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This interview was originally broadcast on Sept. 15, 2010. Man in the Woods is now available in paperback.
Many of Scott Spencer's novels feature a turning point — a dreadful, often unplanned act committed by one of the characters — after which nothing will ever be the same.
In his classic 1979 novel Endless Love, a love-struck teenager accidentally burns down his girlfriend's house after he's told he cannot see her again, an incident that plays indelibly in his mind for the next 30 years and changes both his life and his girlfriend's life forever. In A Ship Made of Paper, a lawyer flees his career and New York City after a violent incident and then becomes obsessed with a married mother in his small hometown.
Spencer's newest novel, Man in the Woods, starts off ordinarily enough: A carpenter named Paul takes a detour to the woods to have a few quiet moments to himself.
But Paul is not alone. He's soon joined by another man in the woods, who has amassed a number of gambling debts and thinks he is being tracked down by his creditors. That second man has a dog with him — a dog he stole from his ex-girlfriend — and is hitting the dog and yanking him around by his chain. Paul intervenes, which leads to an altercation — and Paul accidentally kills the man.
Spencer tells Terry Gross that he chose a death as the turning point in this novel because he's interested in lives being changed very suddenly — and wanted, in the aftermath of that change, to both push his characters to the edge and test their conscience.
"I'm interested in how close our orderly lives are to chaos," he says. "Just the way we see how savagery can break out in societies that just a year before were orderly. ... This expression of some inner beastliness is compelling to me because I can identify with it. ... I think it's something we all wonder if we could be capable of — this kind of violence and under what circumstances ... and what would the aftermath be."
Scott Spencer is the author of 10 books. Both Endless Love and A Ship Made of Paper were nominated for the National Book Award. He is a regular contributor to Rolling Stone and has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harpers Magazine and GQ.
Interview Highlights
On his belief in D-O-G vs. his belief in G-O-D
"I definitely believe in dog. You can't have as much dog hair in your house as I do and not believe in dog. And God [was] one of the things I was most interested in figuring out while writing this book — and at one point I thought, 'I'm really writing a religious book here.' And another point in writing it, I said, 'I'm really writing a very irreligious book here.' And then when I finally finished, I realized that this was something — and this is not a contradiction in terms — something that was passionately agnostic. Really, [this novel was] as passionate about agnosticism as much as Graham Greene is about his Catholicism because I could feel the otherworldly intentions of fate hovering over my characters yet I could not ever really ever quite come to a true narrative understanding that this fate was some sort of otherworldly intelligence that made sense enough that we could call it God."
On agnosticism
"Before [deciding I was an agnostic] I bounced between atheism and a desire to give some sort of religious meaning to my life. I was just talking to my mother last week and she talked to me about when I was a little kid, sometimes she'd have to bring me to a church — not that we went to church, because my parents were militantly atheistic — but she'd go to a church for some community meeting and she'd turn around and I'd be gone. And I'd be in one of the pews sort of praying fervently. I always had this feeling that I wished that religion, or a belief in God, and that ritual and that living metaphor [with] which I could explain my life was available to me.
"And there would just be times when I would just feel withering contempt for the whole thing and sort of glad that I hadn't entered into that system of thought. But novelists think a lot about God ... [because] we create whole worlds and we people them and then we tell the people what to do: We make them fall in love or fall out of windows. So there is that curiosity about God that I think all novelists have."
On physically defending others
"I always felt that that was the responsibility that I was born [into] because I'm male. When I was 10 years old, my father said, 'Men don't sleep as deeply as women because we need to be ready if somebody comes.' In my life as I've actually led it, I've always felt it was up to me to step in if somebody who is in my circle, who because of my relationship to them, I am duty-bound to protect. It is up to me to step in. I have not been in some situation like that Dustin Hoffman character in Straw Dogs with his little wire-rimmed glasses and his porn-starry-looking wife while all of these cretinish locals pound on the windows and try to get in — but there have been a couple of instances when I've had to 'man up,' as we say, and step between someone who was mine to protect somehow and someone who was going to do them some harm."
On the idea that men have a genetic impulse to defend others
"It's very hard to say what anyone is genetically because ... people don't exist outside of society. You can't find a person who isn't culturally determined to one extent or another. So I don't know — until we start making people in test tubes — and then we have to keep them in the lab and study them, but even then they'd be the victims of some sort of deprivation — so it's very hard to say what people are in essence. I think it's one of the jobs that novels have, really. I think it's one of the things that keeps people reading — that we are endlessly amazed and curious and perplexed about: What is our nature?"
DAVID BIANCULLI, host: This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli of tvworthwatching.com, sitting in for Terry Gross. Terry considers today's guest, Scott Spencer, to be one of her favorite writers. He's the author of the bestselling books "Endless Love" and "A Ship Made of Paper," and he's taught fiction writing at Columbia University and in prison.
Scott Spencer's latest novel, "Man in the Woods," has just come out in paperback. The main character, Paul Phillips, accidentally kills someone in the woods and has to decide whether to confess to the police or just continue his life.
He finds himself wishing there were a god to whom he could turn, a god that would understand what went wrong. But Paul doesn't believe. However, the woman he lives with does. She's a recovering alcoholic who's written a bestseller about recently finding Jesus and realizing, quote, that most of my old friends think I'm ready for the funny farm, especially my liberal progressive friends who fear that I've gone all Pat Robertson on them, unquote.
Terry Gross spoke with Scott Spencer last year, when "Man in the Woods" was originally published.
TERRY GROSS, host: Scott Spencer, welcome back to FRESH AIR. I really love the book.
SCOTT SPENCER: Oh, thank you, Terry, it's great to be here.
GROSS: So I want you to do a reading. So let's set it up a little bit. So Paul is a carpenter who is driving and takes a detour from the highway to go into the woods to be alone. But soon he's not alone. A man joins him, a man who owes a gambling debt he can't repay.
And this man is paranoid because he thinks the guys he owes the money to are trying to hunt him down and that when they find him, they'll break his legs or kill him.
This man also has a dog, a dog that he stole from his now-ex-girlfriend, and he's kind of abusive to this dog. So would you explain what happens in the woods when he meets the main character, Paul the carpenter?
SPENCER: Paul sees him, sees this man, and he sees him yanking his dog around and hitting the dog. And it just is so deeply offensive to him that he wants to intervene. And he says: Hey, stop doing that. And one thing leads to another.
And the man is so fearful that he feels that the only way to protect himself is to actually become even more violent toward the dog. And that enrages Paul, and they have an altercation, an altercation that really is kind of pushing and shoving and futile hitting that people who don't really know how to fight engage in. But it does become very violent, and the man is accidentally killed.
GROSS: So I want you to read what happens after Paul, who's really the main character of the novel, accidentally kills this man who's been abusing the dog, and Paul has no idea what he's supposed to do now.
SPENCER: Well, he says: I'm not even innocent. I won't even be able to say it was self-defense because I was never in danger. I did it. I'm going to be arrested.
But what difference does the possibility of arrest make next to the overriding fact that a man's life has just ended? A man is dead. A heart has stopped. A future has been cancelled. A wife, children, friends, all of the pleasures of love, the sky, music, touch, food, wine, have just been taken away forever. A man is dead, no more able to share in the glories of the earth than if he had never been born.
Paul clutches his head. It is so difficult to think. This much he knows: His life is a coin. It has been flipped, and now, against a darkening sky, it turns over and over. From the morass, there rises a question: How can this be happening?
And he wishes suddenly, fervently, that there was a god looking on with his eye on the sparrow and everything else, knowing what we did, what we meant, what we did not mean, what was deliberate, what was accidental, what was so perplexing and mixed, you couldn't with any confidence say what was what.
GROSS: That's Scott Spencer, reading from his new novel "Man in the Woods." Your novels often have a turning point, a dividing line in which some dreadful, often unplanned and unintended horrible act has been committed, after which nothing will be the same.
This time, it's this accidental, totally unintended murder. Why did you choose murder this time to be the turning point?
SPENCER: I think that you're right that I am very interested in lives being changed very, very suddenly. I'm interested in how close our orderly lives are to utter chaos, just the way we see, you know, how savagery can break out in societies that a year before were orderly.
I so, you know, I've had people change their life by setting a fire, and I've had people changing their lives by what, by failing to prevent someone from leaving.
But this act of - and I don't really call it murder. I really call it manslaughter because there was no intention, but this act of violence, this expression of some inner rage and some inner beastliness is, you know, is compelling to me because I can identify with it.
I think that it's something that we all wonder about. I think it's something that we all wonder if we would be capable of an act of violence and under what circumstances would we be capable of it and what would the aftermath be.
I mean, I'm very interested in writing about conscience. And I wanted to test somebody's conscience. I wanted to really push somebody to the very edge of what they could accept about themselves.
GROSS: Do you think of this as your kind of cerebral version of a crime novel, a crime novel about someone who isn't a criminal type, someone who hasn't been in a fight since he was a teenager, someone who never intended to commit a crime?
SPENCER: Well, I'm not sure that I think of it that way. You know, it might be that without my having intended it to be. You know, I was really moved by something I read, and I think it was one of Camus' notebooks or diaries when he says, you know, a guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
And I thought, gee, that's, you know, first of all so beautiful, and it just reminded me of something that I would have wanted to deal with in my own writing. I also wanted to deal with dogs because I live with so many dogs. So all these things sort of converged and I found myself with a book on my hands.
GROSS: Okay. So let's get to dogs.
GROSS: You know, we've seen the man the main character, Paul, commit manslaughter in the woods. He accidentally kills this man who has been abusing his dog, and watching that abuse so upsets Paul that he gets into a fight with the man.
