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LONDON—The 13-nation European Space Agency is expected to endorse a series of projects later this month that could boost the agency’s annual budget from $1.7 billion to $3 billion by 1993. The new efforts include a more powerful version of its Ariane satellite launcher, a manned Hermes spacecraft and the Columbus orbitbig laboratory that would be part of the U.S. space station. Hermes, which zoom into orbit atop the improved Ariane rocket, would give Western Europe its first opport

CHICAGO—A campaign to increase federal support for research and industrial applications of new technology began last month with a series of conferences held throughout the country. The conferences were designed both to garner support and thinking on new R&D initiatives and to provide regional views on global competitiveness and the declining technological status of the United States. Sponsored by the businessoriented Conference Board and the Council on Research and Technology (CORETECH

OSLO—Last year’s slump in oil prices not only ended a heady period of growth for Norway’s economy, but it also plunged the nation into its worst fiscal crisis in decades. Despite these problems, the government’s firm belief in the value of technological development has led to a promise to increase R&D spending significantly over the next five years. Norway’s continued commitment to science is made possible in part by its having prepared during the recent boom ye

WASHINGTON—A large black bust of Thomas Edison greets visitors to the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) here. Established in 1923 at the famous inventor’s urging, the lab was for more than 20 years the federal govemment’s sole facility for fundamental research in the physical sciences. NRL remains the Pentagon’s flagship research facility, conducting work in such fields as space, new materials, microelectronics and artificial intelligence. Some 700 of its 1,600 scienti

LONDON—Britain is using “ferrets” to transfer technology from its national defense research laboratories into the civil sector. These two-legged ferrets, all of whom have good technical qualifications, are employed by a technology broker to spot promising ideas and obtain licenses for them. The broker is a private company called Defence Technology Enterprises based at Milton Keynes. Owned by eight British financial institutions, it so far has signed up more than 200 associa

WASHINGTON—Thanks to the new tax law, many U.S. graduate students this year will owe taxes on their fellowships and stipends for the first time. And some will see their financial aid shrink accordingly. “There’s a lot of dissatisfaction, dissension and anger” among affected students about the new tax regulations, said Patrick Melia, assistant dean of the graduate school at Georgetown University here. “It’s created a lot of unneeded frustration.” U

WASHINGTON—The fear of lawsuits is blocking efforts to purge the scientific literature of articles by psychologist Stephen Breuning that are based on fraudulent data. The National Institute of Mental Health concluded this spring that Breuning “knowingly, willfully and repeatedly engaged in misleading and deceptive practices in reporting results of research.” Although all journal editors who published Breuning’s questionable papers were sent copies of the NIMH report, on

LIVERMORE, CALIF.—The University of California will continue to run the nation’s two federal laboratories for designing nuclear weapons, with a new five-year contract that nearly doubles its management fee. Officials said that much of the extra money will be spent on commercializing research from the federal labs. The regents voted 17-3, with one abstention, to maintain the university’s ties to the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., and the Los Ala

If someone had told me last December that I would meet Andrel Sakharov six months later in Moscow, I—a notorious optimist—would have considered that person a fool. But in June, after unsuccessfully trying to call Sakharov shortly after my arrival in Moscow en route to a conference in Novosibirsk, I asked a friend to drive me to 48B Chkalov Street at around 9 p.m. I rang at the shabby door, which was opened by Yelena Bonner, Sakharov’s wife. She is used to late visitors, to

Q: The U.S. government is concerned about high technology links with the Eastern bloc. Does that concern you? SEIBOLD: I am a scientist, and this is a European science foundation. It doesn’t matter to me, if a man is a good geologist, whether he is a communist or a Jesuit. If he cooperates and brings good ideas and is a good scientist, fine. Q: But isn’t science becoming more closely linked with technology? Isn’t it becoming more difficult to draw a sharp line between what

When Eugene Seibold —German marine geologist, doyen of European science policy and president of the European Science Foundation (ESF)—f aces the problems of organizing international collaboration on the linguistically and culturally divided European continent, he says he is a realist. In Europe, where it’s unheard of for a French academic, for example, to be given a professorship in a German university, any real integration is unlikely “for another 200 years.” Seib

Working with laboratory animals carries several risks. Apart from the obvious physical hazards of bites and scratches, animal research often involves biological hazards that exist because animals can serve as natural reservoirs for infectious diseases (including zoonoses), hosts in studies of pathogenic microorganisms, and sources of allergens. These hazards can affect not only laboratory personnel, but also other laboratory animals, including valuable breeding stocks. Infectious diseases that