instruction:
In this task, you are given news articles and you need to generate a highlight, i.e., a short summary, with a maximum length of 10 lines.
question:
(CNN) -- In September 1985 a devastating earthquake measuring 8.1 on the Richter Scale smashed into Mexico City killing 10,000 people and leaving parts of the city in ruins. Since then, the populous Latin American nation of 122 million has invested in one of the most advanced seismic warning systems anywhere in the world. The SASMEX facility came online in 1991 and reacts to data gathered by sensors placed near major fault lines along Mexico's Pacific coast. Receivers dotted around five major cities, including Mexico City and Acapulco, will sound the alarm if they detect an earthquake. It's a system that can buy vital seconds for residents to brace themselves before the tremors begin. But not everyone has access to a SASMEX receiver -- there are 100,000 in operation but at a cost of roughly $330 apiece, they are a luxury the majority of Mexicans can't afford. Most receivers are stationed in the likes of public buildings, hospitals, schools and subway stations. With roughly 21 million people living both formally and informally in and around Mexico City alone, that means many will not be aware the alarm is sounding until the ground begins shaking. $50 alarm . According to local tech entrepreneur, Andres Meira, such vital services should be far more widely available. Meira is no passive observer in this debate. He moved to Mexico City after working in Haiti and witnessing the devastation caused by the 7.0 magnitude earthquake that struck the Caribbean island in 2010 killing more than 230,000 people. It's an experience that had a profound and lasting effect on him. "Until you live in one of these places you don't really understand the primitive fear of earthquakes," he said. "There are times when you can't sleep and sometimes you wake up in the middle of the night and make sure things aren't moving." Now, after combining with local engineers and tech investors based in Silicon Valley, Meira believes he may have a solution that will bring the SASMEX signal to the masses. It's called the Grillo (the Spanish word for cricket) early warning system. The compact device -- a cube about the size of an alarm clock -- taps into the special frequencies that SASMEX operates on and relays that information to its users. When seismic activity is detected, the Grillo sounds a loud, flashing alarm. At a cost of just $50, it also undercuts the price of the receivers used primarily in public buildings by around 85%. "This is the most affordable and the most direct way for the Mexican public to connect to the early warning system," Meira says of the product, which also became Mexico's most successful ever Kickstarter campaign. Mexico City's geographic location and geological makeup put it at particular risk from seismic activity. There have been a handful of relatively small quakes in 2014 already. Meira also hopes versions of the Grillo system could be introduced elsewhere in the world where earthquakes are a real risk -- like in Nepal, India, the West Coast of the U.S. and along much of the Pacific Coast of South America. Missing education? But others point to the difficulty of introducing a mass warning system without first educating citizens on what to do when receiving a direct alert. Speaking to McClatchyDC.com earlier this year, Arturo Iglesias Mendoza, director of the Institute of Geophysics at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, pondered what would happen if 5,000 of 60,000 people in a football stadium received an alert of an imminent earthquake? "People should know that the safest thing to do is to stay in the stadium," he said. On top of that, the $50 price is still a considerable investment for many residents of a country where the average wage remains under $5 a day. Then there is the fact that only a handful of early warning systems like SASMEX exist anywhere in the world. This means that Grillo will unlikely have government sourced data and advanced sensor system set up near major fault lines to tap into in many other locations. Meira and his colleagues have anticipated such difficulties. He speaks of the next stage of the Grillo project which will see hundreds of specially developed sensors placed all over Mexico, feeding into an algorithm that will provide early-warning alerts to apps and smartphones. Warning app . Known as Grillo Active, the tiny orange devices contain a sensitive movement detector, microprocessor and a WiFi module to transmit a signal. Grillo are currently in talks with a major convenience store chain to locate the devices at between 500 and 1,000 of their stores around Mexico. Such a wide spread will ensure more reliable and faster alerts. "The real test of a good infrastructure is the density of sensors," Meira said. "This is our plan in Mexico." Given that the devices can be produced cheaply and located anywhere with an internet connection, the potential for Grillo to be used in a variety of vulnerable areas around the world is very real. Japan remains the only nation in the world where the entire country is hooked up to an early warning facility. And that system, which consists of 1,000 GPS sensors. For now, however, this fledgling group's focus remains on Mexico. The first small batch of Grillo boxes produced have been sold, although they haven't yet seen any action in the field. Mexico's last earthquake was recorded about six months ago, when the device was still in the prototype phase. Meira hopes that the acid test doesn't come too soon, but he expects a solid performance from his invention when it does. "The science is all there," he said. "We have tested it out in two earthquakes and they worked just fine. One was a seven pointer (on the Richter scale) and it worked perfectly." Now, they await the next earthquake.
answer:
Grillo is a device that aims to bring a low-cost earthquake warning system to the masses in Mexico .
