At Cornell University there is "preliminary discussion on a national symposium" to be held at the upstate New York campus to discuss, among other things, the rising costs of subscriptions to commercially published academic journals, according to Ross Atkinson, Cornell's deputy university librarian. The backdrop for the potential symposium? A number of recent significant events in the world of academic publishing: The release in December 1998 of the Journal Price Study1 by a Cornell Universit

Steven Burrill Donations to scientists and scientific projects today often take on a personal flavor. Many relatively young and wealthy entrepreneurs direct their dollars to scientific causes that tap into personal concerns and strongly felt and articulated visions. "I ... [feel] passionately about ... science and technology and the need to build an economy and a society based around science and technology. I believe the education system by and large has not been keeping up in providing our yo

Eric Carmen/ARCADIS Geraghy & Miller Phytoremediation--the use of trees and plants to help clean up toxic waste sites--is not only a growing science; it's also a growth industry. One report estimates that the phytoremediation market in the United States will expand from $16.5-$29.5 million in 1998 to $55-$103 million by 2000 and to $214-$370 million by 2005.1 In addition to offering job opportunities for environment-related physical scientists, the industry also will need life scientists, s

EXPORT MECHANISM: The tRNA must mature inside the nucleus before export. tRNAs are aminoacylated, and only tRNAs charged with an amino acid are exported efficiently. Export occurs when the tRNA is carried through the nuclear pore by a complex of exportin-t and Ran-GTP. As the project to sequence the human genome moves relentlessly ahead, molecular biologists are hard at work posing the next important questions about protein synthesis. Soon scientists will know every single gene and every RNA,

The potential health effects of manganese particles released into ambient air from vehicles burning gasoline with the controversial octane-boosting additive MMT (manganese methylcyclopentadienyl) will be examined by a series of experiments to be conducted at the Chemical Industry Institute of Toxicology (CIIT) in Research Triangle Park, N.C. The testing is slated to begin next year and to run for at least four years. Photo courtesy of Ford Motor Co. WEAR AND TEAR: The two spark plugs show co

Research universities are stepping up their efforts to prepare future faculty Learning to teach is becoming part of the graduate school curriculum at a number of major research universities. Teaching's importance has often gotten a good deal of lip service at such institutions, but now graduate students can formally get instruction in teaching from mentors, attend seminars on pedagogy, and teach at small colleges that have partner relationships with research- oriented universities. Some of th

MORE STUDY NEEDED: Mark Messina, a nutrition consultant, says Lamartiniere's findings are an "exciting hypothesis," but he notes that epidemiological studies linking soy and breast cancer rates have mixed results. Soy is a hot topic these days, not only among farmers--who have planted a record 71.7 million acres of soybeans, according to the U. S. Department of Agriculture--but among scientists who are exploring and debating the health benefits of a food that for thousands of years has been a

Organisms cannot live without fear. "Fearfulness is one of the most basic physiological and behavioral responses we have. It probably supersedes everything because of its survival value," says Ned Kalin, Hedberg professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He also is chair of the department of psychiatry and director of the university's HealthEmotions Research Institute. But fear gone awry can debilitate animals and humans. Excessive fear can lead to psychopat

Blocking and promoting angiogenesis--the development of blood vessels--is a rapidly advancing strategy that offers opportunities to treat a spectrum of diseases. The strategy views blood vessel growth and inhibition as the linchpin in certain diseases. Stopping the growth of blood vessels from tumors, for instance, means there is no highway for metastasis, the spread of cancer from its primary site. On the other hand, increasing blood vessel growth can help ischemic, or blood-starved, hearts.

HIV STUDIES: Rockefeller's Melissa Pope is investigating dendritic cell-T cell fusions with an eye toward potential strategies for interrupting HIV replication. Dendritic cells-highly specialized immune-system cells that can trigger T cells to fight infections-are being intensively studied as potential cancer vaccines. Researchers also are investigating these cells to understand their role in initiating HIV infection and for possible use in a vaccine for HIV. Dendritic cells are found in almo

FROM LAB TO FIELD: Florida's Marjorie Hoy holds a dish containing several hundred Western predatory mites, which she transformed by injecting a plasmid containing a gene directly into females' ovaries. Creating transgenic insects is seen by some scientists as a new way to manage and possibly eradicate enduring problems such as malaria and agricultural damage from the Mediterranean fruit fly. Researchers appear to be making significant strides in refining the technique. Meanwhile, critics are r

Multiple sclerosis (MS) continues to baffle those who seek to understand it. The cause of the disease remains obscure, as does the mechanism of the drugs used to ameliorate its symptoms. Affecting 0.1 percent of the population, the neurodegenerative disease is marked by demyelination, or the destruction of the myelin sheath on neurons in the brain and spinal cord. Researchers have been scrutinizing the proteins and lipids composing myelin, studying genetics of patients, exploring links between