Instructional laser videodiscs promise to serve up physics with pizazz in high schools across the country Ephraim L. Rubin, physicist, businessman, and classical clarinetist, has seen the grim statistics on the level of scientific literacy among the current generation of high school students. "It's terrifying and mind-boggling how bad it is," he says, citing studies like the one done in 1988 by the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement in which 12th-graders f

When the space shuttle Columbia touched down in late 1983, payload specialist Byron K. Lichtenberg emerged from the Spacelab-1 mission both triumphant and troubled. The experiments—on everything from astronomy to protein crystal growth studies—had gone exceedingly well, and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration wanted him to fly again. There was, however, a slight problem: Lichtenberg, a biomedical engineer, was about to become unemployed. For the five years leading u

“[Here we are on] the Halloween preceding 1984,” Carl Sagan solemnly told a gathering of scientists and reporters in Washington, D.C., “and I deeply wish that what I am about to tell you were only a ghost story, something invented to frighten children for a day. But unfortunately, it is not just a story.” Thus began a spellbinding tale of doom, delivered in inimitable Sagan fashion. Should nuclear war erupt between the world’s two superpow ers, warned the Corn

LIVERMORE, CALIF.—It seemed like a great idea at the time: In the spring of 1987, chemist Bob Peny, armed with a quiet resolve and the patent to a pollution-reducing process he had discovered while a researcher at Sandia National Laboratory’s Combustion Research Facility (CRF) in Livermore, left a secure, challenging, and well-paying job to start his own company, Technor Inc. Launched with a Department of Energy Small Business and Innovation Research grant, the startup seemed de

Physicist Luis Walter Alvarez, a age 77, lost a long battle with can cer on September 1,1988—and the scientific community lost one of it most creative and feisty members Luie, as he was known by colleagues and castigators alike, won numerous awards, including the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1968 for his work in developing, and experimenting with, the hydrogen bubble chamber a device used to track the paths of, and thus identify, elementary particles. But long before that he bad been a k

Several years ago, paleontologist Dewey M. McLean stepped to the podium at a conference on the climatological effects of volcanoes. The silver-haired professor from the Virginia Polytechnic Institute looked out over the packed house like a pastor surveying his flock. He was about to deliver a sermon— well, a paper actually—that would take on one of the exalted among his priesthood—the redoubtable Nobel laureate Luis W. Alvarez. Specifically, McLean was about to challenge Alva

Caviling, carping, and quarreling, is this any way to advance science? New HAVEN, CONN. "For a science that deals with the apparently simple question of who is related to whom, phylogeny has been positively littered with bones of contention. The root problem, explains former Yale University taxonomist Charles Sibley, is that a creatures appearance may not always bean accurate guide to its place in the pantheon of beasts. So until recently, phylogenists were left to cavil over the appropriate