A number of major fault lines are situated along Mexico's Pacific Coast .
Some say a widespread program of public education is required so people know what to do when seismic activity occurs .


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(CNN) -- Sitting incongruously among the hangars and laboratories of NASA's Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley is the squat facade of an old McDonald's. You won't get a burger there, though -- its cash registers and soft-serve machines have given way to old tape drives and modern computers run by a rogue team of hacker engineers who've rechristened the place McMoon's. These self-described techno-archaeologists have been on a mission to recover and digitize forgotten photos taken in the '60s by a quintet of scuttled lunar satellites. The Lunar Orbiter Image Recovery Project (LOIRP) has since 2007 brought some 2,000 pictures back from 1,500 analog data tapes. They contain the first high-resolution photographs ever taken from behind the lunar horizon, including the first photo of an earthrise (first slide above). Thanks to the technical savvy and DIY engineering of the team at LOIRP, it's being seen at a higher resolution than was ever previously possible. "We're reaching back to a capability that existed but couldn't be touched back when it was created," says Keith Cowing, co-lead and founding member at LOIRP. "It's like having a DVD in 1966, you can't play it. We had resolution of the Earth of about a kilometer [per pixel]. This is an image taken a quarter of a f***king million miles away in 1966. The Beatles were warming up to play Shea Stadium at the moment it was being taken." Between 1966 and '67, five Lunar Orbiters snapped pictures onto 70mm film from about 30 miles above the moon. The satellites were sent mainly to scout potential landing sites for manned moon missions. Each satellite would point its dual lens Kodak camera at a target, snap a picture, then develop the photograph. High- and low-resolution photos were then scanned into strips called framelets using something akin to an old fax machine reader. The images were beamed in modulated signals to one of three receiving stations in Australia, Spain, or California, where the pictures--and collateral chatter from the NASA operators--were recorded straight to tape. After finishing their missions, the satellites were unceremoniously dashed against the moon rocks, clearing the way for Apollo. The brilliant and ballsy engineering was typical of NASA during its golden age, a time when it was also more closely linked to other government agencies with an interest in taking pictures from space. "These guys were operating right at the edge," Cowing says with a reverence for these NASA engineers that's shared by his team. "There's a certain spy program heritage to all this, but these guys went above that, because those spy satellites would send their images back. These didn't. They couldn't. They were in lunar orbit." Fascinating Ways People Try to Leave Their Mark on the World . The photos were stored with remarkably high fidelity on the tapes, but at the time had to be copied from projection screens onto paper, sometimes at sizes so large that warehouses and even old churches were rented out to hang them up. The results were pretty grainy, but clear enough to identify landing sites and potential hazards. After the low-fi printing, the tapes were shoved into boxes and forgotten. They changed hands several times over the years, almost getting tossed out before landing in storage in Moorpark, California. Several abortive attempts were made to recover data from the tapes, which were well kept, but it wasn't until 2005 that NASA engineer Keith Cowing and space entrepreneur Dennis Wingo were able to bring the materials and the technical know how together. When they learned through a Usenet group that former NASA employee Nancy Evans might have both the tapes and the super-rare Ampex FR-900 drives needed to read them, they jumped into action. They drove to Los Angeles, where the refrigerator-sized drives were being stored in a backyard shed surrounded by chickens. At the same time, they retrieved the tapes from a storage unit in nearby Moorpark, and things gradually began to take shape. Funding the project out of pocket at first, they were consumed with figuring out how to release the images trapped in the tapes. "We're both Apollo babies, so the moon to us was something that's unfinished business," says Cowing. "These tapes were sealed for history by somebody who cared, and it was astonishing the condition they were in. So we started buying used parts on eBay, Radioshack -- I was sitting at a black-tie reception at one point buying something on my iPhone. We just buy and reassemble these things bit by bit." The drives had to be rebuilt and in some cases completely