Note: This story, originally published in our April 1960 issue of Scientific American, is being made available as a supplement to the April 2010 issue 50, 100, 150 Years Ago feature.

The State of Israel has undertaken to create a new agriculture in an old and damaged land. The 20th century Israelites did not find their promised land "Rowing with milk and honey," as their forebears did 3,300 years ago. They came to a land of encroaching sand dunes along a once-verdant coast, of malarial swamps and naked limestone hills from which an estimated three feet of topsoil had been scoured, sorted and spread as sterile overwash upon the plains or swept out to sea in Rood waters that time after time turned the beautiful blue of the Mediterranean to a dirty brown as far as the horizon. The land of Israel had shared the fate of land throughout the Middle East. A decline in productivity, in population and in culture had set in with the fading of the Byzantine Empire some 1,300 years ago. The markers of former forest boundaries on treeless slopes and the ruins of dams, aqueducts and terraced irrigation works, of cities, bridges and paved highways-all bore witness that the land had once supported a great civilization with a much larger population in a higher state of well-being.

NASA launch managers this morning cleared space shuttle Endeavour to lift off before dawn Sunday from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, one of the five remaining flights before the shuttle program concludes this year or early next. The planned launch comes less than a week after the future of human spaceflight in the U.S. was shaken by President Obama, whose budget request for fiscal year 2011, released Monday, would cancel Constellation , the planned successor to the shuttle. [More]