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In increasing numbers, European financiers are shrugging off their traditional conservatism and discovering the definition of venture capital that their U.S. cousins have always embraced taking a chance on an unproven idea or technology. To be sure, the spirit of risk taking varies from country to country—the U.K. is much more daring than West Germany, for example. But according to accounting firm Peat Marwick McLintock, last year—for the first time ever—there was more venture

Biotech Association To Aid Patent Office Frustrated with the Patent and Trademark Office’s multi-year delay in issuing biotechnology patents (see “Biotech Patent Bottleneck Harms Makers Of Better Mousetraps,” The Scientist, September 5, 1988, page 2), the Industrial Biotechnology Association has offered to help train patent examiners. ‘We decided not just to complain [about the backlog], but to do something about it,” IBA president Richard 0. Godown said October 2

Nobel laureate Philip Anderson was shocked when he picked up the New York Times last month. There on the front page was an article announcing a bold new theory in his field. The story said that Caltech chemist William Goddard had come up with a simple explanation for high- temperature superconductivity—probably the hottest mystery in materials science today. Not only that, the article reported, but calculations based on Goddard’s theory showed that the idea of room-temperature su

A scientist’s dream: a “thinking” computer smart enough to recognize objects by sight, understand human speech and respond in kind, even learn by example. And if that’s not enough, the computer’s pattern of thought would help unlock the mysteries of how the human brain works. That’s the promise of the hot new approach to computing that’s been dubbed neural networking— and scientists are paying attention. Neural network courses and doctoral progr

ANCHORAGE ALASKA—Fishermen off the coast of Alaska’s Bering Sea last year caught a record two million metric tons of cod, flounder, and other bottomfish, nearly 50% more than the harvest of a decade ago. During the same period, the yield of Alaska king crab plunged by 90%, to a scant 42 million pounds. Marine scientists think there might be a causal connection between the two trends, but they have no data to back up their hunch. Hundreds of miles to the east, in the state’s

Advance Notice On Neural Networks This month, the DOD’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is elected to announce a two-year “seed grant” program in neural network research. The program grows out of a report from MIT’s Lincoln Labs that DARPA commissioned a year ago, which suggests increased funding for neural network research over the next eight years. The long-term goals of this project will be to explore the advantages of neural nets over conventional computer

Below is a list of notable grants recently awarded in the sciences—large federal grants as well as awards of all sizes from prIvate foundations. The individual cited with each entry is the project’s principal investigator. BIOMEDICINE Research. $75,000 from Dow Corning Corp. to Clemson University for biomedical and bioengineering research and development Cell growth and protein synthesis in vascular cells. $243,543 from W.W. Smith Charitable Trust,’ Rosemont, Pa., to Connect

The Department of Energy-funded Solar Energy Research Institute is looking for new partners to stay alive. After eight years of diminishing DOE money—partially attributable to the Reagan administration’s lack of support for solar energy—the 11-year-old Golden, Cob., lab has enlisted NASA to underwrite part of its alternative energy research. It is also completing deals with EPA and the Department of Defense that could add 10% to SERI’s $58 million budget next year, accor

The name Erkki Ruoslahti appears so frequently below the titles of groundbreaking cell biology papers in top-quality journals, it should be a household word in cell laboratories by now. Three of his team’s papers have been listed among The Scientist’s ‘Hot Papers’ during the past three months; two other papers have made it into the Institute for Scientific Information’s Current Contents listing of the 100 most-cited life-sciences articles for 1986. Many Stars Wh

At Last, A Science Policy From Bush At the very end of his campaign for president, George Bush finally offered scientists a glimpse of how they would fare under his administration. And, in what came as a surprise to many scientists, it was a view that embraced many of the positions urged upon both candidates by the major scientific organizations. Speaking three weeks ago to a Columbus, Ohio, audience of broadcasters, Bush pledged to promote his science adviser to a Cabinet-level position (with

The Latest Word On Communication The U.K’s Economic and Social Research Council announced last month the creation of the Human Communication Research Centre at the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. It will be the first Interdisciplinary Research Centre that the council has located in Scotland, and will unite studies in psychology, linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence, says University of Edinburgh psychologist Keith Stenning. The goal will be to understand how p

The American Museum of Natural’ History's summer expedition to Madagascar yielded some "devastating" news about the health--that is, the lack of it—of the country’s unique flora and fauna, says museum biologist Melanie Stiassny. During the first comprehensive survey of ichthyofauna in the country, Stiassny and biologist Peter Reinthal discovered a new species of silverside fish and several primitive species of cichlid fish. But they also found that rain forest destruction is e