Researchers, discouraged by mapping's drudgery, doubt that a 5-year plan to finish high-resolution image is now feasible. WASHINGTON--After three years of escalating expectations, rising financial support, and congressional accolades, the Human Genome Initiative has encountered its first major hurdle. A key element of the project has fallen several years behind schedule, in part because peer review panels at the National Institutes of Health decided that some incoming grant proposals on the to

Synchrotron radiation, once best known to high-energy physicists an an energy-sapping nuisance, is now emerging as an important new research area in its own right. First discovered in the early days of atom smashers, the radiation occurs when charged particles, such as electrons and protons; are rapidly accelerated. The more the particles are forced to speed up or change direction, the more energy they re-release as spontaneous radiation. That energy is, in effect, wasted in high-energy phy

Recent discoveries of manufacturing processes that can create microscopic machinery—motors, sensors, and even tweezers no larger than the thickness of a human hair—have led to the rapid growth of a new National Science Foundation program in micro-mechanical research. Thanks largely to spin-off technology from the microscopically detailed etching of integrated circuits, breakthroughs in fabricating micron-sized machines have inspired a $7 million, multiyear National Science Foundat

WASHINGTON—Presidential candidates are often criticized for being vague. But Michael Dukakis has learned the hard way that it also doesn't pay to be specific. He's had to change his stand on the space station. Constantly pressed to cite areas where the Democratic standard bearer would trim the federal deficit, the Dukakis campaign used to mention the $30 billion space station as one potential target-this despite the fact that the candidate endorsed the concept of a space station. In the pa