Notebook

NIH-Approved Munchies Picnic Alert Cleopatra's Secret? His Nominations Big Dipper Bio-Serv, a Frenchtown, N.J., manufacturer of food for experimental animals, is serving up a new product for laboratory primates: Golden Squares, a banana-flavored treat that the company recommends feeding to the animals once a week. Sales manager Hilton J. Sigfried says Golden Squares was developed as "a treat that's nutritionally complete" in response to NIH and USDA regulations that handlers "manipulate the animals' diet so they have some variety in their life; so they don't become cage- crazy. The old way was that they ate the same thing all the time, supplemented with candy, like marshmallows or M&Ms." The monkeys aren't the only ones munching on Golden Squares, Sigfried notes: "I don't know of a monkey handler who doesn't nibble on the food a little bit--they want to know what they're giving the critter. In fact, we have friends in the industry who took [Golden Squares] to a party and set it out." According to John Bay, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, the future of robotics will not be R2D2 or C-3PO, but small, simple robot "ants." Instead of having individual central computers like the Star Wars androids, these small robots will have tiny microprocessors with just enough software to allow each to communicate with the others and accomplish heavy lifting and maneuvering operations. Though the mechanical design of the robots is still in the early stages, Bay envisions these new robots as small, easily transportable, and with unlimited collective strength. "And because these units don't need to be very smart," he says, "they would cost much less than larger, more complex robots." Women from ancient times have used plant products as contraceptives and abortifacients, says John M. Riddle, a medical historian at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. In his book, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance, to be released this summer by Harvard University Press, Riddle says Egyptian women 4,000 years ago used plants such as giant fennel, juniper, rue, and pennyroyal to control reproduction. As medicine became progressively dominated by men from medieval times on, this knowledge was largely lost, he says. Today, Western medicine is not adequately exploring such uses of plants, according to Riddle, perhaps because little profit can be made on drugs grown locally and self-administered. Modern Chinese medical studies have verified the safety and effectiveness of traditional plant-based contraceptives used by women there, he says, and women in India are known to use plants similarly. Knowledge of contraceptive plants also persists in the mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee, he says. "One woman I heard about took about a tablespoon of Queen Anne's lace seed post- coitus for 10 years to prevent pregnancy. But then, on a trip with her husband, she forgot her Mason jar of seed." Riddle cautions that some plants, if misused, may be toxic. Nominations are now being accepted by New York Mayor David Dinkins for the Mayor's Awards for Science and Technology Excellence. The awards will be presented for technology; mathematics and physical and engineering sciences; and biological and medical sciences. Candidates must live or work in New York City. Nominations will be accepted until September 15. For more information, contact the New York Academy of Sciences at (212) 838-0230. Since 1986, the USDA's Agricultural Research Service has been coordinating a project to grow a better potato chip. The result is the Coastal Chip, a new heat-resistant potato for making chips that are heartier and won't have brown splotches. The potato was named the Coastal Chip because it was developed primarily for harvest in the northeastern United States. Scientists in Virginia, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maine have been involved in the chip research.

Notebook

The Scientist Staff

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