The Scientist - Home

WASHINGTON -- Federal agencies are opening their computer lines to provide scientists with easier and quicker access to information about grants. But even though the Bush administration generally wants its research agencies to coordinate their efforts, each agency has taken a different approach. The result is a smorgasbord of services. At least three agencies - the National Science Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Energy - are setting up grants-by-electronic

Shut Reactor Scatters Radioactivity Officials at Brookhaven National Laboratory found themselves locking the barn after the horse had escaped when debris from routine maintenance on the lab's High Flux Beam Reactor scattered radioactive flecks in the lab and in some employees' homes last month. Bits of stainless steel containing radioactive cobalt-60 were found on maintenance workers as they left the building through a recently installed portal monitor system. Because that system was not yet fo

NIST now offers crystallographers a way to let their computers do the work with a database of crystal structures WASHINGTON - Ask a biologist about crystallization - the process of precipitating crystals out of solution - and you're apt to hear it described as a black art requiring patience and a special touch. But a databank that became available last month is expected to make the process more efficient, less time-consuming, and perhaps one day even less magical. The National Institute of St

WASHINGTON--The lessons from the past tell a chilling tale about the warming of the future, according to paleontologists and anthropologists at the Smithsonian Institution. And now they too have joined in the debate about global change. Concerned that their institution, the National Museum of Natural History, has been overlooked by the nation's global change policymakers, they have exchanged lab coats for suit jackets and lab benches for podiums to let Washington know they want a larger role in

Death Rays Into Plowshares The Strategic Defense Initiative may never shoot down an intercontinental ballistic missile, but the laser technology it developed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., is about to be put to work performing eye surgery. The San Francisco-based Phoenix Laser Systems Inc., founded by physicists Alfred Sklar, Allen Frank, and other members of Livermore's Theoretical Physics Group in 1987, has developed a low-energy neodymium YAG laser to per

A new law allows Pentagon to become venture capitalist to support domestic firms deemed vital to national security SANTA CLARA, CALIF. -- When Jerry E. Crowley threw a lunch last fall for potential investors, he was looking for a few risk-taking venture capitalists to help out his company, Gazelle Microcircuits Inc., a small startup electronics firm here in Silicon Valley. But instead of someone from the private sector, Crowley managed to tap a totally unexpected source of funds: the Departme

NEW YORK -- Gordon and Breach Science Publishers, pressing its battle against comparative price surveys, has won a temporary injunction against the American Mathematical Society blocking distribution in West Germany of the November 1989 Notices of the AMS, which carried one such survey. William Strong, attorney for AMS, says he is now consulting with the society's German counsel on how to respond to the injunction. Similar comparative price surveys have prompted the publisher to sue the Ameri

A brain drain, red tape, and pinched budgets could turn the $8 billion network of defense labs into a scientific backwater At the U.S. Army's Aviation Systems Command in St. Louis, helicopter designer Roger Smith was faced with an important career move. The Army was transferring its helicopter-design activities to San Francisco, a much more expensive place to live. But Smith's salary was set by federal law and couldn't be raised to reflect the higher cost of living on the West Coast. Looking

As six-year term ends, Bloch wins praise for raising NSF's profile, but questions remain on how to set priorities WASHINGTON -- You won't see this advertisement in the classified section of any newspaper or magazine. But it describes the type of person that the scientific community hopes will become the next director of the National Science Foundation. The six-year term of the current office holder, Erich Bloch, expires this coming August, and - although there has been no official announcemen

Despite gaps in their knowledge of how the mollusk produces the adhesive, scientists hope to re-create it GAITHERSBURG, MD. -- "Nature didn't make mussel glue for man's instant gratification," says Herbert Waite, the marine biochemist who first isolated adhesive protein from the foot of the common blue mussel. But man certainly intends to make use of and profit from this novel material. Last month, Genex Corp. - a Maryland biotechnology company - introduced its first glue based on the mussel

Consortium's technology for synthetic protein engineering offers access to one of the next hot fields in biotechnology WASHINGTON -- Proteins! That's what his elders would tell Dustin Hoffman to pursue instead of plastics if the 1960s movie The Graduate were set in the 1990s. That's where the next revolution in man-made materials will be. And that's why the federal government, the University of Maryland, and local politicians have invested $8 million to set up a protein engineering laboratory,

Inside Out At NIH In their quest for the authority to pay higher salaries to attract top scientific talent, NIH officials are quick to claim that, since James Wyngaarden came from Duke University to become NIH director in 1982, they have been unable to fill any top administrative positions with outsiders. That streak came to an end in January with the appointment of James Snow, chairman of the department of otorhinolaryngology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, as the first d