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Cavazos Comes Late And Can't Stay Long If the Bush administration ever comes up with a coordinated plan to improve precollege science and math education, 10 A.M. on February 28 will hold an honored place in history. That's the date and time that Education Secretary Lauro Cavazos and NSF Director Erich Bloch appeared together - for the first time - before a congressional committee and talked about how their two agencies could team up to make things better. Bringing the two men together may not s

University of Minnesota math chairman resigns in controversy after his school is awarded a $67 million computer center contract MINNEAPOLIS -- Six months after the successful end to a heated competition to win a $67 million supercomputer research grant from the Army, University of Minnesota computer scientist Ettore Infante is trying to track down a bumper sticker portraying him as a warmonger. "It shows me on the head of a missile," says the genial dean of the university's Institute of Techn

Livermore Decides Not To Blow Its Stack In a decision hailed by environmentalists, Lawrence Livermore National Lab announced it wants to cancel construction of an on-site incinerator whose stack would have emitted small amounts of radioactivity. But Director John Nuckolls' proposal to go ahead with the rest of what is known as a Decontamination and Waste Treatment Facility is likely to embroil the lab in another lengthy round of regulatory agency battles. The incinerator was part of a plan to r

With larger membership come questions of how the group can best serve the needs of its expanded constituency When approximately 40 undergraduate and graduate students meet this coming weekend on the campus of Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh to discuss military and environmental security, they will be advancing the goals of a movement that has sprouted across the nation in recent years. The event is a regional conference sponsored by Student Pugwash USA, a society whose name is still

William L. Dewey looks at this week's meeting of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology with an air of bemused satisfaction. "It's like going to a buffet lunch when you're really hungry and there's more there than you can eat," says Dewey, FASEB's president. "Too much good stuff." The organization's 74th annual meeting - taking place in Washington, D.C., from April 1 to 5 - is sponsored by four of the six FASEB corporate member societies (the American Physiological Socie

The chemical giant, looking for a better research climate, joins other German firms in the Western Hemisphere Eluding pressure from environmentalists and biotechnology regulators at home while looking for new markets to conquer abroad, the West German chemical giant BASF Corp. is establishing a foothold in the United States, with a $100 million research facility at the Massachusetts Biotechnology Park in Worcester. BASF's decision in 1988 to set up shop in the U.S. is the latest example of an

With Packard Foundation support, the 3-year-old MBARI is establishing its credibility in oceanographic research. MONTEREY, CALIF. -- A unique marine science institute is growing on the shore of Monterey Bay in central California, one that bonds scientists and engineers in a single unit through the use of the latest computer technology and unmanned submersible equipment. The three-year-old Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) is well-positioned to make a splash within the national

The new HHS unit resists pressure to reveal the names of the biomedical scientists it has found guilty of wrongdoing NEW ORLEANS -- The year-old Office of Scientific Integrity Review - responsible for resulting the cases of federally funded biomedical researchers accused of scientific misconduct - has meted out punishment to more than a dozen such researchers so far. But the head of that office said last month that he has no intention of making information pertaining to these cases available t

An initiative by Japanese firms and government agencies outpaces U.S. efforts, despite America's head start in the field WASHINGTON -- Try to imagine Motorola, Corning Glass Works, Bethlehem Steel, Merck, and Revlon sitting down at the table with Citibank, Chase Manhattan, Bank of Boston, and a few insurance companies and agreeing to invest more than $90 million in a new research project. Then throw in the federal government, with a matching contribution of $90 million. Such a scenario, impla

Wraparound Video The Small Business Innovations Research program is funding a project that could revolutionize the way people watch video images: the Alternate Reality Vision System (ARVIS), developed by an engineering firm in Conway, Wash. According to Bob Dyer, an electronics engineer at Concept Vision System, ARVIS is a stereoscopic image projection device that occupies the viewer's entire field of vision. Conceived by company president John Webster, a registered-nurse- turned-inventor who i

Beautiful Science We may not know art, but we know what we like - in this case a 100,000 French franc (about $16,000) prize offered by Mo=89t-Hennessy-Louis Vuitton, the French luxury products firm, for a "study, or innovative technical process, related to the application of materials on surfaces, to achieve aesthetic effects." One of last year's winners of the "Science Pour L'Art" competition was physicist Jerzy A. Dobrowolsky, of the National Research Council of Canada. Dobrowolsky's work has

Biotech And The President's Budget Despite President Bush's fiscal 1991 budget request of $3.6 billion for biotechnology research and development, a 6% increase over 1990, the Industrial Biotechnology Association is displeased by at least one aspect of the plan. The thorn in the side of the IBA is the budget's inclusion of a U.S. Food and Drug Administration user fee, which would be assessed to any company applying for a product review. The budget calls for these fees to provide the FDA with $