Forget Maui, get hitched in space! That’s the message of one Japanese firm that is teaming up with an American private spaceflight group to offer suborbital weddings for just over $2 million a pop.

The Japanese firm First Advantage and the U.S.-based private spaceflight firm Rocketplane Global, Inc., are apparently planning to host weddings in space for about $2.3 million (240 million yen), according to media reports and both firms’ Japanese Web sites.

An illustration advertising space weddings from Japan’s First Advantage and the U.S. firm Rocketplane Global. Credit: First Advantage/Rocketplane Global/http://www.spacewedding.jp.

A translation of First Advantage’s Space Wedding site suggests a four-day training regime that would culminate in a wedding ceremony that would start on the ground and be completed during a one-hour flight into suborbital space about 60 miles (100 km) above Earth, according to the AFP news service.

An artist’s illustration advertising space weddings by Japan’s First Advantage and the U.S. firm Rocketplane Global. Credit: （C）2008 eraliy/Misuzu Onuki/Rocketplane Global, Japan.

Such a ceremony could include a space wedding photo album, marriage certificate, as well as the capability to broadcast the cosmic union live in some way, read First Advantage’s site. Apparently, the couple could take up to three guests – assumedly a priest and two witnesses – along for the near-space nuptials, reported Russia’s RIA Novosti, adding that the first flight could be in 2011.

According to the AFP, First Advantage spokesperson Taro Katsura said his firm expects the main customers for its space weddings to come from China or the Arab gulf region.

This is a good point to note, by the way, that there is a precedent for space weddings. In 2003, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Malenchenko wed his bride - then Ekaterina Dmitriev - while flying 240 miles above Earth aboard the International Space Station. His wife, of course, was on Earth with the rest of the wedding party next to a cardboard cutout of her groom.

Based in Oklahoma City, Okla., Rocketplane Global is developing the XP Spaceplane for private suborbital spaceflights. The four-seat spaceship is slated to be about the size of a fighter jet and designed to carry two jet engines and a rocket engine to reach space.

Initially, the spacecraft is expected to fly missions based out of the Oklahoma Spaceport and give passengers about four minutes of weightlessness during their short trip. Basic space tourism seats, not a full-up space wedding charter, carried ticket prices ranging from the base $200,000 to $250,000 for a premium view up front with the pilot, Rocketplane officials have said.

So that’s the lowdown on Rocketplane Global and Japan’s First Advantage space weddings of the future. If you’re counting down, another space tourism firm – Virgin Galactic – will roll out the WhiteKnightTwo mothership of its SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceliners on July 28.

The only problem I can think is: once you get married in space, where do you go for a honeymoon?

You know, Space Adventures in Virginia is offering $100 million trips around the moon aboard Russian Soyuz spacecraft. So, there’s an idea.

• Video: Rocketplane’s XP Spaceplane
• Future of Flight: Space Tourism, Investment and Technology
• Video: SpaceShipTwo Revealed

More space wedding information: http://spacewedding.jp/ (in Japanese)

More Rocketplane Global, Japan info: http://rocketplane.jp/index.html (in Japanese)

Inflation (there, I said it) and the mortgage meltdown, worry about global warming and the overall glum economy (we’re not supposed to call it a recession until it’s over or a new person is in the White House or until inflation is clearly the greater worry, whichever comes first) are having profound effects on how Americans live.

You know best. You are driving less, driving slower, and being more careful at the grocery store. In the East where public transportation is not a dirty word, buses and subways are stuffed and Amtrak ridership is at an all-time high.

And no surprise, you are tightening your belts. A Bloomberg/L.A. Times survey this week finds seven in 10 “say higher gas prices have caused them ‘financial hardship.’ More than 1 in 3 respondents say they have cut back on their spending over the last six months as oil and food prices surged and unemployment rose.”

If you are a Baby Boomer, you’re whining like crazy. But you always have been.

Meanwhile, as your stocks plunged today and oil surged above $140 a barrel, here are a dozen less obvious signs of the times:

1. Government officials in a Minnesota county worrying how they’ll plow the snow next winter. They are struggling with budgets that were planned before fuel prices skyrocketed. “We’re looking at fuel efficiency, but it can only go so far,” said Don Theisen, who runs Washington County’s public works department. “The big equipment, like snowplows, have improved over time, but nothing that will make up for the rise in fuel costs.”