So, you know, after the murder, Paul has to decide what to do with the dog. Does he keep the dog? Does he get rid of the dog? Because the dog is, like, the witness and the dog is the evidence. So would you read that passage where Paul's wondering about the dog?
SPENCER: Yeah, he says: If I am going to have a chance at really walking away from this, I need to get rid of this dog. But he could not think it through. He couldn't figure it out, where he would bring the dog, where the dog would be safe. The dog had suffered enough. That much was clear.
That one fact was true north. Paul could not beat a man to death for kicking the dog in the ribs and then just open the door of his truck and let the dog fend for itself. The dog is his witness, his confessor. He has seen it all, and he can still sit next to Paul, breathing with him, trusting him.
The dog is the reason. The dog is what has been salvaged from the worst moment of Paul's life. The dog is the bridge which Paul walks upon as he inches his way over the abyss. The dog is God spelled backwards. Paul turns for another look at Shep(ph) but can't see him. The dog has drowned in the darkness of the truck's cabin.
GROSS: So yes, the dog is God spelled backwards. Do you believe in dog more than you believe in God?
SPENCER: Well, I feel - I definitely believe in dog. There's no question - you can't have as much dog hair in your house as I do and not believe in dog.
SPENCER: And about God, it was one of the things I was most interested in figuring out about myself when I was writing this book - and at one point, I thought, I'm really writing a religious book here. And then at another point in the writing of it, I said, I'm actually writing a very irreligious book or anti-religious book.
And then when I finally finished the book, I realized what I had written was something that was, this is not a contradiction in terms, something that was passionately agnostic, really as passionate about agnosticism as much as Graham Greene is passionate about his Catholicism because I could feel, I could feel the otherworldly intentions of fate hovering over my characters.
Yet, I could not ever really ever quite come to a true narrative understanding that this fate was really some sort of otherworldly intelligence that made sense enough that we could call it God.
GROSS: Is being passionate about agnosticism a position that you only recently arrived at?
SPENCER: Yes. I've really, before, have bounced between atheism and a desire to have some sort of - give some sort of religious meaning to my life.
You know, I was just talking to my mother last week, and she talked to me about when I was, like, a little kid, sometimes, she'd have to bring me to a church, not that we went to church because my parents were militantly atheistic, but she'd go to a church for some community meeting and then turn around and I'd be gone.
And she'd find me in one of the pews sort of praying fervently. And I always had this feeling that I wished that religion and a belief in God, and that ritual and that living metaphor in which I could explain my life was available to me.
And there would just be times when I would just feel such sort of withering contempt for the whole thing, and I was sort of glad that I hadn't entered into that sort of, that system of thought.
But, you know, novelists, I think, think a lot about God because, you know, they say doctors play God, and they do to an extent because, you know, they're always monkeying around or trying to fix things. But they're dealing with what's already there.
Novelists, you take that God thing one step further. We create whole worlds and then we people them. And, you know, then we tell the people what to do: We make them fall in love or jump out of windows. So there is that curiosity about God that I think all novelists have.
GROSS: So were you brought with a religion at all?
SPENCER: No, I was brought up militantly without a religion. My parents...
GROSS: And what was the religion you were not brought up with, if you know what I mean?
SPENCER: I was - let me list off all the religions I wasn't brought up with. But my parents' parents were Jews.
GROSS: But you mentioned going to church.
SPENCER: Well, it was a church that - my mother was not there for religious reasons. She was there for a community meeting. You know, they were civic-minded. They were always going to meetings. And so this one happened to be in a church.
And I was raised on the south side of Chicago in a working-class neighborhood. My father worked in a steel mill. And our neighbors were, by and large, either Polish or Irish Catholics.
And from time to time, like, one of their older sisters would get married or confirmation. I would go to church, and I would just be filled with not only awe but longing.
And really, it was only out of some sort of great love and respect for my parents that I kept it to myself because my feeling was that they would be just absolutely heartbroken and mortified if I ever confessed to them that I would like to give that churchgoing thing a crack.
GROSS: Right.
SPENCER: So much so that I would lie on our little lawn and stare up at the sky and wait and wait and wait for some sort of definitive sign that would give me the courage to go in and tell my parents that I'd had it with being an atheist, that it was time for me to go to church.
GROSS: But it had to be church, not a synagogue? It wasn't going to be Judaism?
SPENCER: I didn't even know about synagogues yet.
GROSS: Okay, this was really...
SPENCER: This was before synagogues came to America.
SPENCER: No, a few years later, some new houses were built in our area. The houses that we lived in were $11,000, and these new houses were kind of posh, $14,000 houses. And some Jewish families moved in, and suddenly, there was a temple in the area.
And so, that became another place where I would have liked to have gone, although maybe it's because my first taste of religion was in the Catholic Church, nothing really that I've ever seen since has had that kind of visceral impact on me.
BIANCULLI: Scott Spencer speaking to Terry Gross in 2010. More after a break. This is FRESH AIR.
BIANCULLI: Let's get back to Terry's interview with author Scott Spencer. His latest novel, "Man in the Woods," has just come out in paperback. They spoke last year.
GROSS: Because there are so often some kind of crime that is usually unintentionally committed or is an act of passion gone wrong in your novels, I find it especially interesting that you've been teaching writing in prison as part of the Bard Prison Initiative, in which you can actually earn a degree in prison through these in-prison course.
So you are actually spending time teaching people, you know, working with people on their writing who have been convicted of a crime and who are living in that place in which you are, you know, put away to pay for your crime and theoretically to reflect on what you've done.
And I guess I'm really curious what that experience is like for you as somebody who's written about people who have transgressed, who've transgressed, who've crossed a line.
SPENCER: Yeah, it's the most amazing teaching experience I've ever had. The prison population I was working with were all guys, all men in a maximum-security prison. So they had all committed acts of, you know, grave - I mean, they were just, they had done really severely wrong things.
I mean, I had one man in my class who was there for armed robbery, and he was the only nonviolent, I mean relatively nonviolent criminal who I was teaching.
It was inspiring in so many ways because you could never find 15 men who read more carefully and more passionately and with, you know, with more eagerness and hunger than the guys in that class. I mean, they would read, you know, everything from, you know, Robert Stone to Edgar Allan Poe to Alice Munro, and they would always have the most complex and interesting and engaged response to the work.
A lot of them were men whose formal schooling in the schools outside of the prison was patchy at best. And so, you know, one of the things that you sort of despair about when you're teaching in MFA programs is you have writers who actually have a lot of talent and have chops, that have a great deal of desire to write, but they just really haven't, they just haven't had that much happen to them yet in life.
So their stories tend to either be, you know, notional or sort of too youthfully observed or just about things that are basically about their families. And in the case of the people in the prison writing program, they had a lot to write about. They had a lot of stuff that you sort of eagerly go to writers to find out because they've seen something of the world that you haven't seen.
Just the way, you know, people would read, like, Melville's early novels to find out what life was like in the South Seas, you would want to read these guys' stories to find out what life was like in some of those communities.
GROSS: Do you feel like you're getting insights into the kind of life and the kind of mind and the kind of conscience or lack of conscience that you want to understand more about as a novelist?
SPENCER: One of the things that I learned from working with these guys is how alike we all are. There's, for the most part, most of these men, if I would have met them somehow under different circumstances, I would probably not have been able to guess that these guys had killed anybody or, you know, had been part of some, you know, vast criminal undertaking.
The commonality that we have just as human beings is, for me, the most - the most moving and the most instructive part of working with them.
BIANCULLI: Author Scott Spencer, speaking to Terry Gross in 2010. His latest novel, "Man in the Woods," is now out in a paperback edition, which features a reprint of the FRESH AIR interview we're listening to today. We'll continue their conversation in the second half of the show. I'm David Bianculli, and this is FRESH AIR.
This is FRESH AIR. I'm David Bianculli in for Terry Gross, that with more of Terry's 2010 interview with Scott Spencer. He's the author of "Endless Love," "A Ship Made of Paper" and "Willing." His latest novel, "Man in the Woods," has just come out in paperback.
Scott Spencer has taught fiction writing at Columbia University, the University of Iowa and Williams College. But says his most amazing teaching experience was when he talked writing at a maximum security prison in New York.
GROSS: What's it like for you the moment you walk into the prison and what's the moment like when you leave the prison? It must feel pretty overwhelming.
SPENCER: Yeah. It is overwhelming. That's a great question, because between my car, which I pulled into the prison parking lot, and the classroom where I meet with the students, I go through I would say at least 12 locked gates, you know, all of them just, you know, big, thick cast iron gates with these gigantic jailhouse keys. And it's - you go through a maze. The first, you're always escorted. You can never go anywhere alone, of course. Although, in the classroom I am alone, there's not a guard there. It's just me and the students. And so you are going deeper and deeper and deeper into the kind of cavern of this prison and you're passing guys, some of them being marched by guards with their hands handcuffed behind their back and some of them are pushing mops and some of them, you know, getting ready to work in the cafeteria, some of them looking at you, most of them not looking at you, everyone's sort of locked in their own personal space, and you do feel this tremendous despair.
I think you would have to be anesthetized. Whatever you think about criminal justice, whether you think these guys have gotten the right deal, whether you think their life could've been different if they'd been given different breaks in life, whether you think their sentences could've been different if they'd had better representation, whatever your feeling is about crime and punishment, you'd have to be deeply anesthetized not to feel this great sinking sense of sadness to be in an environment where there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of men locked up in cages. It's really - its nightmarish and overwhelming. And, you know, it's a terrible thing to see but it does make you very, very appreciative of your own life.
