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Foundation to fund research on cancer and cognitive neuroscience The James S. McDonnell Foundation in St. Louis is moving millions to support research in two new areas: cancer research and cognitive neuroscience. For thefirst time, the foundation is inviting proposals, due July 15, to fund research exploring both basic cancer biology and ways the knowledge gained from that research might be transferred to clinics. The foundation has budgeted up to $10 million over the next five years for the

Within five years, the National Science Foundation hopes to receive a "substantial" number of proposals electronically, according to Alvin Thaler, NSF’s point man for computerizing document transfer. By late fall, Thaler hopes to see a test proposal arrive electronically, complete with tables, equations, diagrams, and photographs. In the meantime about 40,000 proposals a year arrive at NSF, each one (with its copies) about a foot thick. Line them up on a shelf and you have "seven miles

THE BUSINESS OF SCIENCE: Winning And Losing In The High-Tech Age Simon Ramo Hill and Wang; New York; 289 pages; $19.95 Scientists like Simon Ramo are rare think of a utility infielder who batts .300, knocks in 100 RBI’s, and wins a Golden Glove award to boot Trained as a physicist at Cal Tech Ramo proved adept at technological innovation, with 25 patents by the time he was 30. He made major contributions to the development of microwave radar during World War II and helped develop the el

THE CONQUEST OF THE MICROCHIP Hans Queisser Harvard University Press; Cambridge; 185 pages; $24.95 Thoughtful U.S. scientists might wonder why Europe lags so far behind in microelectronics. Hans Queisser, director of the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, West Germany, offers a precise explanation: "The significance of silicon was underestimated, the economic miracle of post-World War II reconstruction was based on conventional industry, and public and government prior

Before I had a PC, I wouldn’t have thought of using a paper and pencil outline before writing an article or committee report. Now it’s rare that I don’t use my PC’s outliner. Not only do I compose full outlines before sitting down to write papers, but I prepare most of my course and professional lectures either partially or entirely in an outliner. What makes an outlining program (at least one of the good ones) so much more powerful than paper and pencil is the ease o

Two years after the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, the surrounding lakes and streams are finally returning to their original radiation levels. It took that long for Nature to work the nasty poison out of her system. Should a similar disaster occur today, a new material could do in two weeks what it took Nature two years to accomplish in Chernobyl, predicts Sridhar Komarneni, professor of clay mineralogy at Penn- sylvania State University’s Materials research Lab and Department of Agron

The tunable dye laser, once a highly specialized instrument used only by laser physicists, is proving irresistible to a wider range of physicists, chemists, and engineers, as well as to biologists, physicians, psychologists, and even art historians. Recent advances in dye laser research and three noteworthy new products are pushing time-able dye lasers into more laboratories than ever before. A colliding pulse mode-locked dye laser kit developed by Clark Instrumentation Inc. produces 100-fem

The device most people think of when they imagine a laser is actually a laser oscillator. A laser is actually a light amplifier. Dye laser oscillators are light sources that can be tuned to any color in the visible and near-visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum (3900A-9000A). Unlike other types of lasers, the dye laser amplifies light over a large range of frequencies. In this sense, the dye laser islike apublic address system, which amplifies sound over a large range of frequencies

They were never in the same place at the same time, yet three renowned scientists, working in tandem, came up with a new dinosaur Gorgosaurs were close relatives to the well-known Tyrannosaurus rex, huge beasts, up to 45 feet long and weighing as much as five tons. This skull was small, supposedly the remains of a baby gorgosaur. But it just didn’t look like a gorgosaur to Bakker. He told as much to the museum’s curator, Michael Williams, but he couldn’t prove his hunch. A

Scientists at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory have picked up a strong—and unwelcome—signal from a source close to home. NSF has slashed the observatory’s research equipment budget in half, cut staff by 10 percent, and sharply reduced funding for postdocs. This is the fourth straight year of shrinking budgets for the program, which includes three observatories and 10 very long baseline array antennas being constructed around the country. Recruiters at Los Alamos Na

From Yale To Stanford, Universities Are Thoubled Shortfalls in overhead, depreciation, and other indirect costs can tear apart faculties and bring strong provosts to their knees. Indirect costs aren’t glamorous. They won’t solve the mystery of dinosaur extinction or find the charm in quarks. But whisper those two simple words in the ear of virtually any president or provost of a major research university, and you may see a strong person blanch. The reason: Indirect costs are risin

Retin-A, the acne drug that is prescribed for wrinkles, has also smoothed the future for the University of Pennsylvania’s dermatology department. The drug’s inventor and patent holder, longtime Penn dermatologist Albert Kligman, 71, has been donating his royalties to the department. The money, $4 million so far and climbing fast, frees the department from the hypocrisy” of grant-getting, says Kligman, and has been used to recruit faculty, buy equipment, and fund research. Un