2. With diesel prices even higher than gas, thieves are siphoning big-rig fuel. “There’s quite a bit of theft going on,” said Dave Williams, vice president of equipment and maintenance for Phoenix-based Knight Transportation. “We’ve had to figure out how to track it and keep it from happening.”

3. The Caribbean tourism industry is sinking, and on many islands it’s pretty much all they have. That means, of course, that you and many others are planning staycations this summer.

4. An official in Madison, Wisconsin is advocating a ban on fast-food drive-thrus. “Given the concern about all the carbon going into the atmosphere, I’m not sure we should be building more places for people to sit idling in their cars,” says Eric Sundquist, appointed to a citizen panel by the mayor.

5. Suburban commuters, especially out West where the public transport options are as rare as hybrid cars on a showroom floor, know too well the disproportionate hit to the pocketbook they’re suffering now. And so, of course, there’s talk about the death of the suburbs and the exurbs.

6. Carpooling is nothing new, but now rodeo cowboys are saddling up together. They have to drive to the many stops on the rodeo circuit, often in diesel pickup trucks towing trailers weighted down by the animals. “It’s ridiculous, I mean it’s doubled my cost to go places,” said Monty Lewis, the 2004 world champion tie-down roper.

7. Cocoa Beach Florida is scrubbing its fireworks simply because the city can’t afford it this year.

8. Job productivity is declining as workers stress about pump prices, claims Wayne Hochwarter of Florida State University’s College of Business. There’s no firm data on this (in fact, I suspect a lot of people are working harder for fear they’ll be laid off). But Hochwarter did a survey earlier this year to see what’s on workers’ minds. “People concerned with the effects of gas prices were significantly less attentive on the job, less excited about going to work, less passionate and conscientious and more tense,” he concludes. “These people also reported more ‘blues’ on the job.” Sad.

9. Now we turn positive, Vint Cerf (the real Al Gore of the Internet) and now a Google mucky-muck, said “Although I’m not happy with increased oil prices, the Internet (industry) may actually benefit from that as people turn to it as an aid to improve their efficiency.” Indeed: Lisa Honan of U.K.-based Eyenetwork, which brokers videoconference facilities in 3,500 locations, says studio bookings have more than doubled in the past year. The No. 1 use: interviewing job candidates. Take note, ye who are blue an slacking (No. 6).

And, to reprise, there are these offbeat upsides:

10. Deaths are likely down. Fewer miles driven means safer roads. One study predicts nearly 2,000 fewer people will die because of the recent price hikes.

11. Less gas is being consumed (fewer SUVs, less driving, etc.). One economist estimates that each $1 rise in gas leads to 14 percent less fuel consumption over the long haul. Of course, as consumption falls, some analysts say prices at the pump could dip, stimulating demand.

12. Pollution is reduced. If we use less gas, logic dictates that smog will decrease (you’ll breath cleaner air) and we’ll pump lower amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Little if any research has quantified this potential outcome, but the traffic-death study also predicts 600 fewer pollution-related deaths. So maybe, just maybe, we’re on the, ahem, road to recovery.

The deluge of office and personal email and IM and texting, along with web surfing, putzing with iTunes and so on has workers increasingly distracted from … oh yeah … work. We simply can’t not look at it all, and so we’re distracted like never before.

These ties that bind us to our companies, families and friends — every minute, every evening, every vacation — are costing billions on the job and ruining our time off. And it’s all stressing us out, which can be deadly.

This collective technotether — not on Google yet, so I’ll define it as “the technology and 24/7 modern mindset that diffuse focus on the job, fuel stress, and thwart relaxation off the job” — even sneaks into spouses bedrooms late at night when email checking and web surfing replace, um, watching Johnny Carson.

A study earlier this year found that some people may be as addicted to personal electronic devices as junkies are to drugs. Among the signs of addiction: You can’t get through dinner without checking messages.

What companies are doing

Awareness of the problem’s psychological and economic costs is growing among employers, particularly they’re taking note of the lost productivity. And the big companies that created the technotethers (Intel, Microsoft et al.) are trying to lessen the impact with everything from new software to better manage how often things beep and flash to pilot workflow programs designed to turn down the e-chatter, according to an article in the NY Times today.

The article quantifies the problem some, suggesting there’s money to be made by figuring out how to get workers to work again:

A typical information worker who sits at a computer all day turns to his e-mail program more than 50 times and uses instant messaging 77 times, according to one measure by RescueTime, a company that analyzes computer habits. … The fractured attention comes at a cost. In the United States, more than $650 billion a year in productivity is lost because of unnecessary interruptions, predominately mundane matters, according to Basex.