You know, you asked me what it was like going in and just going deeper and deeper into this environment where everybody is in a cage. The opposite is when you walk out and suddenly there's the sky and there's your car and you're going to get in your car and you're going to drive home and in 45 minutes you're going to be in your own house and your girlfriend's going to be there and you're going to - you can eat whatever you want and drink whatever you want and do whatever you want. It's stuff that we take for granted but it feels just absolutely almost like you've won the lottery every time you leave that place.
GROSS: So your novel is called "Man in the Woods" and one the character says, guys get into the woods. We go back to our elemental selves and stuff happens. And then he says, men do what men do. We're just part of the scheme of things. We're just nature. And after reading that, I read a piece that you wrote for O Magazine - Oprah's magazine in May of 2008, and you wrote in that, the simple truth is that men are somewhat violent, even those of us who abhor violence. Even if we are cerebral, out of shape, blind in one eye, many of us expect of ourselves levels of daring and aggression that would quite frankly horrify most women, if it didn't reduce them to helpless laughter.
So do you believe that, that somewhere deep inside most men there's this level of violence and that that's the kind of thing that can be unleashed in the woods?
SPENCER: I do believe that. I do also want to say that I'm not terribly out of shape or blind in one eye, so I just want to make that clear.
GROSS: Okay.
SPENCER: But I think that men have an acceptance of violence - acceptance of the validity of violence. I think that, I mean I believe that if a man is walking down the street and some stranger comes up and smacks him in the back of the head, and if the man who is smacked in the back of the head just, you know, says ow, and, you know, continues to walk on and doesn't do something about it, his greatest grudge will be against himself at that point. He won't say what was wrong with that crazy guy who just came up to me for no reason and smacked me in the back of the head. He'll ask, what was wrong with me that I didn't respond in kind? And I do think that that is gender specific.
GROSS: And in this article you wrote: From the beginning of organized society, boys have been raised to accept the idea that one day they might be called upon to either kill or be killed, to be ready to defend their home, their villages, their tribes against harm.
Have you ever felt that pressure to physically defend somebody or a home against harm?
SPENCER: I've always felt that that is a responsibility that I was born to because I'm male. I mean when I was 10 years old, my father said, you know, men don't sleep as deeply as women because we need to be ready if somebody comes. In my life as I've actually led it, I've always felt that it's up to me to step in if somebody who is sort of in my circle who I, just because of my relationship to them, I am sort of duty-bound to protect it, it is up to me to step in. You know, I have not been in some situation like that Dustin Hoffman character in "Straw Dogs" who...
GROSS: I hope not.
SPENCER: ...who's there with his little wire-rimmed glasses and his sort of porn-starry-looking wife while all these kind of cretin-ish locals pound on the windows and try to get in, but there have been a couple of instances when I've had to sort of man up, as we say, and step between someone who I feel was mine to protect somehow and someone who was going to do them some harm.
GROSS: Would you share one of those instances?
SPENCER: I'll share a funny and somewhat banal one that - my mother got out of a taxicab and she was having this huge argument with the cab driver because in her view, he had taken her way out of her way as a way of running up the fare. And I'm not sure that that was really true, but she was very, very irritated at the idea that this guy was cheating her. And they - when she got out of the cab, she said this guy cheated me on my fare. And the cab driver, who was a guy about my size, maybe a few years younger than me at the time, you know, got out and just, you know, wagged his finger in my mother's face and called her a name and, you know, a pretty bad name. And I thought to myself, oh no.
SPENCER: Now I have to do something. This guy is probably, in the full scheme of things, he's probably in the right, because I was looking at the fare on the meter. It didn't seem unreasonable. She had come in from La Guardia, it was all the way to the Village. It seemed like a normal fare. But on the other hand, he had crossed the line. He had called my mother a name. So I hit him.
GROSS: Wow.
SPENCER: I hit him. Not that hard.
GROSS: On the face?
SPENCER: No. I hit him in the stomach.
GROSS: Oh, you punched him.
SPENCER: Yeah. I punched him.
GROSS: Ah, and he did what?
SPENCER: He called me a name and he just looked at us like we were just...
SPENCER: You two deserve each other. I'm getting out of here.
GROSS: Now this whole idea that deep inside men is this kind of like almost genetic impulse to be prepared to defend friends, family, home, cities, villages against harm. And I'm wondering...
GROSS: ...if you think that that's a philosophy you maybe created to explain this - these occasional impulses that you have.
SPENCER: You know, it's very hard to say what anyone is genetically because you can never see anybody outside of society, because people don't exist outside of society. You cannot - you can't find a person who isn't culturally determined to one extent or another.
GROSS: True.
SPENCER: We all are.
GROSS: Yeah.
SPENCER: So I don't know. I mean until we start making people in test tubes and keeping...
GROSS: I thought we were doing that. Okay, go ahead.
SPENCER: But then we send them off some place and then we have to keep them in the lab and study them. But even then, they'll be victims of some sort of depravation. So it's very hard to say what people are in essence. I think its one of the jobs that novels have, really. I mean it's one of the things that keeps people reading, I believe, is that we are endlessly sort of amazed and curious and perplexed about what is our nature.
GROSS: The first real - I mean your biggest hit in terms of your books, is "Endless Love," which was a bestseller and was adapted into a film that, as we've talked about before on FRESH AIR, had so little to do with the book that it's based on. It's a wonderful, wonderful book.
But then it was that hit with Diana Ross. Who did she do it with on that? Lionel Richie. Lionel Richie.
SPENCER: That was Lionel Richie.
GROSS: Okay. And...
SPENCER: Who I think wrote it.
GROSS: Okay. So, I've just been thinking about - now, I've been thinking about how the title of your new book is "Man in the Woods." And its not a man in the woods. Its not the man in the woods. Its about man in the woods. And so the lack of like an a or a the in the title is significant. So I was thinking of like the song, the title song from the movie adaptation of your book "Endless Love." It's like my endless love. And like you can't, like the lyric is, and your eyes, your eyes, your eyes, they tell me how much you care. Oh yes, you will always be my endless love. No.
GROSS: Like, a person isn't your endless - and the endless love in your title is about this kind of like this love that won't stop. This kind of obsessive, dangerous love that force - that gets this person to transgress all ethical boundaries and become this like horrible stalker and commit horrible acts. I mean, how did you feel about the word my in there - my endless love?
SPENCER: Well, it was actually the least of my worries.
SPENCER: And who knows what's going to happen next because I just - I learned a couple of months ago that Universal Pictures, which owns the rights to that book, is planning now to do a remake.
GROSS: No. Really.
SPENCER: Yeah. It makes you want to quote William Burroughs.
GROSS: Who said?
SPENCER: Pack your ermines, Mary. We're getting out of here right now.
GROSS: Scott Spencer, it's always great to talk with you. Thank you so much.
SPENCER: Thank you, Terry. It was wonderful to talk to you.
BIANCULLI: Author Scott Spencer speaking to Terry Gross in 2010. His latest novel, "Man in the Woods," has just come out in paperback.
Coming up, two new movies about writers. One about Hunter S. Thompson, the other about Shakespeare. David Edelstein reviews "The Rum Diary and "Anonymous." This is FRESH AIR.
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Bear in Israel undergoes surgery to repair disc
Surgery can be a real bear. Even for a bear. In Israel, a 19-year-old Syria brown bear named Mango underwent surgery Wednesday to repair a herniated disc, said Sagit Horowitz, a spokeswoman for the Ramat Gan Zoological Center near Tel Aviv.
Zoologists first noticed Mango had a problem when he started to show signs of paralysis in his hind legs in the last few weeks, said Dr. Merav Shamir, who led the surgery on the furry patient.
"It started acutely," she said. "He wasn't able to move his right hind limb and it progressively deteriorated over the following 48 hours to become completely paralyzed on the hind limbs."
Horowitz said veterinarians discovered the 250-kilogram (550-pound) bear had the injured disc during an X-ray taken after noticing his worsening paralysis. That disc compressed Mango's spinal cord and caused the paralysis he had been suffering through, Shamir said.
Veterinarians shaved parts of the bear's furry back to prepare him for surgery Wednesday, as well as intubated him. They propped his head up on a pillow wrapped in a trash bag and put an IV through his snout. They also wrapped a blood-pressure cuff around his right paw.
Such unique procedures aren't uncommon at the Ramat Gan Zoological Center, the premier zoo of Israel. Last year, veterinarians there used acupuncture to cure the chronic ear infection of a 14-year-old Sumatran tiger named Pedang.
Shamir said other bears with a similar disc problem like Mango had been euthanized and that the surgery he underwent was novel for bears—though often performed on small dogs.
"I'm nervous now—I'll be happier in a few hours," Shamir said before the hourslong surgery began. "I wish him luck."
Veterinarians will know in the coming weeks whether Mango makes a full recovery.
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OnlineSuccess.Site Boosts Brand Awareness through Premium Social Media Campaigns
The Coca-Cola Company has spent countless sum of money for nearly a century building its brand to how it's known today. For the past several decades, Coca-Cola has enjoyed ubiquitous recognition. The drink itself is more than a sweet treat to quench thirst. Coca-Cola can be associated with all good things in life: friendship, family, triumph, the holiday seasons, pop culture, entertainment, and so on. Coca-Cola is a perfect case study of brand awareness.
Of course, Coca-Cola is not the only example of a product with a strong global brand. The same can be said with other brands like McDonald's for fast-food burgers, Apple for cellphones and computers, BMW and Mercedes for luxury car brands, Nike for athletic shoes, and even Kleenex for tissue paper. For the last example, Kleenex enjoys such high brand awareness that its name is used synonymously for tissue paper.
