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DOD dollars have been stripped from California and Massachusetts in behalf of heartland science. WASHINGTON—Last fall, Caltech mechanical engineer Frank Marble was due to receive $500,000 from the Department of Defense to study the fuel dynamics of the hypersonic aerospace plane. It was to be the second installment in a three-year, $1.75 million award under the Defense Department’s new University Research Initiative—a program designed to support on campus. research with pote

Thanks to physicist Don Braben, the oil giant funds Nobeists and little-known scientists when no one will LONDON—Harvard chemist Dudley Herschbach was reading a copy of Physics Today one day in 1981 when he came across an article on quantum chromodynamics. It explained how physicists use dimensional contraction to calculate the energy levels of subatomic particles. Intrigued, the soon-to-be Nobel laureate thought this might make a good exercise for his chemistry students to apply to atom

The baffling battle over Unix: Why would IBM team up with its arch rivals? Is its software consortium bluffing AT&T? Unix. After years of learning incompatible sets of commands and rewriting programs for each new computer, scientists thought they saw relief on the way. Computer workstations of all stripes run Unix. Cray-2 supercomputers run Unix. Even Apple Computer has introduced a version of the AT&T Bell Labs-developed system for its Macintosh II. Hosanna? Not yet. In the middie of May, s

Are science and technology being shortchanged in the current presidential race? So far, the campaign has focused on past policies and mistakes, not future directions. The talk about tomorrow has been nothing more than stirring rhetoric about making the United States great again, bringing it back, and other equally vague promises. Missing is any specific debate about science and technology (see The Scientist, June 27, 1988, page 1). Both George Bush and Michael Dukakis are “for” t

At every level of decision making in the federal government, scientific and technological factors have become increasingly important. This is true in fields ranging from educational policy to basic and applied research strategy, from trade negotiations to arms control policy, and from defense to health related issues. Therefore, it is in the interest of the nation to have a cadre of scientists and engineers helping to make key decisions. Yet, we have a dearth of scientists and engineers in im

A certain amount of error in science is inevitable; in fact, the correction of errors and the retraction of incorrect or premature conclusions is expected as part of the normal process and progress of science. Errors come in many varieties. Scientists, like everyone can be careless or inattentive. Such errors are preventable. But there are other errors that scientists make that are almost unavoidable, as when a conclusion, based on accurate experiments and current knowledge, is later shown to

“Better late than never,” one might say about the U.S. federal government’s response to AIDS, first identified in 1981. Only in the past few years has the government moved aggressively to fund the battle against the epidemic. Today, al- though federal funding has greatly increased, many continue to believe that it is still below what it should be. In the spring of 1987, AIDS researcher and immunochemist Paul Naylor of George Washington University called for a tripling of the

The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is supposed to coordinate federal policy on science. But low-profile science adviser William Graham, even after 20 months on the job, occasionally still finds himself on the outside looking in. The latest snub is a new report from the Office of Technology Assessment on ways to improve U.S. efforts to commercialize high-temperature superconductivity [to get the report, call (202) 783-3238 and ask for GPO 052-003-01112-3; the price is $8].

Wanted: Young Talent for $500,000 Prize The National Science Foundation is looking for promising young researchers in any field of science, mathematics, or engineering to consider for the 1989 Alan T. Waterman Award. Honoring NSF’s first director, the award encourages “further high quality research,” with a prize of up to $500,000 per year for three years of research or advanced study. The award grant is made to the institution of the recipient’s choice and is administer

For almost 10 years, I’ve been looking for a truly portable computer to take into the field. But at 28 pounds, the first portables—the Osborne and the Kaypro—deserved the term “luggables;” it took a sumo wrestler or a defensive lineman to really feel comfortable car- rying them. The same was true for the first 32-pound Compaq “portable.” The problem was the CRT. It was heavy—even Osborne’s 9-inch version—and together with the associ

It’s hard enough for most scientists to organize their thoughts and present them logically on paper. But when a group gets together to create a document—a departmental grant application, for example, or a jointly authored research paper—the complications tend to increase geometrically. Typically, one member of a group drafts a document. Then the other participants circulate the work in progress, scribbling notes in the margins and throughout the text. By the time the annota

In the laboratory, chemicals are measured by the gram or kilogram rather than by the ton or kiloton as they are in industry. The cost involved with disposal of hazardous chemicals tends to be inversely proportional to the volume of waste, so the disposal cost per pound is usually much higher for laboratory waste than for industrial waste. As a result, laboratories should recognize not only the usual moral and legal reasons for minimizing their waste, but economic reasons as well. Five general