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An international group of senior scientists has appealed to Presidents Bush and Yeltsin for a permanent ban on nuclear explosive testing by the United States and Russia. In June, nine members of the Executive Committee of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs—chaired by John Holdren, a professor of energy and resources at the University of California, Berkeley—sent a letter to the two leaders, who were coming together for a summit meeting. The letter implored them to

Going For The Gold A team of four United States high school students placed fourth at the 24th International Chemistry Olympiad, held July 11-17 in Pittsburgh. Out of 33 countries, they were bested only by China, Hungary, and Poland. The annual competition was hosted by the U.S. for the first time since its inauguration in 1968 and was organized this year by the American Chemical Society. Medals were awarded at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., on July 21 . Swaine Chen, from

Alluding dramatically to the vast scope of their achievements, President Bush recently presented 15 researchers and inventors and one corporation with the United States govemment's highest scientific honors, the National Medal of Science and the National Medal of Technology. The number of 1992 award recipients was significantly less this year than in previous years. The 1991 crop of both science and tecbnology medal winners, for example, totaled 33; the medals numbered 31 in 1990 and 22 in 1989

The United States government's four-year ban on federal financing for human fetal tissue transplantation research directly affects only those scientists who would transplant fetal tissue from induced abortions into human patients. But both the ban and the controversy and confusion surrounding it also affect the working lives of other U.S. scientists with an interest in tissue repair and transplantation, researchers say. Thousands of investigators worldwide-a large proportion of whom are from

This summer, three years after the prodemocracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and the subsequent Chinese government crackdown on participants—including many scientists and students—at least two important scientific meetings, one in entomology and one in physics, have been scheduled in Beijing. Because of China's record of human rights abuses, the original siting of the meetings in China has been hotly debated within each scientific community, with some concerned United States

CHALLENGING THE BASIC TENETS When the Heidelberg Appeal, delivered to the leaders of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, assails an "irrational ideology" that questions technology and idealizes a so-called natural state, it is attacking, among others, those who embrace these notions, namely those who have come to be known as "neo-Luddites." The label "Luddite" originates from an early 19th-century English labor movement, inspired by Ned Ludd, who, upon seeing the industrial revolution repl

THE VANDERBILT FREE ELECTRON LASER CENTER Vanderbilt University's Free Electron Laser Center was dedicated on April 16, 1992, with a commemorative lecture delivered by noted physicist Edward Teller, an outspoken proponent of the Strategic Defense Initiative. The FEL facility is a 13,000-square-foot building, which includes a subsurface vault with seven-foot-thick concrete walls for housing the radiation-producing laser. The laser light is sent upstairs to the research laboratories through a ser

Hands Across The Sky Bush Whacking A Hard Task Site Visits Running On Sun Hands Across The Sky Here's a sure sign that the Cold War is over: Astronomers in the United States—a community that in the 1960s was determined to make more scientific discoveries than the Russians—have collected about $45,000 to help preserve astronomy research in the former Soviet Union. "Even when there was a Cold War, we respected the work of our [Russian] colleagues, and the respect has gone both ways,"

Professors hotly debated it, students protested it, and volumes of legal documents were drafted concerning it. But after nearly 2 1/2 years of turmoil, controversial race research at the University of Delaware will be allowed to continue. On April 29, the university's administration quietly reached a settlement of a labor grievance with two educational studies professors, allowing them to accept previously blocked funds for conducting research into the relationship between race and intelligen

Some researchers question the aura of secrecy that surrounds the presidential panel's closed-door sessions on science policy Scientists around the United States appear to be at loggerheads over the question, brought to the fore by a recent lawsuit, of whether the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST) should be conducting a greater portion of its work in meetings that are open to the press and public. On one hand, some, including PCAST members, say that discussing

Under new leadership, the huge science organization hopes to overcome inertia and lay claim to status as the `voice' of science During his 19-year tenure at the helm of Brooklyn, N.Y.'s Polytechnic University, engineer George Buglia-rello took an ailing institution and made it a contender in the scientific community. Last week, when Bugliarello assumed a one-year term as president of Sigma Xi, the 101,600-member scientific honor society, he said he hopes to accomplish much the same goal in a f

If Karen Worth and her colleagues on a National Research Council project have their way, it won't be long before the traditional three R's of childhood classrooms--reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic--are expanded to include an "S," for science. Worth, an education instructor at Wheelock College in Boston, is playing a lead role in a recently launched NRC initiative focusing on precollege education, specifically on the status of science as a vital ingredient in K-12 curricula. The fledgling eff