The Scientist - Home

The SSC Laboratory in Dallas, the Department of Energy's newest national laboratory, says that its 54-mile proton accelerator will cost about 25% more than what the department had estimated. The price of the facility was pegged at $4.4 billion by DOE when it announced Texas as the site of the mammoth supercollider project in December 1988; DOE officials later increased that figure to $5.9 billion to account for the cost of inflation over its eight-year construction cycle. The new estimate, whic

Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory work too hard. So officials have decided to cope with a 3% cut in the lab's 1990 budget by telling everybody to stay home as much as possible. This is how it works: Director John Nuckolls has asked the lab's 8,000 employees to use up all of the vacation time they earn this year, as well as one fourth of the time they have accrued during their tenure at the lab. The money to pay vacation time comes out of a different pot from the money for reg

Maryland Governor William Schaefer hopes to encourage more high-tech entrepreneurship in his state with a $15 million seed-capital fund he proposed to his state's General Assembly last month. The plan calls for a pool of money - mostly from public pension funds - that would be invested in venture capital firms; these firms would match the state investment and provide capital for high-tech startups. J. Randall Evans, secretary of the Maryland Department of Economic Development, says there could

Artificial intelligence continues to make inroads into the airline industry, helping carriers like Iberia deal with flight rescheduling problems and maintenance schedules. Now AI's combative little brother, neural networks, has made its first contribution to making the friendly skies more profitable. NationAir, a Montreal carrier, has installed a "yield management" system designed by BehavHeuristics Inc., to forecast passenger demand for flights at various fare levels. The system, which learns

A look at the top stories in physics this past year according to Physics News in 1989 reveals one conspicuous absence - cold fusion. Why was one of science's most fiercely debated issues of the year not included? Phillip Schewe, editor of the American Institute of Physics' annual review, says there simply was not enough confirming evidence. Last spring, when the cold fusion issue was contested by physicists attending the American Physical Society meeting in Baltimore, there was a pervasive feel

When Jing Jie Yu, an associate professor at the Peking Union Medical College in Beijing, China, attempted to organize scientists and doctors to educate the public about the harmful effects of smoking, she was met by a less-than-enthusiastic Chinese government. Today, three years later, she is a visiting scientist on the Smoking, Tobacco, and Cancer Program at the National Cancer Institute in Bethesda, Md., and, she says, smoking has become an even more serious health threat in her country, espe

The Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology is considering measures to boost its membership and promote biomedical research, as well as redefine its financial structure. FASEB president William L. Dewey, associate provost for research and graduate affairs at Virginia Commonwealth University, says that the Bethesda, Md.-based organization wants to become more attractive to both its current seven societies and potential new members by making FASEB membership less expensive and h

A new report says a White House committee has failed to properly oversee the nation's biotech policies. WASHINGTON--The Biotechnology Science Coordinating Committee, which was created to address the scientific problems arising from the burgeoning biotechnology industry, is being criticized for failing to do its job. The government body has been accused in one recent report of overstepping its charter by encroaching on the authority of other federal agencies and of hiding its work from the publ

Tom Dillehay's claim that the Chilean site is the oldest known New World excavation finally gains acceptance Thirteen years ago, archeologist Tom Dillehay was teaching at the Universidad Austral de Chile in Valdivia and pursuing his interest in early Andean cultures. Then a student asked the young researcher to identify several large bones found at Monte Verde, a wet and boggy site in south central Chile. Dillehay recognized the bones immediately as belonging to a mastodon. Dillehay had no wa

The engineer who opposed the doomed launching of the shuttle finds himself ostracized as he embarks on several new careers. PHOENIX--When the shuttle Challenger blew up, the explosion lit a fuse in Roger Boisjoly's conscience. A structural engineer for Morton Thiokol Inc., the firm that later bore blame for the disaster, Boisjoly had argued against the launch the night before and, like the rest of the nation, watched in horror when the shuttle blew up. "I left the room and went directly to my

Russian robotics experts labored to reduce human cost of cleanup. Would U.S. technology have made a difference?

President Bush made a surprise visit December 22 to NIH to talk with AIDS patients and to applaud NIH employees "for helping to improve the lives of millions of people and around the world." His audience - which included the heads and deputies of each of the 13 NIH institutes as well as 500 selected intramural scientists - undoubtedly was happy to receive a pat on the back from the First Hand. But they were less than pleased with the 2 1/2-hour wait that they endured within Masur auditorium to