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Some researchers question the aura of secrecy that surrounds the presidential panel's closed-door sessions on science policy Scientists around the United States appear to be at loggerheads over the question, brought to the fore by a recent lawsuit, of whether the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST) should be conducting a greater portion of its work in meetings that are open to the press and public. On one hand, some, including PCAST members, say that discussing

Under new leadership, the huge science organization hopes to overcome inertia and lay claim to status as the `voice' of science During his 19-year tenure at the helm of Brooklyn, N.Y.'s Polytechnic University, engineer George Buglia-rello took an ailing institution and made it a contender in the scientific community. Last week, when Bugliarello assumed a one-year term as president of Sigma Xi, the 101,600-member scientific honor society, he said he hopes to accomplish much the same goal in a f

If Karen Worth and her colleagues on a National Research Council project have their way, it won't be long before the traditional three R's of childhood classrooms--reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic--are expanded to include an "S," for science. Worth, an education instructor at Wheelock College in Boston, is playing a lead role in a recently launched NRC initiative focusing on precollege education, specifically on the status of science as a vital ingredient in K-12 curricula. The fledgling eff

NIH-Approved Munchies Picnic Alert Cleopatra's Secret? His Nominations Big Dipper Bio-Serv, a Frenchtown, N.J., manufacturer of food for experimental animals, is serving up a new product for laboratory primates: Golden Squares, a banana-flavored treat that the company recommends feeding to the animals once a week. Sales manager Hilton J. Sigfried says Golden Squares was developed as "a treat that's nutritionally complete" in response to NIH and USDA regulations that handlers "manipulat

It sits nestled in the National Aeronautics and Space Administration budget, drawing a scant one-tenth of 1 percent of the $15 billion total, yet the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) is singled out on an almost annual basis for congressional flagellation. And this year is no exception--even as NASA gears up for the October inception of a 10-year effort to tune in radio signals from advanced alien civilizations. The problem for SETI, congressional staffers say, is the "giggle fa

The Cold War is over, but government-imposed secrecy in United States science has not been relaxed, say many scientists and policy analysts. They add that more harm than good is being done by continuing the classification system at peak levels, asserting that the process of science, like that of democracy, thrives on the free exchange of information. And, while some of them disagree as to whether secrecy is on the increase or decrease in science, most say that the legal authority for a class

Advances in molecular biology foster greater interdependency among physicians, researchers The province of the scientist traditionally has been one of theory and experiment, exploration and discovery--contrasting sharply with the practical concerns of the physician. But times have changed. Today, physicians find themselves in need of knowledge in such esoteric matters as the polymerase chain reaction and restriction fragment-length polymorphism maps. Meanwhile, scientists are having to acqua

Although investors are more cautious than they were in the go-go 1980s, sources of early-round backing flourish anew After a four-year slump, venture capital funds that provide early-round financial support, including seed money, to start-up biotechnology companies and other high-tech enterprises are reportedly starting to flourish again. "On the order of 100 venture capital funds are currently raising money," says Robert Mast, vice president of Venture Economics, Newark, N.J., a unit of Sec

But it's still unclear which new approaches in human therapeutics will pay off big; cancer and neuroscience are among the contenders Despite the enormous amount of money invested in research and development of biotechnology-derived human therapeutics in the past two decades or so, biotech industry participants and observers say the future is still unclear. Only 21 biotech drugs have been released so far, and many of those are bioengineered versions of substances that have been known and used

Cursing The Lightness Grand Prize: New Equipment The Emperor's New Fish Fast Fax Hold The Ground Beef The International Dark-Sky Association wants to dim urban sky glow and light pollution of all kinds to restore the spectacular view of the night sky our ancestors once enjoyed. "The night sky is part of our environment, too, but everyone forgets that," says astronomer David L. Crawford, executive director of the nonprofit association, which held its fourth annual meeting last month i

The world's foremost supplier of genetically engineered mice, the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, is scurrying to hire as many as 20 geneticists over the next three to four years. 

Now that the National Science Foundation's Strategic Systemic Initiative (SSI) is in its second year, with the second round of grants awarded on May 1, science educators have had a chance to assess the program's progress. And some of them are not pleased. Some critics contend that the initiative--an effort to foster widespread, comprehensive change in the way mathematics and science are taught in United States elementary and secondary public schools--is being hampered. The problem, they say,