re-engineered using instruction manuals or the advice of people who used to service them. The data they recovered then had to be demodulated and digitized, which added more layers of technical difficulties. The resulting framelets had to be individually reassembled in Photoshop. After kluging through countless engineering problems (try finding a chemical substitute for whale oil to lubricate tape heads), the LOIRP team was able to single out and reproduce the famous earthrise image. This proof of concept brought the first NASA funding in 2008, and the team recently completed processing the entire tape collection. "We're the first people out of a generation or more to see this," says Cowing. "No human eye had ever seen this. All they saw was something that had already been through one generation of copying. We're seeing something one order of magnitude more precise right on the screen." Since the '60s, a series of Earth and moon imaging satellites have launched, including the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2009. Despite the advances in computing power and optics, Cowing says the terabytes of images recovered at LOIRP are often even more detailed than those taken by LRO, capable of being blown up to billboard size without losing resolution. "A lot of the images they're taking today, our imagery from 1966 and '67 has sometimes greater resolution and greater dynamic range because of the way the pictures were taken. So sometimes you look into a shadow in a picture that LRO's taken, and you don't see any detail -- with ours, you do." Officially named Building 596, McMoon's flies a flag bearing the distinct Skunkworks skull and crossbones, signaling the team's hacker ethic. The seven or so people tinkering away inside maintain an open-source mentality about their work, making all images and their technological discoveries free to the public. They also have plans for a decommissioned Titan ICBM that's sitting outside (for students, of course). McMoon's has grown into a highly specialized operation, stuffed with a melange of old and new technology now put to use in decoding various NASA and Library of Congress tapes that no one knows what to do with. With a built-in ability to handle hazardous chemicals, the old McDonald's made practical sense, but it also gave them a layer of distance to carry out their weird work. "I had a choice between the barbershop and this building -- we didn't really care what sort of building they gave us, we just didn't want to pay for it," Cowing says. "The surplus folks at NASA Ames where all the old computers and stuff go, they love us because we come over and make all the old stuff work. The safety guys come by and we usually either make them our friends or bark at them and they don't come back." The images gathered at LOIRP have been coerced into providing even more information than they were intended to. Their data have been used to correct figures from the time about Earth's arctic ice levels, and have helped identify an El Nino-type event in the '60s. All the images and the information gathered from them are being fed into the Planetary Data System, an official repository where mission data from LRO, Mars Observer, Climate Orbiter, and many others are documented. Started by the same Nancy Evans that provided the tape drives, the Planetary Data System didn't exist when the Lunar Orbiter pictures were initially taken. The images and information that LOIRP has recovered will be submitted as the official record of the original sattelite mission. It's a testament to the lasting work of the engineers who designed the orbiter missions, and the tenacity of the modern techno archaeologists who are bringing that work to full fruition. "Back then things were designed, even if they failed, to still do something. Today, most jet fighters would fall out of the sky if they didn't have computers adjusting their surfaces and their pattern thousands of times a second. Back then they just had to engineer stuff elegantly so that it worked," he says. "We feel that we're completing the Lunar Orbiter 1 through 5 missions. They never formally submitted their stuff for the archives so we're doing it." Read more from WIRED: . What Exactly Is in McDonald's Famous French Fries? Why You Always Seem to Choose the Slowest Line . People Around the World Pose With Everything They Eat in a Day . Why Does Sleeping In Just Make Me More Tired? 30 Years After Chernobyl's Meltdown, Gripping Photos Expose the Human Fallout . Subscribe to WIRED magazine for less than $1 an issue and get a FREE GIFT! Click here! Copyright 2011 Wired.com.
answer:
NASA-funded project has recovered 2,000 analog moon pictures .
The images were taken by the five Lunar Orbiter images between 1966 and 1967 .
Project uses old and modern technology to produce high-res copies of the originals.


