue US general sends his bomber wing to preemptively strike the USSR. The Soviet ambassador then reveals that his country has just deployed a device that will automatically respond to any nuclear attack by cloaking the planet in deadly "cobalt-thorium-G."

"The whole point of the doomsday machine is lost if you keep it a secret!" cries Dr. Strangelove. "Why didn't you tell the world?" After all, such a device works as a deterrent only if the enemy is aware of its existence. In the movie, the Soviet ambassador can only lamely respond, "It was to be announced at the party congress on Monday."

In real life, however, many Mondays and many party congresses passed after Perimeter was created. So why didn't the Soviets tell the world, or at least the White House, about it? No evidence exists that top Reagan administration officials knew anything about a Soviet doomsday plan. George Shultz, secretary of state for most of Reagan's presidency, told me that he had never heard of it.

In fact, the Soviet military didn't even inform its own civilian arms negotiators. "I was never told about Perimeter," says Yuli Kvitsinsky, lead Soviet negotiator at the time the device was created. And the brass still won't talk about it today. In addition to Yarynich, a few other people confirmed the existence of the system to me—notably former Soviet space official Alexander Zheleznyakov and defense adviser Vitali Tsygichko—but most questions about it are still met with scowls and sharp nyets. At an interview in Moscow this February with Vladimir Dvorkin, another former official in the Strategic Rocket Forces, I was ushered out of the room almost as soon as I brought up the topic.

So why was the US not informed about Perimeter? Kremlinologists have long noted the Soviet military's extreme penchant for secrecy, but surely that couldn't fully explain what appears to be a self-defeating strategic error of extraordinary magnitude.

The silence can be attributed partly to fears that the US would figure out how to disable the system. But the principal reason is more complicated and surprising. According to both Yarynich and Zheleznyakov, Perimeter was never meant as a traditional doomsday machine. The Soviets had taken game theory one step further than Kubrick, Szilard, and everyone else: They built a system to deter themselves.

By guaranteeing that Moscow could hit back, Perimeter was actually designed to keep an overeager Soviet military or civilian leader from launching prematurely during a crisis. The point, Zheleznyakov says, was "to cool down all these hotheads and extremists. No matter what was going to happen, there still would be revenge. Those who attack us will be punished."

Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine (part 2)

By Nicholas Thompson

The new administration began expanding the US nuclear arsenal and priming the silos. And it backed up the bombs with bluster. In his 1981 Senate confirmation hearings, Eugene Rostow, incoming head of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, signaled that the US just might be crazy enough to use its weapons, declaring that Japan "not only survived but flourished after the nuclear attack" of 1945. Speaking of a possible US-Soviet exchange, he said, "Some estimates predict that there would be 10 million casualties on one side and 100 million on another. But that is not the whole of the population."

Meanwhile, in ways both small and large, US behavior toward the Soviets took on a harsher edge. Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin lost his reserved parking pass at the State Department. US troops swooped into tiny Grenada to defeat communism in Operation Urgent Fury. US naval exercises pushed ever closer to Soviet waters.

The strategy worked. Moscow soon believed the new US leadership really was ready to fight a nuclear war. But the Soviets also became convinced that the US was now willing to start a nuclear war. "The policy of the Reagan administration has to be seen as adventurous and serving the goal of world domination," Soviet marshal Nikolai Ogarkov told a gathering of the Warsaw Pact chiefs of staff in September 1982. "In 1941, too, there were many among us who warned against war and many who did not believe a war was coming," Ogarkov said, referring to the German invasion of his country. "Thus, the situation is not only very serious but also very dangerous."

A few months later, Reagan made one of the most provocative moves of the Cold War. He announced that the US was going to develop a shield of lasers and nuclear weapons in space to defend against Soviet warheads. He called it missile defense; critics mocked it as "Star Wars."

To Moscow it was the Death Star—and it confirmed that the US was planning an attack. It would be impossible for the system to stop thousands of incoming Soviet missiles at once, so missile defense made sense only as a way of mopping up after an initial US strike. The US would first fire its thousands of weapons at Soviet cities and missile silos. Some Soviet weapons would survive for a retaliatory launch, but Reagan's shield could block many of those. Thus, Star Wars would nullify the long-standing doctrine of mutually assured destruction, the principle that neither side would ever start a nuclear war since neither could survive a counterattack.

As we know now, Reagan was not planning a first strike. According to his private diaries and personal letters, he genuinely believed he was bringing about lasting peace. (He once told Gorbachev he might be a reincarnation of the human who invented the first shield.) The system, Reagan insisted, was purely defensive. But as the Soviets knew, if the Americans were mobilizing for attack, that's exactly what you'd expect them to say. And according to Cold War logic, if you think the other side is about to launch, you should do one of two things: Either launch first or convince the enemy that you can strike back even if you're dead.

Perimeter ensures the ability to strike back, but it's no hair-trigger device. It was designed to lie semi-dormant until switched on by a high official in a crisis. Then it would begin monitoring a network of seismic, radiation, and air pressure sensors for signs of nuclear explosions. Before launching any retaliatory strike, the system had to check off four if/then propositions: If it was turned on, then it would try to determine that a nuclear weapon had hit Soviet soil. If it seemed that one had, the system would check to see if any communication links to the war room of the Soviet General Staff remained. If they did, and if some amount of time—likely ranging from 15 minutes to an hour—passed without further indications of attack, the machine would assume officials were still living who could order the counterattack and shut down. But if the line to the General Staff went dead, then Perimeter would infer that apocalypse had arrived. It would immediately transfer launch authority to whoever was manning the system at that moment deep inside a protected bunker—bypassing layers and layers of normal command authority. At that point, the ability to destroy the world would fall to whoever was on duty: maybe a high minister sent in during the crisis, maybe a 25-year-old junior officer fresh out of military academy. And if that person decided to press the button ... If/then. If/then. If/then. If/then.

