Science News

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Highlights of New Scientist for Oct 30, 1997.

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El Nino events or volcanic eruptions can boost or depress global temperatures within months, but their strongest impacts on the earth's biosphere may not occur until one to three years later, according to a paper published in the October 31st issue of Science.

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Stumps of cedar trees are revealing details of a huge earthquake along North America's west coast more than 100 years before the arrival of the first European occupants. University of Washington researchers are reporting in Nature that evidence in the dead wood confirms that a great earthquake struck the Pacific Northwest coast in 1700 and set off a tsunami, a train of massive ocean waves, that flooded coastal Japan.

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A little-known brain wave thought to be found in only small percentage of people is instead sitting inside most of our heads and could one day become a key for understanding connections between movement and vision.

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A decade ago, classes in the paranormal were seen as unscholarly by the psychological community. Now, with a generation of believers rasied on movies and shows like The X-Files that make the paranormal seem ordinary , universities and colleges like Texas Christian University are adding courses dealing with the paranormal.

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Despite dramatic losses in wild honeybees and in colonies maintained by hobbyist beekeepers, Cornell University apiculturists say the pollination needs of commercial agriculture in the United States are being met -- for now -- by commercial beekeepers, although their supplies are precarious.

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Los Alamos scientists are building three key instruments and providing other scientific input to NASA's Genesis spacecraft, which will be the first to return extraterrestrial material to Earth for study since the days of Apollo.

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ENVIRONMENTAL CHEMISTRY TIP SHEET Summaries of papers which will appear in the November issue of Environmental Science & Technology, a monthly peer-reviewed journal published by the American Chemical Society, the world's largest scientific society.

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Science tips include 1.) Noise reduction technology applied to fast robots 2.) Virtual reality creates museum pieces 3.) New magnetic refrigeration materials 4.) Thin is in for electronic circuits

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New tool used on six producing U.S. oil wells reveals stresses along sucker rod strings used to extract crude from approximately 80 percent of domestic wells. CR-ROM available free to members of petroleum industry.

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Geological-sciences professors have discovered a fact about the San Andreas fault that may help in our understanding of earthquake hazards in California and other areas. Seismic reflection and refraction surveys of the deep crust show that the San Andreas fault goes straight through the crust and cuts through the Moho, the boundary between the crust and mantle of the Earth, instead of turning in the crust to connect with two other parallel faults in the area.

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Environmental funding on northern ecosystems was awarded to the Natural Resources Research Institute University of Minnesota Duluth today. Seven separate grants totalling $3.9 million will fund research into the 21st century.

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A missile or spaceship, spinning like a football or Olympic diver as it reenters Earth's atmosphere, can be stabilized simply by moving weights within the vehicle. The technique, like balancing an out-of-round tire, may work for satellites too.

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Concern over the health of our oceans has grown, in the past two decades, from worry to alarm. Coastal waters are crucial links in the food chain of the seas, and numerous disasters, many of them man-made, have threatened these waters.

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The government of the Brazilian State of Amazonas has created a new reserve in the Amazon, thus establishing the world's largest contiguous block of protected rainforest, the Wildlife Conservation Society, headquartered at the Bronx Zoo, announced today.

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A roundup of NC State University Web or Internet-based research and outreach activities. For use by the media as briefs or as background for stories.

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A new study indicating that portions of bird brains enlarge in response to social factors adds to the mounting evidence that the brains of higher animals change over time. A University of Washington researcher reported that parts of the brains of male sparrows housed with females enlarged 15 to 20 percent larger than brains of other birds housed with males or in isolation

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A patent disclosure filed Oct. 27 by University of Delaware scientists describes a technique that uses soybean oil--rather than petroleum-derived resins--to produce inexpensive, lightweight and potentially biodegradable composites for tractors, supercars, bridges and military vehicles.

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The Comet Nucleus (CONTOUR) mission to study comets -- a joint project between The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) and Cornell University -- has been selected by NASA as one of two new Discovery Program flights.

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Young couples are more likely to end up in a "make-out" session if they see a scary movie than if they go to a Mozart concert. That's according to Dr. Galdino F. Pranzarone, a psychology professor at Roanoke College in Salem, VA.

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New climatological research by University of Michigan engineers suggests that peaks in the El Nino cycle correspond with surges in storm strength, water levels and destruction on the shores of the Great Lakes. Their findings show the region could get one of the most destructive storm seasons on record.

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Each year, U.S. homeowners pay $3 billion to power appliances that have been turned off. Such electricity "leaks" needn't remain the rule, however. New technologies and initiatives will soon be unveiled to highlight the problem and plug these burgeoning leaks.

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When the ice creaks, groans, and finally breaks up on Lake Superior next spring, a team of limnologists and oceanographers will launch a five-year study of a dramatic near-shore current in the lake. The current is called the Keweenaw Current because of its proximity to Michigan's Keweenaw Peninsula, and is considered the strongest current of its kind in the world.

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President Clinton today named 20 young National Science Foundation (NSF)-supported researchers, nine of whom are women, and eight of whom are engineers, to receive the second annual Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers. The presidential honor is the highest bestowed by the U.S. government on outstanding young scientists and engineers who are in the early stages of their independent research careers.

