THE INFINITE VOYAGE “Unseen Worlds,” Part 1 of a 12-part, 3-year television series to be shown on PBS and selected commercial stations. Produced by WQED/ Pittsburgh in association with the National Academy of Sciences with funding from Digital Equipment Corp. The latest big, respectable, complicated television series about science is The Infinite Voyage. Its subtitle (and stated organizing principle) is “The Great Adventure of Scientific Exploration and Discovery.” B

HEDGESVILLE, W.VA.—Guidelines for coping with scientific fraud and misconduct may be drafted by a joint committee of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Bar Association. Draft guidelines could be prepared and discussed at the group’s next meeting in the spring of 1988, according to Albert H. Teich of the AAAS. Teich is project director of the subcommittee on scientific fraud and misconduct of the AAAS/ABA National Conference of Lawyers and Sc

June Brood 10 of the periodical cicada reappeared in the eastern United States. Brood 10 is the largest group of these remarkable insects, which are known (erroneously) in American folklore as 17-year locusts. For 17 years the nymphs linger beneath the surface of the soil. Then millions emerge, climb the nearest tree, shed their skins, sing love songs that would do credit to a heavy-metal rock group, mate, lay eggs, and die. A few weeks later the new nymphs drop to the ground from which their

Chemist and exobiologist Cyril Ponnamperuma was born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and took a degree in philosophy at the University of Madras. He went on to study chemistry at Birkbeck College in London under crystallographer J.D. Bernal, a pioneer in studies of the origin of life. After receiving a Ph.D. in 1962 from the University of California, Berkeley, Ponreamperuma joined NASA'S Exobiology Division and kiter became chief of its chemical evolution branch. Since 1971 he has directed the Lab ora

WASHINGTON—The federal government ought to be spending $500 million a year by 1990 on competitive grants for research in agricultural biotechnology, a National Research Council committee has told the Department of Agriculture. In a report issued late last month, the Committee on a National Strategy for Biotechnology in Agriculture urged a major restructuring of U.S. agricultural research. It argued that the country needs much more emphasis on basic research and improved techniques and appl

Through his activities as a science educator and popularizer, experimental physicist Sergei P Kapitza has become one of the best-known scientists in the Soviet Union. Millions of people watch his biweekly television show on scientific issues, for which he received the State Award in 1980. Kapitza was born in England, where his father, Peter L. Kapitza, was working on low-temperature physics and magnetism at Cam bridge. After graduating from the Moscow Aeronautical Institute in 1949, Sergei Kapi

The tale of the South African grandmother pregnant with her daughter's triplets surfaced in the middle of the Fifth World Congress on In Vitro Fertilization and Embryo Transfer. But it created hardly a ripple among the scientists and clinicians gathered last month in blossom-time Norfolk, Virginia. They included all the big names of IVF as well as many who nurse big-name dreams, and they were intent on taking stock of where they are and where they're going. So intent, in fact, that news from th

Nuclear physicist Alvin W Trivelpiece, the new executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, brings to the post experience in academia, industry and government. He received his master's degree and doctorate at the California Institute of Technology, then went on to teach at the University of California at Berkeley (1959-66) and the University of Maryland (1966-76). In 1973-75, on leave from his faculty post, Trivelpiece was assistant director for research in the d

WASHINGTON—Congress may take up legislation to govern ownership of human tissue and cell lines. The issue of who owns a cell line—the human source of the original tissues and cells or the scientists who derived the cell line from them—has caught the fancy of two influential legislators. Sen. Albert Gore (D-Tenn.), vice chairman of the Congressional Biomedical Ethics Board, said that present confusion over the issue "could impede important research." He thinks legislation may be

Eager to press on with the megaproject to sequence the human genome, molecular biologists are figuring out ways to pay for it. Some of these schemes surely qualify as the most creative financing since Ollie North decided to underwrite Central American wars that U.S. citizens don't want to fight by soaking the Iranians for weapons U.S. citizens don't want to sell them. The Washington Post reports, tongue in cheek, that the scientists have rejected car washes and bake sales in favor of several oth

CHICAGO—Universities should regulate, and possibly even ban, some relationships between students and those faculty with financial ties to industry, says a Harvard physician who has studied ties between academia and industry. His 1985 survey of almost 700 grad students and postdocs in biotechnology-related fields found that a majority believe the benefits of increased financial support of students and faculty by industry outweigh the risks. A little more than one-third were getting such sup

The appearance of Walter Stewart and Ned Feder's long-pending paper analyzing John Darsee's fraudulent scientific publications is extremely good news. It should be reassuring, both to scientists and to those who pay their bills. It shows that the system works. The venerable Nature, which published the paper in its January 15 issue, has once again served science well. The publication process was certainly protracted; various versions of the paper have been under consideration there and elsewhere