Some of us check email 50 times before half the country wakes up.

One thing the article largely overlooked: Workers who can figure out ways to cut down their own distractions (set the email program to check every 15 minutes instead of every minute; keep IMs briefer; don’t forward email jokes) they become more productive and theoretically more valuable

Another factor beyond the scope of the Times article: The technotether destroys your time off, so you come back to work as exhausted as when you left. While this might be a harder problem to quantify, companies should start trying harder to ignore workers who are on vacation.

What you can do

A study released earlier this month claims that instant messaging actually decreases interruptions in the workplace.

The research found that IMs were often “used as a substitute for other, more disruptive forms of communication such as the telephone, e-mail, and face-to-face conversations.” Using instant messaging led to more conversations on the computer, but the conversations were briefer, said R. Kelly Garrett, co-author of the study and assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University.

The telephone survey involved 912 office workers in 12 metropolitan areas The results were published recently in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication.

Instead of dropping in unexpectedly, many IM coworkers to see when they are available, the survey found. Many also use IM to get quick answers or to inquire about tasks instead of engaging in longer face-to-face conversations.

“We find that employees are quite strategic in their use of instant messaging. They are using it to check in with their colleagues to find out if they’re busy before interrupting them in a more intrusive way,” Garrett said.

Sounds good, but in reality, I think IM can be either highly valuable or horribly intrusive, depending on how it’s used. A lot of younger workers tend to be more chatty and inclined to begin and end an IM session with extra salutations or extraneous comments, while upper-management-types are more concise. Workers closer to each other in the chain of command tend, I think, to use IM to “catch up” more, lengthening the interruptions to real work, whereas others separated in the chain are more likely to hand down orders or take them and end an IM session quickly. If Bill Gates IMs to suggest you need to fix that software security loophole, you don’t reply:

hey bill.

sure. I’ll get right on it.
how’s the global philanthropy going?

Company culture (and individual managers setting some informal IM polices) play a big role in all this.

Outside the workplace, cutting the technotether (or at least loosening it a bit) might be as simple as choosing to do so, assuming you don’t fear it’ll get you fired.

I did an experiment on my last vacation, because I needed a real one: I asked my immediate colleagues (not the whole company) to exclude me from emails unless it was something I really needed to see. I made sure everyone knew who to turn to for answers on various possible problems before they turned to me. And I told them to call me anytime. On my Treo, then, I checked email 2-3 times a day in sessions lasting just a few minutes, and I was actually able to keep up with the email load and return to work a week later with an empty inbox. I got just a couple of phone calls, and in each case was glad they’d called for my input. Most important, I enjoyed my vacation.

It was a small step but it helped. Another step I need to take, and I know this will be harder, is to send fewer emails and IMs to my staff, during the day, at night and over the weekend, so they can do their jobs. And maybe I should stop blogging on Saturdays…

A Wi-Fi setup in your body, using Bluetooth connected to base station in your home, could alert a hospital of a heart attack or other health emergency, predicts the UK’s Ofcom, the independent regulator for communications industries.

From The Times in London: If the “in-body network” recorded that the person had suddenly collapsed, it would send an alert, via a nearby base station at their home, to a surgery or hospital.

Other than possible privacy concerns, such a device seems pretty simple, composed of off-the-shelf ideas: Think external heart rate monitor’s worn by runners mixed with the common cell phone ear bud and the already implantable RFID chips.

BBC News online ran an interesting article today on the potential health effects faced by the children born to the woman held captive and raped by her father for 24 years, both by the nature of the incestuous relationship and as the result of growing up in windowless cellar.

Without exposure to sunlight, the children developed a deficiency of vitamin D, according to the article, which plays a role in bone formation and could help protect against cancer, diabetes and heart disease. Vitamin D is formed by photochemical reactions in the skin that occur when ultraviolet B light hits it. The vitamin is then converted into an active form in the liver and kidney and circulated through the blood, where it regulates calcium and phosphorus levels.

A lack of vitamin D could also compromise their immune systems, which have likely already been weakend because they have never been exposed to the outside environment and the usual childhood illnesses that help build up immunity.

The low ceilings of the cellar have also reportedly given the older children a permanently hunched posture.

The BBC report says that all six surviving children born of the daughter-father relationship seem to have escaped the potential genetic defects that can occur because of incest. The article has a good explanation of why these defects are more likely in children born out of incestuous relationships.