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(CNN) -- A new CNN poll confirms that we're witnessing a quiet reversal in the character of our two major parties. Traditionally, Republicans have always coalesced around the conventional wisdom front-runner for president. Conservatives respect structure, order and party brand names. Not for nothing was the name Nixon, Bush or Dole on the GOP presidential ticket from 1952 to 2004. In contrast, Democrats have favored the presidential candidate with the hot hand, rising from obscurity to the White House -- think Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. But a fresh-out-of-the-oven CNN presidential poll shows a fractured GOP field of newcomers with no clear front-runner while the Democrats have given an unprecedented lead to a brand name of their own: Hillary Clinton. Opinion: GOP strategy on shutdown courts doom . Yes, it is pathetically early to be projecting on the 2016 presidential campaign. Predictive capacity hovers somewhere near zero, and time fixated on polls would be productively used thinking about the 2014 midterms or the fights over the debt ceiling looming over our divided, dysfunctional Congress. But as a snapshot of the underlying dynamics driving the two parties, this new poll is worth a look. On the GOP side of the aisle, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie narrowly leads the fractured field at 17%, one point above Rep. Paul Ryan, best known as Mitt Romney's vice presidential running mate. In the old days, the previous vice presidential nominee would be the future favorite. But that doesn't seem to be the case for Ryan, who emerged from the 2012 presidential race arguably damaged by his association with the Romney campaign. Traditionally, the governor of blue state New Jersey wouldn't be on the GOP radar at all, but Christie -- cruising to a landslide re-election -- seems to be the exception to this and other rules. Next on the list is Rand Paul, the scion of an outsider libertarian movement sparked by his dad's multiple runs for president. But the compelling and controversial one-time eye doctor is a first-term senator from Kentucky, far from your typical presidential timber. Perhaps most interesting is the second tier of GOP candidates. Jeb Bush seems settled in at 10%, despite brand name and legendary brand loyalty. Two Hispanic senate Republicans, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, come in next at 9% and 7% respectively. And then, at the bottom of the barrel, come two 2012 aspirants: Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum. Far from being strengthened by their 2012 campaigns, these two candidates seem weakened by the experience. Rick Perry's "oops" heard round the world still resonates while Santorum's strident social conservatism doesn't seem to be taken seriously by 95% of the party faithful. Strange days. Obama pressures conservative Republicans over possible shutdown . The real news is on the Democratic side. Hillary Clinton has accumulated a towering 55 percentage point lead over her next closest competitor, Vice President Joe Biden, who is at 10% and doesn't exactly lack name recognition. Below Biden are first-term Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren at 7%, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo at 6% and Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley -- perhaps the most openly ambitious of the bunch -- at 2%. Clinton's dominance illustrates an interesting dynamic. Six years ago, she was a far more polarizing figure among Democrats (and independents). Today, after her service as secretary of state, she seems more qualified and less polarizing, transcending her association with the culture of wars concurrent with Bubba's two terms in office. Tough and experienced, Clinton is now positioned as a candidate who rivals Obama's 2007 surge. She will also be positioned as the candidate of the 51%, compelling to women of all ages and even possibly competitive among Republican women in this incarnation. Uncle Joe Biden is well liked by the rank and file, but there doesn't seem to be much of a stampede to put him on the top of the ticket. Warren's strength comes from fascination with the new and represents the growing strength of the liberal base in the party. And while successful governors like Cuomo and O'Malley have earned the right to be taken seriously as presidential candidates, the party faithful don't seem to be much interested in buying what they are selling at the moment. If Clinton does not run for some reason, Democrats will quickly wake up to the awkward fact that they have almost no depth of the bench after two Obama terms. So there you have it: Democrats are behaving like Republicans, falling in line behind the big brand name dominating a race that is still three years away. And Republicans are behaving like Democrats, putting forward a fractured field with no clear front-runners but elevating a New Jersey governor, a Wisconsin congressman and a Kentucky senator to the front of the pack. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of John Avlon.
answer:

John Avlon: A new CNN poll shows a reversal in the character of two major parties .
Avlon: Traditionally, GOP coalesce around a front-runner; Democrats root for newcomers .
Now, GOP has an eclectic pool of presidential candidates; Democrats have Hillary Clinton .
Avlon: If Clinton does not run, Democrats will have almost no strong candidate .