The benefits of having brand awareness are obvious. For one, popular brands are the de facto choices of consumers. Hardly anybody thinks twice of having Coke when wanting a carbonated beverage. It's second nature, even more, natural than the specific thought of having a carbonated beverage. Wanting a Coke when thirsty is a knee-jerk reaction. Popularity translates to sales and for Coca-Cola, it's a 30 billion dollar yearly revenue.
Question is, would it also take other businesses several generations before they can reach comparable levels of brand awareness, and not to mention the need for infinitely deep pockets to regularly spend on a multi-prong all-media global marketing campaign? Yes, if they are international conglomerates like Coca-Cola, McDonald's or Nike. However, for small businesses, start-ups, and entrepreneurs, a smaller scale brand awareness campaign strategy will be more suitable, and at the same time, they can expect much more impressive returns for their investment, dollar-for-dollar. This is where a service like OnlineSuccess.Site matters.
OnlineSuccess.Site is a leading provider of online business and marketing solutions for big and small businesses alike. OnlineSuccess.Site provides a range of services for most businesses' marketing needs and budget: from simple WordPress website design to web hosting packages. At the higher-end of its service range, OnlineSuccess.Site offers a few premium marketing packages that incorporate social media promotions as a primary means of developing an awareness of the client business's brand. But why promote through social media and how does OnlineSuccess.Site do this?
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Meyer Lemons Greeting Card + Envelope
Brighten up someone's day with this bunch of Meyer lemons!
This card is 5x7", is blank inside, and is paired with a matching envelope. Each greeting card and envelope is packed in a plastic sleeve. It is printed on 120 lb matte cover stock with soy-based inks.
Art and Design by Marcella Kriebel ® in Washington DC, produced in the USA.
After several months of my retail portion of the studio being closed due to Covid-19, we are now opening up the roll top door on Saturdays from 9-2pm in front for people to shop while remaining outside on the Arts Walk.
This open time is during the Monroe Street Market Farmers Market, so stop by get produce, too!
We will be taking strict health precautions while welcoming open air door-front shopping to customers, and will have hand sanitizer on hand for all.
Stay healthy,


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Mount Option - 221 Full Arch
Our double door mounts are made from superior iron and/or strengthen gauge steel. Each double mount undergoes an electrostatic process to increase durability of the lantern and finish. Designs vary in mounting options, sizes, and glass options depending on the double door requirements. All of our premium door mount fixtures are approved for indoor or outdoor use. If you wish, we are able to custom manufacture any double door mount with simple changes to our existing standard fixtures or fully customized designs to fit your needs.


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Have you ever heard of Dev? Me neither. But she's the girl who sings that song "Like a G6" that reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 a year and a half ago. It got her a record deal and she was poised for pop superstardom—but then the 22-year-old got pregnant, causing some perceived setbacks in her career, like her label pushing her album release date back. But MTV is the pregnancy channel now, so they gave her her own reality show. If you're counting along at home, you'll know that this is the seventh series in MTV's 2012 schedule featuring young women dealing with unplanned pregnancies (16 & Pregnant, Teen Mom, Teen Mom 2, Teen Mom 3, Snooki & JWOWW, and Jersey Shore). Simply titled Dev, the show will follow the singer as balances her high-risk pregnancy—her unborn child's bowels are on the outside of its body—with her fledgling career, love life (her fiancee is a pro-skater), and relationship with her parents, who had her at such a young age that the soon-to-be grandparents still do beer bongs. Dev premieres on MTV on May 23.
More from Jezebel
Mommet Coddler
I've only heard of Dev because my son wanted to be her for Halloween this past year (he only told me after I'd already finished his Lady Gaga outfit though, so he ended up just being a generic 'diva'). I suspect that we're going to have some conversations about this in the near future.


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THE fossil-fuelled garden party that is the 2015 Goodwood Festival of Speed kicks off this weekend at the English estate of Lord March.
Cars ranging from Formula One open-wheelers to coachbuilt classics take it in turns over three days to run up the nine turns of the 1.9km hillclimb course.
Here's a selection of images from day one of the event, including a few Aussie favourites.


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Possible Duplicate:
Is there a formula to calculate DOF?
Is there an easy way to establish, on paper, which of these two lenses, shot wide open and with the same subject size in frame, would result in a shallower DOF?
I've tried using some of the online calculators but got a bit stuck because the 85 would need a larger camera-subject distance to get the same subject size, but has a longer focal length, but a smaller aperture.


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is a zip code in ,
Looking to buy a home in the zipcode? Start your search by getting familiar with the local real estate market. Decide whether buying a rent to own home in , is right for you.
Homes in Nearby Cities:
No nearby cities found
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6. Be clever about clicksExplain to your child why he shouldn't open files or click on links unless they are from a known source. This is a great time to talk about how viruses can harm the computer. Another option is to allow your pre-schooler to surf only one site at a time — if he wants to navigate to a new site, ask that he asks you or an older family member for help.7. Use a child-safe appTry the Kido'z app (http://kidoz.net/) – designed specifically for pre-schoolers, the app turns all smartphones, tablets or computers into kid-friendly devices. Parental controls let you toggle between online/offline mode, set time limits and manage what your child can or cannot see or do online. Best of all, you can set up a custom profile for each child. Other PC options include NetNanny, Norton Family and Kaspersky PURE.
The key is to establish your expectations and limits clearly and specify what the consequences are if your child breaks the rules. It is a good idea to explain to your child that you have installed parental controls and why – trust is the cornerstone of any relationship, including your relationship with your child. If you keep the lines of communication open and are consistent in your approach (don't forget to set a good example), your child will quickly learn how to become a responsible online citizen. These are good habits that will carry on through his primary and secondary school years – by laying a good foundation early in life you will be saving yourself a headache later!
Child-friendly sites and apps Unsure of where to get started? Try these child-friendly and educational options.• http://www.netsmartzkids.org/Games, e-books, videos and more, dedicated to promoting child safety online.
• http://www.storyplace.org/Interactive online reading with activities and more with a special section dedicated to pre-schoolers.
• http://www.uptoten.com/Games and activities for children up to 10 years of age – there's plenty here for your six-year-old!


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Ion thruster
An ion thruster is a form of electric propulsion used for spacecraft propulsion that creates thrust by accelerating ions. The term is strictly used to refer to gridded ion thrusters, but may often more loosely be applied to all electric propulsion systems that accelerate plasma, since plasma consists of ions. Ion thrusters are categorized by how they accelerate the ions, using either electrostatic or electromagnetic force. Electrostatic ion thrusters use the Coulomb force and accelerate the ions in the direction of the electric field. Electromagnetic ion thrusters use the Lorentz force to accelerate the ions. In either case, when an ion passes through an electrostatic grid engine, the potential difference of the electric field converts to the ion's kinetic energy (in the reference frame of a spacecraft).
According to Edgar Choueiri ion thrusters have an input power spanning 1–7 kilowatts, exhaust velocity 20–50 kilometers per second, thrust 20–250 millinewtons and efficiency 60–80%.[1][2]
The Deep Space 1 spacecraft, powered by an ion thruster, changed velocity by 4.3 km/s while consuming less than 74 kilograms of xenon. The Dawn spacecraft has surpassed the record with 10 km/s.[1][2]
The applications of ion thrusters include control of the orientation and position of orbiting satellites (some satellites have dozens of low-power ion thrusters) and use as a main propulsion engine for low-mass robotic space vehicles (for example Deep Space 1 and Dawn).[1][2]
Ion thrusters are not the most prospective type of electrically powered spacecraft propulsion (although in practice they have worked out more than others).[2] Technical capabilities of the ion engine are limited by the space charge created by ions, that limits the density thrust (force per cross-sectional area of the engine) at a very small level.[2] Therefore ion thrusters create very small levels of thrust (for example thrust engine Deep Space 1 approximately equals the weight of one sheet of paper[2]) compared to conventional chemical rockets but achieve very high specific impulse, or propellant mass efficiencies, by accelerating their exhausts to very high speed. However, ion thrusters carry a fundamental price: the power imparted to the exhaust increases with the square of its velocity while the thrust increases only linearly. Normal chemical rockets, on the other hand, can provide very high thrust but are limited in total impulse by the small amount of energy that can be stored chemically in the propellants.[3] Given the practical weight of suitable power sources, the accelerations given by ion thrusters are frequently less than one thousandth of standard gravity. However, since they operate essentially as electric (or electrostatic) motors, a greater fraction of the input power is converted into kinetic exhaust power than in a chemical rocket. Chemical rockets operate as heat engines, hence Carnot's theorem bounds their possible exhaust velocity.
Due to their relatively high power needs, given the specific power of power supplies, and the requirement of an environment void of other ionized particles, ion thrust propulsion is currently only practical in space.
