Three Australians recently were arrested on charges of breaking into computers in the United States and other countries. The arrests heightened concerns about the security of the growing network of computers used by scientists. In November 1988, when a rogue program, or "worm," spread along America's network of research computers, 60,000 machines were connected. A year after the highly publicized incident, the number of interconnected scientific computers was 160,000 and heading upward. How f

If the satellite reaches its planned orbit aboard a Delta rocket, the so-called Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) is designed to probe for local variations in the background microwave radio hiss that seems to come from every corner of the sky. Although the observations of the three instruments on board—averaged over a year of readings—may turn Out to be bland, that blandness will be very challenging because of the problem of accounting for something so smooth in a universe that is

FLANAGAN’S VERSION: A Spectator’s Guide to Science on the Eve of the 21st Century Dennis Flanagan Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1988; 230 pages; $18.95 For 40 years and more, Dennis Flanagan has been struggling to popularize the scientific revolution that we are in. Now that is a long time. It’s about enough time, for example, for a northeastern maple to mature, be cut down with an amateur’s handsaw, sawn into lengths, split, stacked, dried, laid in the fireplace, and