The Scientist - Home

WASHINGTON—The U.S. fusion program must accept “an unprecedented degree of collaboration” with Western Europe, Japan and the Soviet Union if it is to achieve its current goals, according to government officials and the authors of a new report to Congress. Going it alone is too expensive and, besides, the money isn’t available. That was the clear message from the Department of Energy and the congressional Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) at a hearing last month b

LONDON—A team of 40 scientists from the United States, Western Europe, Japan and the Soviet Union plans to begin work next spring on a three-year, $180 million effort to design the next large thermonuclear fusion experiment. If the participants accept the design, construction of the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) could begin as early as 1993. Meeting last month in Vienna, officials from each of the participants also agreed on a European site for the project. It

WASHINGTON—On November 6 the American Chemical Society will celebrate National Chemistry Day. The posters proclaiming that "chemistry is everywhere” are part of the society's campaign to blunt the impact of such environmental disasters as Bhopal and Love Canal and, at the same time, gain crdit for some of the recent advances in medicine and biotechnology. Even as ACS is looking outward, however, it is also trying to harmonize its dual roles as a professional society and as an advi

WASHINGTON—Ohio State University physicist William Palmer says he felt like “eollapsing in the corner” after working long hours to help his state complete its proposal for the Superconducting Supercollider. But the september 2 filing deadline was just the beginning of the race for the multi-billion-dollar high-energy physics project. Officials from Ohio and 24 other states barely had time to catch their breath before plunging ahead into the next phase of the campaign, which

BEIJING—Impressed by China’s example, more than 100 scientists from Asia, Africa and Latin America have resolved to improve scientific and technical cooperation within and between their countries. But the September meeting here adjourned with no consensus on specific proposals. “The secret of success is self-reliance plus a collective spirit, which I define as cooperation and coordination,” Lu Jiaxi, executive president of the Chinese Academy of Science, told delegate

WASHINGTON—The National Institutes of Health is tightening monitoring and information programs for researchers and other staff who handle the AIDS virus. The new effort follows the announcement October 8 that a second worker has become infected, apparently in an accident at an contract facility. Some scien tists have also questioned whether current safety guidelines are adequate to deal with the dangers posed by working with the virus. The new procedures will require workers in the inst

Thomas R. Odhiambo, founder and director of ICIPE (the International Centre for Insect Physiology and Ecology) in Nairobi. has won international recognition for his efforts as a scientist, educator and administrator to mobilize support for science in Africa. As a child in Kenya he developed a curiosity about wasps that helped inspire his later studies at Makerere University in Uganda and at Cambridge University in England, where he received a Ph.D. in insect physiology in 1965. After stints as

Q:Must traditional folk practices in Africa be abandoned for the scientific culture to flourish? ODHIAMBO: I don’t think so. In fact, if you analyze folklore, particularly storytelling, there’s a tremendous amount of natural history in it. All one has to do is translate what is being stated into more modern language—simply make those stories current. I don’t see a conflict at all between the traditional knowledge base and the modem technology base. I think we can use th

All my life—or at least from the time I knew what astronomy was—I wanted to be an astronomer. But being an astronomer has not turned out to involve doing the kinds of things I imagined when I decided to go to graduate school 25 years ago. I went to Carleton College, one of the best of the small midwestern liberal arts schools. Influenced by the commitment of my professors to teaching, I planned to become a teacher at a school like Carleton. A physics professor, however, convinc

WASHINGTON—National Geographic magazine invited its readers to smell an armpit and, strangely enough, 1.5 million of them did. Readers put their noses to the grindstone as part of the magazine’s Smell Survey, a joint effort with the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia to sniff out data, on our olfactory sense. The data are now available to researchers. The September 1986 issue of the magazine included a scratch-and-sniff sheet (odorants encased in polymers) that conta

PARIS—American and British officials say that the selection of Spanish biochemist Federico Mayor Zaragoza as director-general of UNESCO is not enough to secure their return to the scientific and cultural agency they abandoned. But Mayor’s nomination October 18 by the 50-member executive board is being seen as an opportunity to correct some of the problems in spending and organization that have grown up during the 13-year reign of Senegal’s Amadou Mahear M’Bow. The 53-

THE INFINITE VOYAGE “Unseen Worlds,” Part 1 of a 12-part, 3-year television series to be shown on PBS and selected commercial stations. Produced by WQED/ Pittsburgh in association with the National Academy of Sciences with funding from Digital Equipment Corp. The latest big, respectable, complicated television series about science is The Infinite Voyage. Its subtitle (and stated organizing principle) is “The Great Adventure of Scientific Exploration and Discovery.” B