- Origins 1
- General description 2
Electrostatic ion thrusters 3
- Gridded electrostatic ion thrusters 3.1
- Hall effect thrusters 3.2
- Field emission electric propulsion 3.3
Electromagnetic thrusters 4
- Pulsed inductive thrusters (PIT) 4.1
- Magnetoplasmadynamic (MPD) / lithium Lorentz force accelerator (LiLFA) 4.2
- Electrodeless plasma thrusters 4.3
- Helicon double layer thruster 4.4
- Comparisons 5
- Lifetime 6
- Propellants 7
- Energy efficiency 8
- Applications 9
Missions 10
- Pure demonstration vehicles 10.1
Operational missions 10.2
- In Earth orbit 10.2.1
- In deep space 10.2.2
Planned missions 10.3
- Future project 10.3.1
- See also 11
- References 12
- External links 13
The first person to publish mention of the idea was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in 1911.[4] However, the first documented instance where the possibility of electric propulsion is considered is found in Robert H. Goddard's handwritten notebook in an entry dated 6 September 1906.[5] The first experiments with ion thrusters were carried out by Goddard at Clark University from 1916–1917.[6] The technique was recommended for near-vacuum conditions at high altitude, but thrust was demonstrated with ionized air streams at atmospheric pressure. The idea appeared again in Hermann Oberth's "Wege zur Raumschiffahrt" (Ways to Spaceflight), published in 1923, where he explained his thoughts on the mass savings of electric propulsion, predicted its use in spacecraft propulsion and attitude control, and advocated electrostatic acceleration of charged gases.[4]
A working ion thruster was built by Harold R. Kaufman in 1959 at the NASA Glenn Research Center facilities. It was similar to the general design of a gridded electrostatic ion thruster with mercury as its fuel. Suborbital tests of the engine followed during the 1960s and in 1964 the engine was sent into a suborbital flight aboard the Space Electric Rocket Test 1 (SERT 1). It successfully operated for the planned 31 minutes before falling back to Earth.[7] This test was followed by an orbital test, SERT-2, in 1970.
An alternate form of electric propulsion, the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization, visited Soviet laboratories.
General description
Ion thrusters use beams of ions (electrically charged atoms or molecules) to create thrust in accordance with momentum conservation. The method of accelerating the ions varies, but all designs take advantage of the charge/mass ratio of the ions. This ratio means that relatively small potential differences can create very high exhaust velocities. This reduces the amount of reaction mass or fuel required, but increases the amount of specific power required compared to chemical rockets. Ion thrusters are therefore able to achieve extremely high specific impulses. The drawback of the low thrust is low spacecraft acceleration, because the mass of current electric power units is directly correlated with the amount of power given. This low thrust makes ion thrusters unsuited for launching spacecraft into orbit, but they are ideal for in-space propulsion applications.
Various ion thrusters have been designed and they all generally fit under two categories. The thrusters are categorized as either electrostatic or electromagnetic. The main difference is how the ions are accelerated.
- Electrostatic ion thrusters use the Coulomb force and are categorized as accelerating the ions in the direction of the electric field.
- Electromagnetic ion thrusters use the Lorentz force to accelerate the ions.
Power supplies for ion thrusters are usually solar panels, but at sufficiently large distances from the Sun, nuclear power is used. In each case the power supply mass is essentially proportional to the peak power that can be supplied, and they both essentially give, for this application, no limit to the energy.
Electric thrusters tend to produce low thrust, which results in low acceleration. Using 1 g is 9.81 m/s2; F = m a ⇒ a = F/m. An NSTAR thruster producing a thrust (force) of 92 mN[9] will accelerate a satellite with a mass of 1,000 kg by 0.092 N / 1,000 kg = 0.000092 m/s2 (or 9.38×10−6 g).
Electrostatic ion thrusters
Gridded electrostatic ion thrusters
Gridded electrostatic ion thrusters commonly utilize xenon gas. This gas has no charge and is ionized by bombarding it with energetic electrons. These electrons can be provided from a hot cathode filament and when accelerated in the electrical field of the cathode, fall to the anode. Alternatively, the electrons can be accelerated by the oscillating electric field induced by an alternating magnetic field of a coil, which results in a self-sustaining discharge and omits any cathode (radio frequency ion thruster).
The positively charged ions are extracted by an extraction system consisting of 2 or 3 multi-aperture grids. After entering the grid system via the plasma sheath the ions are accelerated due to the potential difference between the first and second grid (named screen and accelerator grid) to the final ion energy of typically 1-2 keV, thereby generating the thrust.
Ion thrusters emit a beam of positive charged xenon ions only. To avoid charging-up the spacecraft, another cathode is placed near the engine, which emits electrons (basically the electron current is the same as the ion current) into the ion beam.[7] This also prevents the beam of ions from returning to the spacecraft and thereby cancelling the thrust.
Gridded electrostatic ion thruster research (past/present):
- NASA Solar electric propulsion Technology Application Readiness (NSTAR) - 2.3 kW, used on two successful missions
- NASA's Evolutionary Xenon Thruster (NEXT) - 6.9 kW, flight qualification hardware built
- Nuclear Electric Xenon Ion System (NEXIS)
- High Power Electric Propulsion (HiPEP) - 25 kW, test example built and run briefly on the ground
- EADS Radio-Frequency Ion Thruster (RIT)
- Dual-Stage 4-Grid (DS4G)[10][11]
Hall effect thrusters
Hall effect thrusters accelerate ions with the use of an electric potential maintained between a cylindrical anode and a negatively charged plasma that forms the cathode. The bulk of the propellant (typically xenon gas) is introduced near the anode, where it becomes ionized, and the ions are attracted towards the cathode; they accelerate towards and through it, picking up electrons as they leave to neutralize the beam and leave the thruster at high velocity.
The anode is at one end of a cylindrical tube, and in the center is a spike that is wound to produce a radial magnetic field between it and the surrounding tube. The ions are largely unaffected by the magnetic field, since they are too massive. However, the electrons produced near the end of the spike to create the cathode are far more affected and are trapped by the magnetic field, and held in place by their attraction to the anode. Some of the electrons spiral down towards the anode, circulating around the spike in a Hall current. When they reach the anode they impact the uncharged propellant and cause it to be ionized, before finally reaching the anode and closing the circuit.[12]
Field emission electric propulsion
Field emission electric propulsion (FEEP) thrusters use a very simple system of accelerating ions to create thrust. Most designs use either caesium or indium as the propellant. The design comprises a small propellant reservoir that stores the liquid metal, a narrow tube or a system of parallel plates that the liquid flows through, and an accelerator (a ring or an elongated aperture in a metallic plate) about a millimetre past the tube end. Caesium and indium are used due to their high atomic weights, low ionization potentials, and low melting points. Once the liquid metal reaches the end of the tube, an electric field applied between the emitter and the accelerator causes the liquid surface to deform into a series of protruding cusps ("Taylor cones"). At a sufficiently high applied voltage, positive ions are extracted from the tips of the cones.[13][14][15] The electric field created by the emitter and the accelerator then accelerates the ions. An external source of electrons neutralizes the positively charged ion stream to prevent charging of the spacecraft.
Electromagnetic thrusters
Pulsed inductive thrusters (PIT)
Pulsed inductive thrusters (PIT) use pulses of thrust instead of one continuous thrust, and have the ability to run on power levels in the order of Megawatts (MW). PITs consist of a large coil encircling a cone shaped tube that emits the propellant gas. Ammonia is the gas commonly used in PIT engines. For each pulse of thrust the PIT gives, a large charge first builds up in a group of capacitors behind the coil and is then released. This creates a current that moves circularly in the direction of jθ. The current then creates a magnetic field in the outward radial direction (Br), which then creates a current in the ammonia gas that has just been released in the opposite direction of the original current. This opposite current ionizes the ammonia and these positively charged ions are accelerated away from the PIT engine due to the electric field jθ crossing with the magnetic field Br, which is due to the Lorentz Force.[16]
Magnetoplasmadynamic (MPD) / lithium Lorentz force accelerator (LiLFA)
Magnetoplasmadynamic (MPD) thrusters and lithium Lorentz force accelerator (LiLFA) thrusters use roughly the same idea with the LiLFA thruster building off of the MPD thruster. Hydrogen, argon, ammonia and nitrogen gas can be used as propellant. In a certain configuration, the ambient gas in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) can be used as a propellant. The gas first enters the main chamber where it is ionized into plasma by the electric field between the anode and the cathode. This plasma then conducts electricity between the anode and the cathode. This new current creates a magnetic field around the cathode, which crosses with the electric field, thereby accelerating the plasma due to the Lorentz force. The LiLFA thruster uses the same general idea as the MPD thruster, except for two main differences. The first difference is that the LiLFA uses lithium vapor, which has the advantage of being able to be stored as a solid. The other difference is that the cathode is replaced by multiple smaller cathode rods packed into a hollow cathode tube. The cathode in the MPD thruster is easily corroded due to constant contact with the plasma. In the LiLFA thruster the lithium vapor is injected into the hollow cathode and is not ionized to its plasma form/corrode the cathode rods until it exits the tube. The plasma is then accelerated using the same Lorentz Force.[17][18][19]
Electrodeless plasma thrusters
Electrodeless plasma thrusters have two unique features: the removal of the anode and cathode electrodes and the ability to throttle the engine. The removal of the electrodes takes away the factor of erosion, which limits lifetime on other ion engines. Neutral gas is first ionized by electromagnetic waves and then transferred to another chamber where it is accelerated by an oscillating electric and magnetic field, also known as the ponderomotive force. This separation of the ionization and acceleration stage give the engine the ability to throttle the speed of propellant flow, which then changes the thrust magnitude and specific impulse values.[20]
Helicon double layer thruster
A helicon double layer thruster is a type of plasma thruster, which ejects high velocity ionized gas to provide thrust to a spacecraft. In this thruster design, gas is injected into a tubular chamber (the source tube) with one open end. Radio frequency AC power (at 13.56 MHz in the prototype design) is coupled into a specially shaped antenna wrapped around the chamber. The electromagnetic wave emitted by the antenna causes the gas to break down and form a plasma. The antenna then excites a Helicon wave in the plasma, which further heats the plasma. The device has a roughly constant magnetic field in the source tube (supplied by Solenoids in the prototype), but the magnetic field diverges and rapidly decreases in magnitude away from the source region, and might be thought of as a kind of magnetic nozzle. In operation, there is a sharp boundary between the high density plasma inside the source region, and the low density plasma in the exhaust, which is associated with a sharp change in electrical potential. The plasma properties change rapidly across this boundary, which is known as a current free electric double layer. The electrical potential is much higher inside the source region than in the exhaust, and this serves both to confine most of the electrons, and to accelerate the ions away from the source region. Enough electrons escape the source region to ensure that the plasma in the exhaust is neutral overall.