Jittery investors might want to shift their financial-company stocks to potato futures.

Rising global food prices, notably rice and corn, have been fueling protests and other unrest for months now as UN officials warned things would get worse. A key problem that’s no longer news: Corn is now valued not just as human food and livestock feed but as fuel (ethanol).

Now “political leaders from poor countries contending that these fuels are driving up food prices and starving poor people,” according to a news analysis in the NY Times, which also notes that “food riots contributed to the dismissal of Haiti’s prime minister last week.”

Meanwhile, the “humble potato” is making a comeback.

Potatoes have a history of popularity surges and disappointment. They originated in South America became an important crop in Europe (though people in many countries disdained them at first) around 1700. French commoners, in particular, were loathe to eat them. But brutal winters associated with the “little ice age” made the spud an attractive crop compared to wheat, which repeatedly got slammed by the weather.

The Irish, after wholly embracing the potato to the point of eating almost nothing else, made the mistake of relying on one variety that was prone to disease, hence the great Irish potato famine in the mid-1800s.

If any of that is news to you, then you probably didn’t realize that 2008 is the year of the potato. What a timely designation that’s turning out to be.

Today, Reuters reports: “Peru’s leaders, frustrated by a doubling of wheat prices in the past year, have started a program encouraging bakers to use potato flour to make bread. Potato bread is being given to school children, prisoners and the military, in the hope the trend will catch on.” Meanwhile China has become the world’s #1 potato grower (who knew?) and India plans to double its potato production within 10 years.

The top potato producers, in millions of tons annually:

1. China 72
2. Russian Fed. 35
3. India 26
4. Ukraine 19
5. United States 17

SOURCE: FAOSTAT via potato2008.org

Merely growing more potatoes won’t, however, solve the global food shortage nor stop the inflation of grocery prices anytime soon. Those problems are linked also to population growth, distribution problems and, of course, fuel prices. Oil surged again to new record highs today. U.S. inflation soared in March, with food and energy leading the way (as John McCain calls on the Feds to suspend gas tax for summer [Have you ever noticed how presidential candidates have all the answers for things that should be done under the current administration? But I digress...]).

Potato Facts: The potato, a tuber, is part of the Solanaceae, “nightshade” family of flowering plants. Nowadays, just as centuries ago, more than 100 varieties can be found in South America. The potato is loaded with starch and some micronutrients. If you eat them, you still need whole grains and other vegetables. They are low in fat, except when laden with butter or sour cream or fried into fries or chips.

A recently developed technique that might eventually produce facsimiles of human embryonic stem cells from skin cells was lauded by President Bush and the Catholic Church as an ethical alternative to using human embryos for research. But it “opens a whole new can of worms” — the possibility of creating chimera humans — one researcher says.

The idea is that you could borrow skin cells from a living or dead person (Albert Einstein jumped to the mind of the concerned scientist) to give your child a genetic leg up.

Scientists used the technique to create baby mice from the skin cells of adult animals. The approach, which reprograms skin cells and inserts them into an embryo, also was employed to revert human skin cells to a quasi-embryonic state. Presumably these virtual stem cells could be used for the same sorts of disease-curing research that embryos are used for.

Overlooked, according to Robert Lanza, chief scientific officer of Advanced Cell Technology in this article in the Independent, is the potential for making baby Einsteins.

“If we had a few skin cells from Albert Einstein, or anyone else in the world, you could have a child that is say 10 per cent or 70 per cent Albert Einstein by just injecting a few of their cells into an embryo,” Lanza said. “It’s unethical and unsafe, but someone may be doing it today.”

The genetic makeup of such a child would be a mix of mother, father and Albert (or Uncle Al or any other skin cell donor).

Clearly such chimera children wouldn’t go over well with most ethicists. People are already squeamish over British attempts to make cybrid embryos for research by putting human DNA into cow eggs. And the new technique, considered safer than the cloning method used on Dolly, raises the interesting (frightening?) prospect of quite easily nudging our genetics toward a race of superhumans.

The short answer, for men anyway: Be born in Iceland.

Icelandic men have apparently surpassed Japanese men in life expectancy. Researchers aren’t sure why, but the men on the Nordic island-nation hang in there an average of 79.4 years, compared to 78.6 in Japan.

Lifespan stats can be misleading, however, and were especially so in the past when many children died young, dragging the averages way down. Even today, life expectancy is an average number that masks large differences between the rich (who have access to the best health care) and the poor, as well as between people who eat well and exercise vs. those who don’t.

