Notebook

NSF Gets Lots More For Education Isn't That Good Enough President Upgrades NSF Fellowship More Help For SSC Accelerations What No Bubble Gum? In hammering out this year's budget, science education has emerged as a favored child of federal legislators. The 1992 NSF budget, which was approved earlier this month, now contains a 44 percent increase over last year's allotment, to $465 million, for education and human resources, after legislators added $75 million to President Bush's request. Only five years ago the education budget at NSF stood at $99 million. By comparison, the $1.88 billion research account is scheduled to go up by 11 percent, some $85 million less than the president requested. Everyone knows that one day the world will run out of oil, but nobody knows what to do about it. The Bush administration last month took the first tiny step toward energy self-sufficiency by renaming the 14-year-old Solar Energy Research Institute in Golden, Colo., the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. As the newest member of the Energy Department's stable of national laboratories, the 500-person lab has an annual budget of $95 million, which is dwarfed by the $1 billion spent yearly at each of the nation's weapons labs and by the $300 million-$700 million spent at several multipurpose labs supported by DOE. But deputy energy secretary Henson Moore says the new name "symbolizes our commitment to renewable energy." For eight years the National Science Foundation has run a Presidential Young Investigators (PYI) program designed to make academia more attractive to up to 200 new Ph.D. scientists and engineers each year who might otherwise go to work for industry. Last month, however, the White House unveiled a program that slices the number of recipients to 30 and doubles the federal contribution. As previously reported (The Scientist, June 10, 1991, page 3), Presidential Faculty Fellows will receive $100,000 annually for five years. Under the new plan the fellows don't have to obtain matching funds from industry, a staple of the PYI program, but they must demonstrate "the potential for leadership" in both research and teaching. The president of a school can nominate up to two young science and engineering faculty members, with the final selection made by the White House after an NSF-sponsored peer review. Applications are available from NSF (1800 G St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20550), and the nomination deadline for 1992 awardees is December 1. For more information, call (202) 357-7536. Drawing on its $483 million budget for the new fiscal year, the Superconducting Supercollider Lab in Dallas has hired two top accelerator physicists to help it design the several smaller machines that will feed into the 54-mile-long accelerator. John Reese, an associate director at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center with 35 years of experience in the field, has signed on for one year, while Gerald Dugan, head of the accelerator division at Fermilab, has taken a permanent position. SSC associate director Don Edwards says their arrival means that "a whole bunch of things that haven't gotten done, by me, will now get done." Last spring the accelerator program suffered a blow when SSC associate director Helen Edwards, who won a National Medal of Technology award in 1989 for her work on Fermilab's Tevatron, chose to retire concurrent with a reorganization of top management at the SSC lab. Move over, Michael Jordan. Take a hike, Jose Canseco. The hottest-selling trading cards around are from . . . the Oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology. This small, private graduate school outside Portland hopes to pump up interest in its faculty by creating a series of 3 1/2" by 2 1/2" cardboard cards that will feature the names and pictures of all 125 of its scientists. Instead of batting averages and points-per-game statistics, the cards detail sources of grant money (IBM, Kodak, and EPA for environmental scientist Richard Johnson) and recent publications (Nature and Artificial Heart for pharmaceutics researcher David Grainger). Be the first on your block to get a complete set. Call Bob Applegate at (503) 690-1192.

Notebook

The Scientist Staff

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