Notebook

Cursing The Lightness Grand Prize: New Equipment The Emperor's New Fish Fast Fax Hold The Ground Beef The International Dark-Sky Association wants to dim urban sky glow and light pollution of all kinds to restore the spectacular view of the night sky our ancestors once enjoyed. "The night sky is part of our environment, too, but everyone forgets that," says astronomer David L. Crawford, executive director of the nonprofit association, which held its fourth annual meeting last month in Tucson, Ariz. Crawford is a professional astronomer, and thus his interest in dark skies may be self-explanatory, but he advances the group's cause in terms of economics and efficiency, as well. He claims that as much as $1 billion could be saved nationwide, while a better view of the stars is achieved through the use of energy-efficient, low-pressure sodium lighting fixtures for street lights (instead of mercury vapor fixtures); lighting that aims downward instead of upward (as on billboards); elimination of unnecessary lighting (such as much outside building illumination); and more appropriate use of dawn-to-dusk timers. The association's hometown, Tucson, has adopted the group's advice in large part. "In fact, the Milky Way can be seen from inside town," says Crawford with some pride. Here's a suggestion for cash-strapped researchers looking for ways to acquire instrumentation: Try to win it by writing a paper on liquid chromatography. The Perkin-Elmer Corp. of Norwalk, Conn., is sponsoring the third annual Perkin-Elmer International Liquid Chromatography Technical Paper Award, with the winner getting $20,000 worth of the company's equipment. The runner-up gets a coupon worth $5,000 toward the purchase of items from Perkin-Elmer's XPRESS catalog. There are no restrictions on technical content of papers entered, so long as the analytical technique used is liquid chromatography and the article refers to a liquid chromatography system from any manufacturer. New papers as well as those published within the last year are eligible. Entries may be submitted until Jan. 1, 1993; winners will be announced next May. For more information and official entry forms, contact Laura Lauman, Perkin-Elmer Corp., 761 Main Ave., Norwalk, Conn. 06859-0250. Phone: (203) 834-6523. Fax: (203) 834-6887. In honor of Emperor Akihito of Japan, who is an ichtylologist, fish researchers at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., have named a odd-looking, newly discovered species of goby fish Platygobiopsis akihito. The emperor--following in the footsteps of his father, the late Emperor Hirohito, who was a marine biologist--has published many papers on the small, tropical, bottom-dwelling gobies. A museum researcher, marine biologist Victor Springer, says Akihito has done some extremely fine work on gobies, so he thought it would be a "nice gesture" to name the new fish after him. "It is a very unusual fish," explains Springer. "The fish has a more depressed head and body than any other goby.... People tell me all the time it looks like somebody stepped on it." Russian translator Rusty Storbeck promises that subscribers to his Santa Fe, N.Mex.-based Fax Headline Service will receive news on the former Soviet Union's space industry "with a lag time of no more than three weeks." This beats his main competitor, the U.S. government's irregularly published booklet by the Federal Broadcast Information Service, by some two months, Storbeck says. "To my way of thinking," he says, "their materials are out of date." The government's slower service is more comprehensive, Storbeck acknowledges. His items--literally translated headlines with short synopses--are culled from a select group of Russian-language periodicals. The basic fax service costs $125 per year. For $100 per 1,000 Russian words, Storbeck will provide a full translation of any article. For information, phone: (505) 438-0283; or fax: (505) 438-9372. Much of what food processors and distributors toss out--like potato peels and stale popcorn--could be used as high-quality animal feed supplements, says Harold Harpster, an associate professor of animal science at Penn State University. Harpster has studied the nutritional content of more than 50 products, including chocolate cream-filled candy eggs and pizza. If logistical problems can be solved, cows could soon be bolstering their alfalfa and corn diets with near-human-quality foods, he says. With waste disposal costs rising, the food industry is interested. "It comes back to economics," says Harpster. "Many of these plants are under the gun to find new ways to dispose of their wastes." (The Scientist, Vol:6, #13, June 22, 1992) (Copyright, The Scientist, Inc.)

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