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To say that Robert Hunter has made enemies in his first year as director of the Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Research is an understatement. In fact, the real question may be just how many friends he still has left. Earlier this month, Congress held a rare three-day hearing on the troubled magnetic fusion program largely to build a case against Hunter and his plans to deemphasize tokamak fusion in favor of more work on a laser-based method known as inertial confinement fusion. A

A few years ago, physicist Abdus Salam, Nobel laureate and founder of the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, suggested that a sister institute to ICTP be founded in the Western Hemisphere. Leave it to physicists frorr Texas to lasso the idea and rope it in. “Other places a couple of years back expressed some interest,” explains David Ernst, a physicist at Texas A&M. “We took the idea and tried to do something.” In September, Ernst and his col

WASHINGTON—Two major foundations have put up $12 million to get a new discipline off the ground. They’ve drafted neurobiologists and cognitive scientists as pilot and copilot in the hope that, once airborne, cognitive neuroscience will improve our understanding of the biological basis of complete behavior. In December, the McDonnell-Pew Program in Cognitive Neuroscience will award $1.2 million grants to six institutions to help crystallize efforts in this hybrid approach to master

WASHINGTON—United States scientists are putting the final touches on the first issue of an English-language version of a Soviet magazine for gifted high school science and math students. A striking example of glasnost, the publishing venture is all the more remarkable because of the scientist who first proposed the idea of a joint arrangement between the two countries. The magazine will be called Quantum, a translation of its namesake, Kvant. It will debut in late November under the aus

PASADENA, CALIF—Two months after its extraordinarily successful encounter with the planet Neptune, Voyager 2 is battling its failing senses and ebbing vitality in an attempt to wrestle yet more science from the cold and barren expanses of interstellar space. The spacecraft has been flung by Neptune’s gravity out of the plane containing the planets of our solar system and is moving ever farther away from planetary science. For scientists and engineers at the National Aeronautics and

It’s two o’clock on an ordinary Monday afternoon, and Stephen Wolfram is just showing up for work. He greets an assitant grabs a batch of charts, and heads for his first meeting, a conference with a team of graphic designers. Together they’ll tackle a tough question regarding a piece of Wolfram-designed software. The question: In what variety of colors should the software be displayed on a computer screen? Wait a minute. This is Stephen Wolfram, the boy genius and enfant ter

WASHINGTON—In a document that is being roundly condemned by science administrators, lobbyists, and other observers, the National Institutes of Health has proposed vol- untary guidelines on financial conflicts of interest by university researchers. The criticism from experts in the field is expected to sharpen the explosive debate on how to preserve the integrity of federally funded research while at the same time translating that research into products that are designed to improve publi

WASHINGTON—Scientists from all over the world are traveling to the earth’s coldest places to do what might turn out to be the decade’s hottest research. Buried deep in Greenland’s ice sheet may be answers to a problem—global warming—that threatens the entire planet. This problem has sparked much talk of international alliances among investigators. But in Greenland, United States scientists have split off from their European colleagues so that now there are tw

Back To El Salvador Archaeology during a civil war is dangerous, but as the bloody conflict in El Salvador drags on, a team has resumed work on a prehistonc site 20 miles north of the capital, San Salvador. The team led by Payson Sheets, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado, Boulder, spent the summer working on what he calls an “archaeological goldmine,” the best preserved domestic village in SQuth America. “I’ve never seen a site like that,” he says. &

WASHINGTON—"There are resources that are going begging.” That’s how Charles Owens, section head in the National Science Foundation’s division of international programs, describes NSF’s efforts to send more United States scientists to Japan. For the past two years NSF, armed with $4.8 million and the moral support of the Japanese government, has offered language, fellowship, and research op- portunities in that country. The goal is to remove the barriers that make

The new NIH regulations that determine how universities should respond to allegations of scientific misconduct (The Scientist, Sept. 4, 1989, page 1) have derailed proposed legislation in Congress. For several months Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) who has explored the issue in numerous hearings involving MIT biologist David Baltimore, has been on the verge of introducing legislation that would force institutions and federal agencies to be more responsive to the issue. But an aide on the House Ener

WASHINGTON—Despite applause from both sides, Soviet and U.S. scientists may be slow to take advantage of two new agreements for joint research. The agreements call on scientists to set up their own collaborations and to find their own funding. Many Soviet scientists are not used to doing this, officials from the National Science Foundation learned during a recent tour of Soviet institutes. “They seem to have some reservations about how this kind of system would work and how it