ComparisonsThe following table compares actual test data of some ion thrusters:
Required power
Specific impulse
Thruster mass
|3,300 to 1,700[21]
|92 max.[9]
|4,300 [23][22][24]
|236 max[9]
|Hall effect
|Hall effect
|Hall effect
|Hall effect
|Liquid Caesium
|620 [1]
|2,500 max.
Required power
Specific impulse
Thruster mass
|Lithium Vapor
A major limiting factor of ion thrusters is their small thrust; however, it is generated at a high propellant efficiency (mass utilisation, specific impulse). The efficiency comes from the high exhaust velocity, which in turn demands high energy, and the performance is ultimately limited by the available spacecraft power.
The low thrust requires ion thrusters to provide continuous thrust for a long time to achieve the needed change in velocity (delta-v) for a particular mission. To cause enough change in momentum, ion thrusters are designed to last for periods of weeks to years.
In practice the lifetime of electrostatic ion thrusters is limited by several processes:
- In electrostatic gridded ion thruster design, charge-exchange ions produced by the beam ions with the neutral gas flow can be accelerated towards the negatively biased accelerator grid and cause grid erosion. End-of-life is reached when either a structural failure of the grid occurs or the holes in the accelerator grid become so large that the ion extraction is largely affected; e.g., by the occurrence of electron backstreaming. Grid erosion cannot be avoided and is the major lifetime-limiting factor. By a thorough grid design and material selection, lifetimes of 20,000 hours and far beyond are reached, which is sufficient to fulfill current space missions.
A test of the NASA Solar electric propulsion Technology Application Readiness (NSTAR) electrostatic ion thruster resulted in 30,472 hours (roughly 3.5 years) of continuous thrust at maximum power. The test was concluded prior to any failure and examination indicated the engine was not approaching failure either.[30]
More recently, the NASA Evolutionary Xenon Thruster (NEXT) Project, conducted at NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio, operated continuously for more than 48,000 hours.[31] The test was conducted in a high vacuum test chamber at Glenn Research Center. Over the course of the 5 1/2 + year test, the engine consumed approximately 870 kilograms of xenon propellant. The total impulse provided by the engine would require over 10,000 kilograms of conventional rocket propellant for similar application. The engine was designed by Aerojet Rocketdyne of Sacramento, California.
- Hall thrusters suffer from very strong erosion of the ceramic discharge chamber by impact of energetic ions: a test reported in 2010[32] showed erosion of around 1 mm per hundred hours of operation, though this is inconsistent with observed on-orbit lifetimes of a few thousand hours.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has created ion drives with a time of continuous operation of more than 3 years.[1][2]
Ionization energy represents a very large percentage of the energy needed to run ion drives. The ideal propellant for ion drives is thus a propellant molecule or atom that is easy to ionize, that has a high mass/ionization energy ratio. In addition, the propellant should not cause erosion of the thruster to any great degree to permit long life; and should not contaminate the vehicle.[33]
Many current designs use xenon gas, as it is easy to ionize, has a reasonably high atomic number, its inert nature, and low erosion. However, xenon is globally in short supply and very expensive.
Older designs used mercury, but this is toxic and expensive, tended to contaminate the vehicle with the metal and was difficult to feed accurately.
Other propellants, such as bismuth, show promise and are areas of research, particularly for gridless designs, such as Hall effect thrusters.
VASIMR design (and other plasma-based engines) are theoretically able to use practically any material for propellant. However, in current tests the most practical propellant is argon, which is a relatively abundant and inexpensive gas.
Energy efficiency
Ion thrusters are frequently quoted with an efficiency metric. This efficiency is the kinetic energy of the exhaust jet emitted per second divided by the electrical power into the device.
The actual overall system energy efficiency in use is determined by the propulsive efficiency, which depends on vehicle speed and exhaust speed. Some thrusters can vary exhaust speed in operation, but all can be designed with different exhaust speeds. At the lower end of Isps the overall efficiency drops, because the ionization takes up a larger percentage energy, and at the high end propulsive efficiency is reduced.
Optimal efficiencies and exhaust velocities can thus be calculated for any given mission to give minimum overall cost.
Ion thrusters have many applications for in-space propulsion. The best applications of the thrusters make use of the long lifetime when significant thrust is not needed. Examples of this include orbit transfers, attitude adjustments, drag compensation for low Earth orbits, transporting cargo such as chemical fuels between propellant depots and ultra-fine adjustments for scientific missions. Ion thrusters can also be used for interplanetary and deep-space missions where time is not crucial. Continuous thrust over a very long time can build up a larger velocity than traditional chemical rockets.
Of all the electric thrusters, ion thrusters have been the most seriously considered commercially and academically in the quest for interplanetary missions and orbit raising maneuvers. Ion thrusters are seen as the best solution for these missions, as they require very high change in velocity overall that can be built up over long periods of time.
Pure demonstration vehicles
Ion propulsion systems were first demonstrated in space by the NASA Lewis (now Glenn Research Center) missions "Space Electric Rocket Test" (SERT) I and II.[34] The first was SERT-1, launched July 20, 1964, successfully proved that the technology operated as predicted in space. These were electrostatic ion thrusters using mercury and cesium as the reaction mass. The second test, SERT-II, launched on February 3, 1970,[35][36] verified the operation of two mercury ion engines for thousands of running hours.[37]
Operational missions
Ion thrusters are routinely used for station-keeping on commercial and military communication satellites in geosynchronous orbit, including satellites manufactured by Boeing and by Hughes Aerospace. The pioneers in this field were the Soviet Union, who used SPT thrusters on a variety of satellites starting in the early 1970s.
Two geostationary satellites (ESA's Artemis in 2001-2003[38] and the US military's AEHF-1 in 2010-2012[39]) have used the ion thruster for orbit raising after the failure of the chemical-propellant engine. Boeing[40] have been using ion thrusters for station-keeping since 1997, and plan in 2013-2014 to offer a variant on their 702 platform, which will have no chemical engine and use ion thrusters for orbit raising; this enables a significantly lower launch mass for a given satellite capability. AEHF-2 used a chemical engine to raise perigee to 10150 miles and is then proceeding to geosynchronous orbit using electric propulsion.[41]
In Earth orbit
ESA's Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer was launched on March 16, 2009. It used ion propulsion throughout its twenty month mission to combat the air-drag it experienced in its low orbit before intentionally deorbiting on November 11, 2013.
In deep space
- Deep Space 1
NASA developed the NSTAR ion engine for use in their interplanetary science missions beginning in the late-1990s. This xenon-propelled ion thruster was first space-tested in the highly successful space probe Deep Space 1, launched in 1998. This was the first use of electric propulsion as the interplanetary propulsion system on a science mission.[34] Based on the NASA design criteria, Hughes Research Labs, developed the XIPS (Xenon Ion Propulsion System) for performing station keeping on geosynchronous satellites.. Hughes (EDD) manufactured the NSTAR thruster used on the spacecraft.
- Hayabusa
The Japanese space agency's Hayabusa, which was launched in 2003 and successfully rendezvoused with the asteroid 25143 Itokawa and remained in close proximity for many months to collect samples and information, was powered by four xenon ion engines. It used xenon ions generated by microwave electron cyclotron resonance, and a carbon / carbon-composite material (which is resistant to erosion) for its acceleration grid.[42] Although the ion engines on Hayabusa had some technical difficulties, in-flight reconfiguration allowed one of the four engines to be repaired, and allowed the mission to successfully return to Earth.[43]
- Smart 1
The European Space Agency's satellite SMART-1, launched in 2003, used a Snecma PPS-1350-G Hall thruster to get from GTO to lunar orbit. This satellite completed its mission on 3 September 2006, in a controlled collision on the Moon's surface, after a trajectory deviation so scientists could see the 3 meter crater the impact created on the visible side of the moon.
- Dawn
Dawn was launched on 27 September 2007 to explore the asteroid Vesta and the dwarf planet Ceres. To cruise from Earth to its targets it uses three Deep Space 1 heritage xenon ion thrusters (firing only one at a time) to take it in a long outward spiral. An extended mission in which Dawn explores other asteroids after Ceres is also possible. Dawn's ion drive is capable of accelerating from 0 to 60 mph (97 km/h) in 4 days, firing continuously.[44]
Planned missions
In addition, several missions are planned to use ion thrusters in the next few years.
- BepiColombo
ESA will launch the BepiColombo mission to Mercury in 2016. It uses ion thrusters in combination with swing-bys to get to Mercury, where a chemical rocket will be fired for orbit insertion.
- LISA Pathfinder
LISA Pathfinder is an ESA spacecraft to be launched in 2015. It will not use ion thrusters as its primary propulsion system, but will use both colloid thrusters and FEEP for very precise attitude control -— the low thrusts of these propulsion devices make it possible to move the spacecraft incremental distances very accurately. It is a test for the possible LISA mission.
