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WASHINGTON - Japan, under pressure to open its labs to outsiders, may soon be inviting more than 300 additional foreign researchers, under programs approved last month by the nation's Finance Ministry. During a visit here last month, Prime Minister Noboru Takeashita offered $4.4 million to help finance long-term visits by U.S. scientists to Japan's government university and industrial labs. He suggested that the National Science Foundation pick the recipients. Charles T. Owens, a Japan special

Another valuable asset in community relations is the site itself. Encouraging curiosity and welcoming the public inside the factory fence brings two enormous benefits. First, visitors become familiar with what is going on in the factory. Meeting workers who are going about their jobs with confidence helps to allay unease about safety-chemical workers are ordinary people after all, with the normal human instincts for self- preservation. It is an important step for the public to realize that a c

The committee finds no evidence to suggest that learning occurs during verified sleep (confirmed by such [measurements] as electrical recordings of brain activity). However, waking perception and interpretation of verbal material could well be altered by presenting that material during the lighter stages of sleep. We conclude that the existence and degree of learning and recall of materials presented during sleep should be examined again as a basic research problem. Many studies have found t

Maier-Leibnitz is emeritus professor of physics at the Technical University Munich. His address is Pienzenauerstrasse 110, 8000 Munich 81, West Germany Based on an article in the Summer-Autumn 1986 issue of Minerva A Review of Science, Learning and Policy. See also "English Spoken Here," THE SCIENTIST,September 7, 1987, p. 9.

When the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science opens in Boston later this week, eight of its scores of sessions will deal with AIDS. That is far more attention than the meeting allocates to any other single topic. Even superconductivity, the glamour kid of science, gets only two. Despite all those days of discussion, judging by the condensed program available in advance of the meeting, the organizers have ignored a critical aspect of AIDS research: the safet

Scientists like to succeed. They like to get the results they hope for, to be recognized for what they have done. But they also know that the greatest success may come from something unexpected, including failure. For example, the failure of Michelson and Morley to detect ether drift was a magnificent failure, which upset classical physics and helped advance Einstein's revolutionary ideas. At the other extreme are the dismal failures that do nothing but consume time and energy and erode the sp

Copyright © 1988 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Reprinted by permission.

Editor's note: This is the first of three articles on utilities for personal computers that will appear over the next several issues. Part 2 will deal with DOS utilities and part 3 with desktop utilities. What are "free" programs and "shareware" programs? Free programs are exactly what they sound like: If you can get copies, they cost nothing. They are often called "public domain," which is a misnomer since most In fact are copyrighted. Shareware is often confused with free software. Its ce

THE NEW RESEARCH ENVIRONMENT Videotape 1-Animal Rights The Threat to Research. Videotape 2 The New Research Environment The Foundation for Biomedical Research. Washington. DC, 1987. VHS: $50 set. 3/4-inch U-Matic: $55 set. INVESTIGATOR'S HANDBOOK For Researchers Using Animal Models. The Foundation for Biomedical Research, Washington DC. 1987.86 pp. $10. CARE AND USE COMMITTEES January 1987 Issue of Laboratory Animal Science. F. Barbara Orlans. Richard C. Simmonds and W. Jean Dodds, eds. The

Dialectical Materialism in the 1980s Radiobiology's War of Words Exchanges, Acronyms And More PHILOSOPHY, AND HUMAN BEHAVIOR IN THE SOVIET UNION Loren R. Graham. Columbia University Press, New York, 1987. 565 pp. $45. BY LINDA L. LUBRANO In 1970 Loren R. Graham completed an outstanding work entitled Science and Philosophy in the Soviet Union. Nominated for the National Book Award, it was the first book to explore the close interrelationship between dialectical materialism and the i

A Niche for Reagan's AIDS Commission A New Yawning Theory International Cooperation: Possible But Not Practical R&D's New Role Who's the Bumblingest Of Them All? Who Will Be the Lucky One? Beyond the Three Rs The more important function for which the [Presidential Commission on the Human Immunodeficiency Virus] . . . commission might be uniquely situated is to remove bureaucratic impediments to research. Fundamental investigation in virology, pathology and drug therapy must be given its

Simple Curiosity: Letters from George Gaylord Simpson to His Family, 1921-1970. Leo F. La- porte, ed. University of California Press: February, 340 pp. $29.95. Collection of letters that range from Simpson's career as a paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, Harvard, the University of Arizona and the British Museum, through expeditions he took to the American West, South American Pampas, North Africa and Italy. Reproduction and Development Marine Invertebrates of the North