Whatever, it’s likely the Icelandic feat has something to do with diet, lifestyle, and available health care. In the United States, male life expectancy is 75.2 years (as of 2004; preliminary 2005 stats here.) Americans are living longer, but we’re not keeping up with advances in other countries.

Part of the problem in the U.S., too, seems to be how we spend our health care dollars. We’re last among 19 industrialized nations in preventable deaths. We spend a fortune on health care, but it’s not working — an irony glossed over in the politicized health care debate. Our Bad Medicine Columnist Chris Wanjek notes:

The United States has by far the highest level of health spending per capita in the world: nearly $6,100 or 15.4 percent of the GDP, according the World Health Organization. Scandinavian countries, with their universal healthcare coverage, pay less than half of this.

Yet the United States has one of the lowest life expectancies among developed nations, at about 78 years, which is lower than Cuba’s and marginally beats Slovenia, according to United Nation’s figures.

That figure of 78 years is the average, including men and women (in all countries, women live longer). And why is that? Nobody knows for sure, but hormones seem to play a role. And one idea put forth a couple years back is that competing for a mate wears us out.

To live really long, you really want to born female in Japan, where you can expect to spend 86 years pondering all this.

If the headline of this blog had you expecting tricks to get you to 100 or 1,000, see our special report on Immortality.

Scientists in the U.K. claim — claim — to have created embryos and stem cells by inserting human DNA into cow eggs. It’s raising hackles as you might expect.

The work, led by Lyle Armstrong at Newcastle University, skirts laws that prevent piddling with human eggs in the same manner.

“Animal eggs are much easier to obtain than human eggs and they effectively act as a ’shell’ to carry human DNA,” the researchers say in their FAQ.

The goal is to mass produce human stem cells for use in research designed to lead toward disease cures.

“If the team can produce cells which will survive in culture it will open the door to a better understanding of disease processes without having to use precious human eggs,” said John Burn, head of the Institute of Human Genetics at the university. “Cells grown using animal eggs cannot be used to treat patients on safety grounds but they will help bring nearer the day when new stem cell therapies are available.”

The Australian Herald-Sun reports the embryos survived three days and were considered 99 percent human. The Catholic Church in Britain has called such creations “monstrous.” Kevin McGovern, director of the Caroline Chisholm Centre for Health Ethics, is quoted by the Herald-Sun:  “An almost-human embryo is being created and then it’s being destroyed,” McGovern said. “I cannot see that that respects human life or the dignity of human life.

Others worry that work like this will lead to freaks of nature … chimeras that are part human, part animal. A Reuters story quotes Arthur Caplan, director of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania: “In my view there is no risk of making monsters this way. The biology will not work. Nor is that the intent of any of these experiments anyway, so I don’t think that fear is justified.”

Only a kook would try to make a chimera, and no reputable institution would fund him. Instead, this is about disease research.

However, the apparent breakthrough has yet to be reviewed, verified and published in a peer-reviewed journal, which is the normal course of action for significant scientific advances. Instead, this group announced their results at a conference last week. That’s premature, and a shame.

“This data needs to be verified and Dr. Armstrong and Newcastle University will be following the peer review system as is normal procedure,” the university said in a statement.

Let’s hope all the hullabaloo isn’t over nothing. You can find more background on the story in my Jan. 18 blog when the British government made this legal.

Seemingly strange fears pepper the collective psyche of the human race, such as phobias of the sun (heliophobia), hair (chaetophobia) and even vegetables (lachanophobia).

A recent news article hints at the existence of a phobia of little people, a term referring those of smaller statures (4 feet 10 inches or shorter, according to Little People of America).

Ethan Wade, who describes himself as a little person, went inside a Greenville County, S.C. burger joint to correct his drive-through window order. As he walked up to the register, an employee behind the counter allegedly “threw her hands up in the air, started yelling ‘Oh, my gosh! Oh my gosh!’ and ran to the back of the restaurant, continuing to yell as she was in back of the restaurant,” Wayne is quoted as saying in an article published by WYFF4 of South Carolina.

The woman then claimed she had a phobia of little people.

So far, no such phobia is recognized by any institution — clinical or otherwise — despite the fact that many people claim their fear should be. Coulrophobia, or the fear of clowns, is likewise not medically recognized but commonly held to exist.

Recent studies show that humans are evolutionary equipped to acquire phobias of living things (such as bats, rats and snakes), but only time and more research can tell if little people fit into that framework.