- International Space Station
As of March 2011, a future launch of an Ad Astra VF-200 200 kW VASIMR electromagnetic thruster was being considered for placement and testing on the International Space Station.[45][46] The VF-200 is a flight version of the VX-200.[47][48] Since the available power from the ISS is less than 200 kW, the ISS VASIMR will include a trickle-charged battery system allowing for 15 min pulses of thrust. Testing of the engine on ISS is valuable, because ISS orbits at a relatively low altitude and experiences fairly high levels of atmospheric drag, making periodic boosts of altitude necessary. Currently, altitude reboosting by chemical rockets fulfills this requirement. If the tests of VASIMR reboosting of the ISS goes according to plan, the increase in specific impulse could mean that the cost of fuel for altitude reboosting will be one-twentieth of the current $210 million annual cost.[45] Hydrogen is generated by the ISS as a by-product, which is currently vented into space.
- NASA high-power SEP system demonstration mission
In June 2011, NASA launched a request-for-proposals[49] for a test mission (from context probably using the NEXT engine) capable of being extended to 300 kW electrical power; this was awarded to Northrop Grumman in February 2012.[50]
Future project
Geoffrey A. Landis proposed for interstellar travel future-technology project interstellar probe with supplying the energy from an external source (laser of base station) and ion thruster.[51][52]
See also
- Colloid thruster
- Comparison of orbital rocket engines
- Electrically powered spacecraft propulsion
- Electrodeless plasma thruster
- Field Emission Electric Propulsion
- Hall effect thruster
- List of spacecraft with electric propulsion
- Magnetoplasmadynamic thruster
- Nano-particle field extraction thruster
- Nuclear electric rocket
- Pulsed inductive thruster
- Spacecraft propulsion
- ^ a b c d Choueiri, Edgar Y. (2009). New dawn of electric rocket. The Ion Drive
- ^ a b c d e f g Choueiri, Edgar Y. (2009) New dawn of electric rocket Scientific American 300, 58–65 doi:10.1038/scientificamerican0209-58
- ^ Electric Spacecraft Propulsion, Electric versus Chemical Propulsion, ESA Science & Technology
- ^ a b Choueiri, E. Y. "A Critical History of Electric Propulsion: The First 50 Years (1906–1956)". Retrieved 2007-11-07.
- ^ Mark Wright, April 6, 1999, science.nasa.gov, Ion Propulsion 50 years in the making
- ^ "Robert H. Goddard: American Rocket Pioneer". Smithsonian Scrapbook.
- ^ a b "Innovative Engines - Glenn Ion Propulsion Research Tames the Challenges of 21st Century Space Travel". Retrieved 2007-11-19.
- ^ "Native Electric Propulsion Engines Today" (in Русский) (7). Novosti Kosmonavtiki. 1999. Archived from the original on 6 June 2011.
- ^ a b c d Shiga, David (2007-09-28). "Next-generation ion engine sets new thrust record". NewScientist. Retrieved 2011-02-02.
- ^ "ESA and ANU make space propulsion breakthrough" (Press release). ESA. 2006-01-11. Retrieved 2007-06-29.
- ^ ANU Space Plasma, Power & Propulsion Group (SP3) (2006-12-06). "ANU and ESA make space propulsion breakthrough". DS4G Web Story. The Australian National University. Archived from the original on 2007-06-27. Retrieved 2007-06-30.
- ^ Oleson, S. R.; Sankovic, J. M. "Advanced Hall Electric Propulsion for Future In-Space Transportation". Retrieved 2007-11-21.
- ^ "FEEP - Field Emission Electric Propulsion". Retrieved 2012-04-27.
- ^ a b c Marcuccio, S., et al. "Experimental Performance of Field Emission Microthrusters". Retrieved 2012-04-27.
^ Marrese-Reading, Colleen; Polk, Jay; Mueller, Juergen; Owens, Al. "In-FEEP Thruster Ion Beam Neutralization with Thermionic and Field Emission Cathodes". Retrieved 2007-11-21.
liquid state and wicked up the needle shank to the tip where high electric fields deform the liquid and extract ions and accelerate them up to 130 km/s through 10 kV.
- ^ Mikellides, Pavlos G. "Pulsed Inductive Thruster (PIT): Modeling and Validation Using the MACH2 Code". Retrieved 2007-11-21.
- ^ Sankaran, K.; Cassady, L.; Kodys, A.D.; Choueiri, E.Y. "A Survey of Propulsion Options for Cargo and Piloted Missions to Mars". Retrieved 2007-11-21.
- ^ LaPointe, Michael R.; Mikellides, Pavlos G. "High Power MPD Thruster Development at the NASA Glenn Research Center". Retrieved 2007-11-21.
- ^ Conley, Buford Ray. "Utilization of Ambient Gas as a Propellant for Low Earth Orbit Electric Propulsion". Retrieved 1995-05-01.
- ^ Emsellem, Gregory D. "Development of a High Power Electrodeless Thruster". Retrieved 2007-11-21.
- ^ a b Szondy, David. "NASA's NEXT ion thruster runs five and a half years nonstop to set new record". Retrieved 26 June 2013.
- ^ Schmidt, George R.; Patterson, Michael J.; Benson, Scott W. "The NASA Evolutionary Xenon Thruster (NEXT): the next step for US deep space propulsion".
- ^ Herman, Daniel A. (May 3–7, 2010), "NASA's Evolutionary Xenon Thruster (NEXT) Project Qualifi cation Propellant Throughput Milestone: Performance, Erosion, and Thruster Service Life Prediction After 450 kg", 57th Joint Army-Navy-NASA-Air Force (JANNAF) Propulsion Meeting, Colorado Springs, Colorado, USA: NASA - Glenn Research Center, retrieved 2014-03-08
- ^ An overview of the Nuclear Electric Xenon Ion System (NEXIS) program (2006), 2006-02-10 (Polk, Jay E., Goebel, Don, Brophy, John R., Beatty, John, Monheiser, J., Giles, D.), Scientific Commons
- ^ a b c "HIGH POWER ELECTRIC PROPULSION PROGRAM (HiPEP)". NASA. 2008-12-22.
- ^ Astrium Radiofrequency Ion Thruster, Model RIT-22., EADS Astrium Archive copy at the Wayback Machine
- ^ VASIMR VX-200 Performance and Near-term SEP Capability for Unmanned Mars Flight, Tim Glover, Future in Space Operations (FISO) Colloquium, 2011-01-19, accessed 2011-01-31.
- ^ a b Krypton Hall effect thruster for space propulsion, IFPiLM, accessed 2014-01-29.
- ^ "Destructive Physical Analysis of Hollow Cathodes from the Deep Space 1 Flight Spare Ion Engine 30,000 Hr Life Test". Retrieved 2007-11-21.
- ^ "NASA Thruster Achieves World-Record 5+ Years of Operation". Retrieved 2012-06-27.
- ^ "A closer look at a stationary plasma thruster".
- ^ Rocket Propulsion Elements — Sutton & Biblarz 7th edition
- ^ a b Sovey, J. S.; Rawlin, V. K.; Patterson, M. J. (May–June 2001). "Ion Propulsion Development Projects in U. S.: Space Electric Rocket Test 1 to Deep Space 1". Journal of Propulsion and Power 17 (3): 517–526.
- ^ SPACE ELECTRIC ROCKET TEST II (SERT II), NASA Glenn Research Center. Accessed July 1, 2010.
- ^ SERT page at Astronautix (Accessed July 1, 2010)
- ^ Space Electric Rocket Test at NASA.gov
- ^
- ^ "Rescue in Space".
- ^ Spaceflight Now. "Electric propulsion could launch new commercial trend".
- ^ "AEHF 2 communications satellite keeps on climbing".
- ^
- ^ Tabuchi, Hiroko (1 July 2010). "Faulty Space Probe Seen as Test of Japan's Expertise". The New York Times.
- ^ The Prius of Space, September 13, 2007, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
- ^ a b "Executive summary". Ad Astra Rocket Company. 24 January 2010. Retrieved 2010-02-27.
- ^ Klotz, Irene (7 August 2008). "Plasma Rocket May Be Tested at Space Station". Discovery News. Retrieved 2010-02-27.
- ^ Whittington, Mark (March 10, 2011). "NASA to Test VF-200 VASIMR Plasma Rocket at the ISS". Yahoo. Retrieved 2012-01-27.
- ^ Mick, Jason (August 11, 2008). "Commercially Developed Plasma Engine Soon to be Tested in Space". DailyTech. Retrieved 2010-02-27.
- ^ "Solar Electric Propulsion System Demonstration Mission Concept Studies".
- ^ "NASA Awards Solar Electric Propulsion Flight System Contract".
- ^ Laser-Powered Interstellar Probe G Landis - APS Bulletin, 1991
- ^ Geoffrey A. Landis. Laser-powered Interstellar Probe on the Geoffrey A. Landis: Science. papers available on the web
- Notes
- ElectroHydroDynamic Thrusters (EHDT), RMCybernetics.
External links
- NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
- Colorado State University Electric Propulsion & Plasma Engineering (CEPPE) Laboratory
- Geoffrey A. Landis: Laser-powered Interstellar Probe
- Choueiri, Edgar Y. (2009). New dawn of electric rocket. The Ion Drive
- "NASA Trumps Star Trek: Ion Drive Live!", The Daily Galaxy 13 April 2009.
- "The Ultimate Space Gadget: NASA's Ion Drive Live!", , The Daily Galaxy, 7 July 2009.
