“Human Immune Defenses Are Transplanted in Mice” beckoned the headline on a front page of the New York Times last month. It announced a story arousing high expectations for a powerful new medical research tool Independently, two teams of researchers had shown that rodents having no immune systems of their own could be made to serve as true models of the human immune system, and this promised to open many doors in the study of human disease—offering insights into some cancers, f

Although a five-member international team of astronomers recently took credit for identifying what appears to be a previously unknown planet, the thrill of first noticing the heavenly body belonged to a single individual, Robert Stefanik. Working in solitude late one night at the Oak Ridge Observatory 30 miles outside of Cambridge, Mass., Stefanik, using a 55-year-old telescope, detected an almost imperceptible wobble in the motion of a star some 90 light-years from Earth. It was this lone scie

Volume one, number one, of the first scientific journal to be simultaneously published in hard copy and on computer diskette has been released by Tetrahedron Publications, a division of Pergamon Press. Called Tetrahedron Computer Methodology—or TCM— and touting itself as “the international electronic journal for rapid publication of original research in computer chemistry,” the new publication also is the first chemical journal to offer scientific research reports that

Professor Schmitt, who has been grumbling about his chemistry department’s antique, demon-ridden gas chromatograph mass spectrometer, discovers that the biology department installed a new one six months before. But when he wanders into their lab to have a look at it, the biology people aren’t all that happy to see him. If he uses it, they’ll have to let everyone use it. And who’s going to train them? Gene D’Amour, associate provost at Tulane University, says th

Knitting, weaving, and braiding are generally reserved for yarn thread1 and hair. Scientific researchers at Drexel University in Philadelphia, however, are experimenting with applying these techniques to fibers of metals, ceramics, and polymers—and they’re making everything from cars to finger joints. In the corner of a room in Drexel’s Fibrous Materials Research Laboratory—the only academic lab of its kind in the country—sits a 100-year-old machine originally de

Dorothy Pierce was a good pal to the four people who worked for her. They all called her “Dottie.” But as a supervisor, she also had to be tough enough to motivate her team of biotech researchers when the going got rough—and it did, it got very rough at Richmond, Calif. based Stauffer Chemical. The team’s moniker? The corn transformation group. Its task? To become the first scientists in the world to implant a foreign gene into maize. That was a year ago. Today, the fiv

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

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