Once initiated, the counterattack would be controlled by so-called command missiles. Hidden in hardened silos designed to withstand the massive blast and electromagnetic pulses of a nuclear explosion, these missiles would launch first and then radio down coded orders to whatever Soviet weapons had survived the first strike. At that point, the machines will have taken over the war. Soaring over the smoldering, radioactive ruins of the motherland, and with all ground communications destroyed, the command missiles would lead the destruction of the US.

The US did build versions of these technologies, deploying command missiles in what was called the Emergency Rocket Communications System. It also developed seismic and radiation sensors to monitor for nuclear tests or explosions the world over. But the US never combined it all into a system of zombie retaliation. It feared accidents and the one mistake that could end it all.

Instead, airborne American crews with the capacity and authority to launch retaliatory strikes were kept aloft throughout the Cold War. Their mission was similar to Perimeter's, but the system relied more on people and less on machines.

And in keeping with the principles of Cold War game theory, the US told the Soviets all about it.

Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine (Part 1)

By Nicholas Thompson

Valery Yarynich glances nervously over his shoulder. Clad in a brown leather jacket, the 72-year-old former Soviet colonel is hunkered in the back of the dimly lit Iron Gate restaurant in Washington, DC. It's March 2009—the Berlin Wall came down two decades ago—but the lean and fit Yarynich is as jumpy as an informant dodging the KGB. He begins to whisper, quietly but firmly.

"The Perimeter system is very, very nice," he says. "We remove unique responsibility from high politicians and the military." He looks around again.

Yarynich is talking about Russia's doomsday machine. That's right, an actual doomsday device—a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. The thing that historian Lewis Mumford called "the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination." Turns out Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff, helped build one.

The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn't matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched.

The technical name was Perimeter, but some called it Mertvaya Ruka, or Dead Hand. It was built 25 years ago and remained a closely guarded secret. With the demise of the USSR, word of the system did leak out, but few people seemed to notice. In fact, though Yarynich and a former Minuteman launch officer named Bruce Blair have been writing about Perimeter since 1993 in numerous books and newspaper articles, its existence has not penetrated the public mind or the corridors of power. The Russians still won't discuss it, and Americans at the highest levels—including former top officials at the State Department and White House—say they've never heard of it. When I recently told former CIA director James Woolsey that the USSR had built a doomsday device, his eyes grew cold. "I hope to God the Soviets were more sensible than that." They weren't.

The system remains so shrouded that Yarynich worries his continued openness puts him in danger. He might have a point: One Soviet official who spoke with Americans about the system died in a mysterious fall down a staircase. But Yarynich takes the risk. He believes the world needs to know about Dead Hand. Because, after all, it is still in place.

The system that Yarynich helped build came online in 1985, after some of the most dangerous years of the Cold War. Throughout the '70s, the USSR had steadily narrowed the long US lead in nuclear firepower. At the same time, post-Vietnam, recession-era America seemed weak and confused. Then in strode Ronald Reagan, promising that the days of retreat were over. It was morning in America, he said, and twilight in the Soviet Union.

Part of the new president's hard-line approach was to make the Soviets believe that the US was unafraid of nuclear war. Many of his advisers had long advocated modeling and actively planning for nuclear combat. These were the progeny of Herman Kahn, author of On Thermonuclear War and Thinking About the Unthinkable. They believed that the side with the largest arsenal and an expressed readiness to use it would gain leverage during every crisis.

Hallstatt Charnel House

An Austrian house of bones filled with hundreds of intricately painted skulls
The town of Hallstatt is the kind of Austrian town that the sound of music might have been set in. On a beautiful forested mountain, set by a perfectly blue lake, filled with charming 19th century houses, it is a perfect vision of cheer. Except of course, for the room filled with skulls.

Behind the Hallstatt Catholic Church, near the St. Micheal's Chapel -- built in the 1100s and older then the church -- in a small and lovingly cared for cemetery is the Hallstatt Beinhaus or the Charnel House. A small building, it is tightly stacked with over 1200 skulls. Because Hallstatt finds itself in such a lovely location, on a mountain and beside a lake, it also finds itself in very short supply of burial grounds.

In the 1700s the church began digging up corpses to make way for the newly dead. The bodies which had been buried for only 10-15 years were then stacked inside the charnel house. Lest this all sound overly callous to the memory of the dead, there is a sweet element to the whole affair, a charmingness that Hallstatt can't seem to escape even with a room full of skulls.

Once the bones were exhumed and properly bleached in the sun, the family members would stack the bones next to their next of kin. In 1720 a tradition began of painting the skulls with symbolic decorations as well as dates of birth and death so that the dead would be remembered, even if they no longer had a grave. Of the 1200 skulls some 610 of them are lovingly painted, with an assortment of symbols, laurels for valor, roses for love, and so on. The ones from the 1700s are painted with thick dark garlands, while the newer ones, 1800s and on, bearing brighter floral styles.

Though this practice was officially stopped by the church in the 1960s, there is a much more recent skull in the beinhaus. Beside the cross with a gold tooth is the skull of a woman who died in 1983, her last request to be put in the beinhaus. The church made an exception to their rule and her skull was entered in 1995, the very last bone to go into the beinhaus.