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Imagine it as F. Lee Bailey meets Albert Einstein, with David Letterman hovering in the background. The Annals of Improbable Research (AIR) and the Journal of Irreproducible Results (JIR), two of a handful of publications that take an intentionally humorous view of science and scientists, are moving slowly toward a date in court. George H. Scherr, publisher of JIR, is suing Marc Abrahams, editor of AIR, and Improbable Research Inc., AIR's parent company, for what Scherr claims is unfair competi

RECORD DONORS: U.S. Healthcare founder Leonard Abramsom and his wife, Madlyn, a cancer survivor, donated $100 million to create a new cancer research center at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center. Photo: Courtesy Bruce Wemger INJECTION INNOVATION: A young patient shows some apprehension as a needle-free injector device is placed against her arm prior to firing. Remember the terror you felt as a child when you went to the doctor for a vaccination? These days, docto

GRIM OUTLOOK: Postdocs need to realize that the odds of getting tenure-track academic jobs are poor, says CSPT's Catherine Gaddy. The once-predictable world of scientific postdoctoral research appears to be entering a period of transformation. Increasingly left in an employment limbo by shrinking tenure-track faculty positions at universities, science postdocs around the United States are beginning to organize and clamor for change. But for many, a nonacademic career seems unavoidable. "The c

Computer consultants warn that the cost of adjusting programs will skyrocket if researchers wait until after their systems crash Jan. 1, 2000, is coming. While self-proclaimed prophets are out pounding pulpits to warn against impending cosmic doom, computer programmers, engineers, and information specialists are wringing their hands over a far more mundane issue-how computers will handle the switch from the year 1999 to the year 2000. Many fear that some instruments and applications won't hand

The Kyoto Accord to reduce "greenhouse" gas emissions faces a hazy future in the United States. A host of unresolved political and scientific issues swirls around the tentative plan to curb global warming-including the degree to which greenhouse gases actually affect the environment. Kyoto sets the stage for science, politics, and public opinion to interact on the largest possible scale, and, some would say, at the highest possible stakes. Science's pivotal role is to take on a formidable chall

Worse Than Expected Under New Management How They're Hooked On Target Royal Tribute To Science FDA Approves Obesity Drug Gene Lawsuit On January 1, Brookhaven Science Associates (BSA), a nonprofit partnership of the State University of New York, Stony Brook, and Columbus, Ohio-based Battelle Memorial Research Institute, assumed operation of the Department of Energy's (DOE's) Brookhaven National Laboratory in Upton, N.Y. The yearly management fee for the five-year, $2 billion contract will be $5

Meta-analysis, which uses systematic methods to search, combine, and evaluate research literature, has been praised for making the review article more scientific and objective. But studies showing that journals are much more likely to publish the results of positive over negative clinical trials have led some to question the validity and objectivity of meta-analyses. Many in the medical community are concerned that this publication bias may skew the results of meta-analyses, which increasingly

A virus unidentified until 1989 now threatens to outstrip HIV as a killer by threefold unless interventions emerge. Around the world, an epidemic is quietly building that has the potential to dwarf AIDS in the number of people affected. The culprit, hepatitis C virus (HCV), is not as consistently lethal as HIV but nevertheless can kill. Development of a broadly useful vaccine seems unlikely, and the only therapeutic agents currently approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are recomb

Telemedicine, or the use of telecommunications and information technology to deliver clinical health-care services, has become a fixture in some rural hospitals in the United States. Much of this presence is due to heavy government subsidies and grants, which leaves health officials unsure if telemedicine is cost-effective in these clinical settings. Other barriers-legal, financial, and technological-have limited its widespread use, and some critics charge that telemedicine is an unwise investm

The recipients of the 1997 Nobel Prizes in science, who will receive their awards on December 10, have traveled the vigorous intellectual journey of science. 

November was a rollercoaster month at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). First, the United States Supreme Court declined to hear NASA's appeal of a lower court ruling subjecting the academy and its committees to the Federal Advisory Committees Act (FACA) of 1972. Animal rights groups argued that under FACA there should have been more public representation on a committee set up to revise the NIH Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals (R. Finn, The Scientist, July 22, 1996, page 1)

For students at the University of California, Los Angeles's College of Letters and Science (CLS), learning has taken on a new dimension this quarter-a cyberdimension. Each one of the roughly 1,000 courses that the college offered during the quarter had its own home page on the World Wide Web. But the concept of Web-based courses, made mandatory at CLS as of September 25, has drawn plenty of controversy. It has also spurred the growth of a cottage industry-the preparation of course home pages-th