Even as Congress once again wrestles with levels of funding for the superconducting supercollider (SSC), plans for another large North American high-energy physics project are moving quietly but steadily ahead. While SSC supporters scramble to entice reluctant foreign partners to help foot an estimated $6 billion bill for what has always been promoted as a United States-led effort, the other project-a proposed $450 million Canadian accelerator-has been designed from the start with international

WASHINGTON—in the three years since it was first proposed, the U.S. effort to map and sequence the human genome has joined the ranks of Big $cience with astonishing speed. Unlike the prospects for such controversial megaprojects as the superconducting supercollider and the space station, funding for the genome project appears to be going nowhere but up. The Bush administration has requested a total of $128 million more than double the current level of $53 million, and Congress appears

As science continues to push the envelope of experimentation, computer-based numerical simulation is gaining wide acceptance as a means of quantifying research subjects that are either too large or too small—or move too quickly or too slowly—to be measured by conventional instruments. Indeed, numerical simulation is now not only the domain of mathematicians and theorists, but also of researchers in most life- and physical-science disciplines. The virtues of numerical simuladon ar

When it comes to computers, space science is far from space-age science. A new government report reveals that NASA’s ambitious program to explore the universe is being seriously hampered by on-board computers that are barely a match for the technology used in children’s video games. The big problem, according to a report from the congressional General Accounting Office (GAO), is the difficulty of protecting leading-edge technology from the hazards of cosmic radiation found in s

WASHINGTON—U.S. space scientists, frustrated by delays caused by the explosion of the shuttle Challenger, have increasingly pinned their hopes on joint experiments with a thriving Soviet space program. But serious technical problems in recent Soviet missions, combined with unprecedented domestic concern over the cost of the Soviet space program, now threaten to dim once-bright opportunities for scientific collaboration in many areas. Ironically, the recent Soviet setbacks also have s

BALTIMORE—It was quite a show while it lasted, they all agreed, but toward the end the magic had started to wear thin. “Cold fusion,” at least to many of the 1,400 scientists who streamed out of the American Physical Society’s May 1 marathon debunking session, ended as it had begun—in a theatrical performance before a packed house. The difference was that this time, organizers claimed, the smoke and mirrors behind Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann’s unpr

The John von Neumann Supercomputing Center at Princeton University may be paying a devastating price for its alliance with a floundering computer giant. Last month the four-year-old center was rocked by the announcement thai its sole supercomputer supplier, ETA Systems Inc., had been shut down abruptly by its parent company, Control Data Corp. (CDC). That decision, made after the six year-old supercomputer subsidiary lost more than $100 million last year, means the center will get no furthe

Although the term “designer drugs” has already become trendy, the actual work of modifying chemical compounds to attack certain proteins and enzymes associated with various diseases has only just gotten off the ground. Fueling the progress in research during the past five years have been significant advances in such areas as X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance technology. And leading the support for this field of scientific investigadon has been the National Insti

Despite-a rocky start on Wall Street, the biotechnology industry is here to stay. The growing recognition that it will soon be possible to modify existing biological proteins or design new ones to create a new class of man-made products ranging from medicines to disease-resistant plants has created a booming market. Over 300 startup companies are now banking on the technology to revolutionize the pharmaceutical and agricultural industries, according to a 1988 Congressional Office Of Technol

Two years ago officials at NCR Corp. scanned the high-technology horizon and saw the discovery of high-temperature superconductors as a once-rn-a-lifetime opportunity for the computer giant. But the Dayton, Ohio, company had a problem: it had never researched superconductivity, and it didn’t know the best way to enter this fast-moving field. To overcome its ignorance, NCR shelled out $100,000. to become a founding member of an industrial consortium on superconductivity being formed by the

Computer artists transform equations into dramatic simulations at the Ilinois Supercomputer Center. On a hot day in Illinois, a storm is brewing. Above cornfields and a dusty road, a cloud dramatically billows and grows. To the experienced eye of veteran meteorologist Robert Wilhelmson, the gathering tempest looks like a potential tornado. But don't run for the storm cellar. The cloud is only 12 inches high and the sky is just the deep blue background of a computer screen. The whole scene e

Every day, researchers at the University of Illinois' National Center for Supercomputer Applications remind themselves of one all-important rule: be famous, not popular. They simply can't collaborate with every researcher who wants to turn data into stunning images. So to keep the nation's scientists from descending on the midwestern computer wonderland, several NCSA projects are trying to take the supercomputer mountain to Mohammed. They aim to someday put the power of "visualization" on the d