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Scholarly and academic publishing is now in a state of unprecedented turmoil because of mergers and takeovers. Harper & Row is now linked with Collins (UK); D. Reidel in Europe has joined with Kluwer British publisher Longman has absorbed Addison-Wesley. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich fought off a raid by Robert Maxwell, but went into debt in the process and was forced to lay off staff. Such events are relatively new in the publishing world. Until World War II, science publishing was very much a

For the second time in three years, the Presidential Young investigator Awards program has been scaled back. Because of NSF’s tight budget only 148 scientists of the planned 200 were selected. In 1986 only half of the scheduled 200 were funded. The five-year-old federal effort is designed to keep new Ph.D.s from leaving academia for industry by providing them with up to $37,500 annually, for five years, as well as an annual $25,000 Stipend. The catch is that these are matching funds, and

The review process at NIH downgrades promising interdiscplinary work in cardiovascular disease because the review system is biased toward individual disciplines, says a former president of the American Physiological Society. Howard Morgan of the Geisinger Clinic in Danville, Pa. has charged that high-quality proposals from academic physiologists are, being ignored by individual study sections because section members lack a sufficiently broad clinical perspective to appreciate the value of

Foundation to fund research on cancer and cognitive neuroscience The James S. McDonnell Foundation in St. Louis is moving millions to support research in two new areas: cancer research and cognitive neuroscience. For thefirst time, the foundation is inviting proposals, due July 15, to fund research exploring both basic cancer biology and ways the knowledge gained from that research might be transferred to clinics. The foundation has budgeted up to $10 million over the next five years for the

Within five years, the National Science Foundation hopes to receive a "substantial" number of proposals electronically, according to Alvin Thaler, NSF’s point man for computerizing document transfer. By late fall, Thaler hopes to see a test proposal arrive electronically, complete with tables, equations, diagrams, and photographs. In the meantime about 40,000 proposals a year arrive at NSF, each one (with its copies) about a foot thick. Line them up on a shelf and you have "seven miles

THE BUSINESS OF SCIENCE: Winning And Losing In The High-Tech Age Simon Ramo Hill and Wang; New York; 289 pages; $19.95 Scientists like Simon Ramo are rare think of a utility infielder who batts .300, knocks in 100 RBI’s, and wins a Golden Glove award to boot Trained as a physicist at Cal Tech Ramo proved adept at technological innovation, with 25 patents by the time he was 30. He made major contributions to the development of microwave radar during World War II and helped develop the el

THE CONQUEST OF THE MICROCHIP Hans Queisser Harvard University Press; Cambridge; 185 pages; $24.95 Thoughtful U.S. scientists might wonder why Europe lags so far behind in microelectronics. Hans Queisser, director of the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, West Germany, offers a precise explanation: "The significance of silicon was underestimated, the economic miracle of post-World War II reconstruction was based on conventional industry, and public and government prior

Before I had a PC, I wouldn’t have thought of using a paper and pencil outline before writing an article or committee report. Now it’s rare that I don’t use my PC’s outliner. Not only do I compose full outlines before sitting down to write papers, but I prepare most of my course and professional lectures either partially or entirely in an outliner. What makes an outlining program (at least one of the good ones) so much more powerful than paper and pencil is the ease o

Two years after the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, the surrounding lakes and streams are finally returning to their original radiation levels. It took that long for Nature to work the nasty poison out of her system. Should a similar disaster occur today, a new material could do in two weeks what it took Nature two years to accomplish in Chernobyl, predicts Sridhar Komarneni, professor of clay mineralogy at Penn- sylvania State University’s Materials research Lab and Department of Agron

The tunable dye laser, once a highly specialized instrument used only by laser physicists, is proving irresistible to a wider range of physicists, chemists, and engineers, as well as to biologists, physicians, psychologists, and even art historians. Recent advances in dye laser research and three noteworthy new products are pushing time-able dye lasers into more laboratories than ever before. A colliding pulse mode-locked dye laser kit developed by Clark Instrumentation Inc. produces 100-fem

The device most people think of when they imagine a laser is actually a laser oscillator. A laser is actually a light amplifier. Dye laser oscillators are light sources that can be tuned to any color in the visible and near-visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum (3900A-9000A). Unlike other types of lasers, the dye laser amplifies light over a large range of frequencies. In this sense, the dye laser islike apublic address system, which amplifies sound over a large range of frequencies

They were never in the same place at the same time, yet three renowned scientists, working in tandem, came up with a new dinosaur Gorgosaurs were close relatives to the well-known Tyrannosaurus rex, huge beasts, up to 45 feet long and weighing as much as five tons. This skull was small, supposedly the remains of a baby gorgosaur. But it just didn’t look like a gorgosaur to Bakker. He told as much to the museum’s curator, Michael Williams, but he couldn’t prove his hunch. A