- All articles with unsourced statements
- Articles with unsourced statements from August 2012
- Articles needing additional references from April 2009
- All articles needing additional references
- Articles with unsourced statements from February 2011
- Articles containing potentially dated statements from March 2011
- All articles containing potentially dated statements
- CS1 Русский-language sources (ru)
- All articles with dead external links
- Articles with dead external links from February 2011
- CS1 Japanese-language sources (ja)
- Commons category with local link same as on Wikidata
- Spacecraft propulsion
- Spaceflight technologies
- Magnetic propulsion devices
- Ions
- Smithsonian Institution Archives related
- Ion engines
- Emerging technologies


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About this download
This program will update VAIO Care Recovery to version 220.127.116.1130 and will have the following:
- Update help file for USB3.0 support.
Available Downloads:
VAIO Care Recovery Update version 18.104.22.16830
File name: EP0000321308.msi
File size: 31.1 MB (32,714,752 bytes)
File Info
File Name
- VAIO Care Recovery Update version 18.104.22.16830
File Version
- 126.96.36.19930
File Size
Release Date
- 2014-04-01
System Requirements
- Windows 8 64bit
1. Download the file to a temporary or download directory (Please note this directory for reference later).
2. Go to the directory where the file was downloaded and double-click EP0000321308.msi.
3. Follow the instructions displayed in the installation wizard.
4. After installation is completed, please restart the computer.
Please make sure to update this patch together with VAIO Care version 8.4
To check if installation is successful:
1. Go to C:\ProgramFiles\Sony\VAIO Care Recovery\Version.txt
2. Version should indicate 22.214.171.12430.


text:
Health care tax hikes for 2013 may be just a start
WASHINGTON (AP) — New taxes are coming Jan. 1 to help finance President Barack Obama's health care overhaul. Most people may not notice. But they will pay attention if Congress decides to start taxing employer-sponsored health insurance, one option in play if lawmakers can ever agree on a budget deal to reduce federal deficits. The tax hikes already on the […]Read more ›


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North Bethesda, MD, April 2, 2013- LibLime announces the production release of LibLime Academic Koha 5.4.
LibLime Academic Koha 5.4 represents the innovation, ideas, and talents of many professional librarians within the Westchester Academic Library Directors Organization (WALDO) group with whom LibLime enjoys working and with who we look forward to a continued professional partnership in years to come.
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Westchester Academic Library Directors Organization (WALDO) is a membership organization supporting the procurement & administration of electronic information services for libraries since 1982. Supporting over 900 member libraries, WALDO offers consortial discounts for over 5,000 products and services. For more information, please visit http://waldolib.org or contact Robert Karen at 866-576-6051 ext. 1 or email@example.com. Other advantages of choosing a LibLime solution through the WALDO consortium include volume discounts, standard contracts, consolidated renewals and invoicing and centralized billing. Participation in the LibLime discounts through WALDO is available to all WALDO full, associate and limited members.
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LibLime – PTFS is the global leader in providing support for the Koha open source ILS. Rather than sell software licenses for static, hard-to-customize software products, the PTFS LibLime Division educates libraries about the benefits of open source, enabling them to make choices about how best to provide their communities and staff with better technology services. The PTFS LibLime Division then facilitates deployment of Koha in libraries by providing outstanding consulting, development, implementation, and support/hosting for libraries of all types and sizes. PTFS is also the developer of the world's leading content management software, ArchivalWare, and specializes in meeting library personnel staffing requirements, digitization, and metadata keying services. For more information, see http://liblime.com or http://ptfs.com or http://archivalware.net.


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Line-up Includes: Karen Finney, Joe Madison, Robert Traynham, Steve Gray, Mara Schiavocampo, Marc Morial, Benjamin Jealous, Patrick Gaspard, Tara Wall, Michael Hancock and Stacey Dash
SILVER SPRING, MD, NOVEMBER 02, 2012 - NBC News, a leading source of global news and information, and TV One, which entertains, informs and inspires Black adult viewers, have confirmed the first round of guests for their TV One: One Vote Matters 2012 Presidential Election coverage. These contributors will join NBC News' Craig Melvin, who will anchor the presidential election night coverage from NBC's Washington, DC studios, and TV One's Washington Watch host Roland Martin, who will round out coverage with contributing segments and analysis. The full night of coverage will stream live on tvone.tv and theGrio.com.
For Presidential Election Night coverage, Tuesday, November 6th from 7:00pm-2:00am ET:
Karen Finney, MSNBC contributor and former DNC strategist; Joe Madison, activist and radio host; Robert Traynham, MSNBC contributor and Washington D.C. Bureau Chief for The Comcast Network, political analyst and associate professorial lecturer at George Washington University, and Steven Gray, journalist and contributing editor at The Root have been confirmed as panelists for TV One's Election Night coverage.
Mara Schiavocampo, Emmy Award-winning correspondent for NBC News will provide updates on exit polling through the broadcast.
Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League; Benjamin Jealous, president and CEO of NAACP; Patrick Gaspard, executive director of the Democratic National Committee and former director of the Office of Political Affairs for the Obama administration; Tara Wall, a Mitt Romney campaign adviser; Rep. Emanuel Cleaver of Missouri; Val Demings, Florida candidate for congress; Michael Hancock, mayor of Denver, Colo. and acclaimed actress Stacey Dash have been confirmed as guests.
NBC News is a leading source of global news and information operating for over 75 years. Every week, NBC News provides more than 30 hours of television news programming, including the top-rated "NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams," "Today," and "Meet the Press" programs. As the network's primetime newsmagazines, "Dateline" and "Rock Center with Brian Williams" provide a variety of in-depth stories week in and week out. NBC is the only broadcast news division with an affiliated cable channel, MSNBC, which provides 24-hour-a-day coverage of news events around the globe. The continuously growing online presence of NBC News, NBC News Digital, includes NBCNews.com, theGrio.com, NBCLatino.com, NBCPolitics.com, EducationNation.com, TODAY.com, NightlyNews.com, BreakingNews.com, Newsvine.com, EveryBlock.com, social media and all of the network's digital initiatives. In addition to its leading news programs and wide range of digital platforms, the network's portfolio includes NBC News Radio, a network of over 750 affiliates nationwide; Peacock Productions, an award-winning in house production company; NBC Learn, the network's educational arm; NBCUniversal Archives, a sales website leveraging NBC News' archival content; and NBC Publishing, a digital publishing group. NBC NewsChannel is the network's liaison to over 200 affiliate stations across the country.
Launched in January 2004, TV One (www.tvone.tv) serves more than 57 million households, offering a broad range of real-life and entertainment-focused original programming, classic series, movies, and music designed to entertain, inform and inspire a diverse audience of adult Black viewers. In December 2008, the company launched TV One High Def, which now serves 14 million households. TV One is owned by Radio One [NASDAQ: ROIA and ROIAK; www.radio-one.com], the largest radio company that primarily targets Black and urban listeners; and Comcast Corporation [NASDAQ: CMCSA, CMCSK); www.comcast.com], one of the nation's leading providers of entertainment, information and communications products and services.


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Browsing 1. Archival Finding Aids by Subject "Geology--Great Lakes (North America)"
Now showing items 1-1 of 1
J.W. Spencer fonds, 1866, 1881-1921 (2012-02-02)Fonds consists mostly of correspondence and offprints of technical publications written by Spencer from various journals. The correspondence includes letters from Charles Walcott, R. R. Gurley, Edward Hull, G. K. Gilbert, ...


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Free ebook – 365 Biblical Success Tips for Christian Entrepreneurs
October 31, 2012 Leave a comment
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Scooter Booties - Rainbows
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- Collection
- 1801 - 1843, 1955
Collection contains both original records and reproductions of materials related to Reverend Thomas McCulloch. Items include a glass plate etching of McCulloch, microfilm copies of his books, a sample of his shorthand, a ticket to a lecture given by McCulloch, and correspondence. The collection also includes a microform copy of a thesis written by a Dalhousie student about McCulloch.
McCulloch, Thomas, 1776-1843


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SEOUL, March 20 (UPI) -- North Korea is likely to face additional financial sanctions besides those imposed by the U.N. Security Council, sources told South Korea's Yonhap News.
U.S. Treasury Undersecretary David Cohen, in charge of terrorism and financial intelligence, was in South Korea Wednesday for talks on North Korea, which is already facing tightened U.N. Security Council sanctions for its Feb. 12 nuclear test.
Since then, North Korea, an isolated, impoverished Communist country, has been issuing provocative threats against the United States and South Korea, including preemptive nuclear strikes.
Cohen, who arrived in Seoul Tuesday, was quoted as saying he would ask South Korea to join the U.S. sanctions.
"We are going to discuss with the government of South Korea about a whole range of possible issues to recent actions by North Korea," Cohen told Yonhap, adding it would be up to the Seoul government to decide how it wants to respond.
U.S. has already imposed its own sanctions on the Foreign Trade Bank of North Korea, the Communist country's main foreign exchange institution.
Earlier, Yonhap, quoting several sources, said Cohen and Dan Fried, the U.S. State Department's sanctions coordinator, on their current Asia trips have been discussing ways to impose financial restrictions on North Korea similar to those faced by Iran. Their trips would include a visit to China.
"It is unusual that China accepted a simultaneous trip by two ranking U.S. government officials handling sanctions on North Korea," one source told Yonhap.
A diplomatic source was quoted as saying the trips by Cohen and Fried may itself send a message to North Korea.
Separately, Kyodo News, quoting sources, said the Japanese government plans to stop its financial institutions from doing business with North Korea's Foreign Trade Bank as a way to cooperate closely with the United States over the North Korean nuclear threat.
The report said although there are currently no transactions between Japanese institutions and the North Korean bank, it is hoped a formal sanction would encourage other countries, including those in China, to bring more pressure on the North.
Kyodo said Japanese Finance Ministry and Foreign Ministry officials had separately informed Cohen about the plan during his Japan visit.