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Red tide, a costly and sometimes life-threatening problem for the shellfish industry and consumers, will come under the scrutiny of faculty and graduate students in the University of Maine School of Marine Sciences in a 5-year research program scheduled to start in 1998.

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Michael Latham, M.D., professor of international nutritional sciences at Cornell University writes new text on international nutrition, "Human Nutrition in the Developing World" (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 1997)

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An innovative process from Bell Labs is making it possible for Lucent Technologies to improve the recovery and recycling of an important natural resurce -- germanium -- from the waste products of optical-fiber manufacturing and to save millions of dollars at the same time.

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RTI has released Version 7.5 of its SUDAANÆ software. SUDAAN is the statistical software package that addresses correlated data issues in statistical analysis, issues that can lead to inaccurate analysis if not properly handled.

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Researchers at the University of Missouri-Rolla are taking a watergun, rather than shotgun, approach to rid the world of land mines. As part of a five-year, $5 million Department of Defense project, researchers are using high-pressure waterjets to develop a device that detects, clears and neutralizes land mines. The same technology has been used to construct an amphitheater beneath the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.

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The National Science Foundation, with cooperation from the Department of Education's National Institute for Disability and Rehabilitation Research, has made a three-year, $952,856 award to the World Wide Web Consortium's Web Accessibility Initiative to ensure information on the Web is more widely accessible to people with disabilities.

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Researchers from Cornell, USC, Harvard and the University of Washington plan to deploy bottom-pressure recorders (BPR's) and seismic instrument arrays for real-time monitoring of tsunami development and study sea-floor deformation that occurs during earthquakes that turn into tsunamis.

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Men may have more dependent personalities than women have. So says Robert F. Bornstein, professor of psychology at Gettysburg College. His study, "Sex Differences in Objective and Projective Dependency Tests: A Meta-Analytic Review," suggests that men may have stronger underlying dependency needs than women.

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Highlights of New Scientist for Oct 23, 1997.

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The University of California, San Diego, San Diego State University, and the University of San Diego have joined together to establish a collaborative, community-wide effort to provide innovative after-school activities for K-12 kids

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Cornell University will direct a $154 millon mission to conduct close-proximity comet fly-bys scheduled for launch early in the next century.

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University of Massachusetts biochemistry professor Anne Simon watches the hit TV show "The X-Files" with particular interest. Simon is a science consultant to the show's creator and executive producer, Chris Carter.

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Despite 27 low-temperature records falling throughout the Northeast in September, the average temperatures for the month were not far from normal, making this the 30th coolest September in the last 103 years of records, according to the Northeast Regional Climate Center at Cornell University.

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When Martha Stevens earned a degree in civil engineering in 1897, she became the first woman to graduate from Purdue University with an engineering degree. Today the picture has changed dramatically, due in part to Purdue's pioneering efforts to attract and retain female engineering students ã efforts that are now used as a model for other universities.

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National Center for Atmospheric Research scientists are turning commercial aircraft into in-flight "sensing platforms" to measure and report turbulence. United Airlines will deploy the software on more than 200 aircraft over the next six months. The data will go into turbulence forecasts to help pilots steer clear of bumpy air.

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The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded grants for two long-term studies of urban ecology, representing the first attempts ever made to study the long-term ecology of urban environments.

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A Johns Hopkins paleobiologist has uncovered clues that the horses (and camels and rhinos) that roamed North America millions of years ago went extinct because of climate change that radically changed their food supply. This new understanding of the extinctions is relevant to today's discussions of global warming.

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A dozen widely diverse research and instructional projects--spanning the arts, humanities and social sciences to engineering, natural sciences and environmentl studies -- will benefit from a new $2.4 million gift of computing equipment and other resources from Intel Corp. to the University of California, San Diego.

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Information technology plays an increasingly important role in our lives through its impact on work, commerce, scientific and engineering research, education and social interaction. Technology developed for the "typical" user, however, may inadvertantly create barriers for people with disabilities. The World Wide Web currently presents many such barriers.

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Sandy Madison hopes to increase the percentage of young women she sees in her introductory computer class at University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point. She is designing a summer program for high school teachers and girls with the help of a National Science Foundation (NSF)grant. The 1999 change from Pascal to C++ programming language for high school advanced placement (AP) computer science tests means that most AP teachers nationwide will need training in C++ and associated teaching techniques. The American shad can detect high-frequency sounds, an adaptation that may allow the fish to escape its principal predator, dolphins.

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LSU astronomers studying gamma-ray bursts have developed a sensor that can be used for such diverse things as detecting lead in paint or tumors in mammograms.

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A new fabric being developed by LSU researchers promises to be as soft and absorbent as cotten but as wrinkle-resistant as polyester.

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Predicting weather patterns caused by El Nino is more an art than a science, but there are a number of things we do know.

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I congratulate the 1997 Nobel Laureates in science. This honor is fitting tribute to their remarkable achievements and, in the case of four of them, to the foresight of the American public which supported their work.

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Parents wanting to help their children adjust to life's stresses may want to turn down the noise in their home, says a Purdue University professor of psychological sciences.

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University of Wisconsin-Madison scientists are a step closer to solving a climatological riddle of the early Stone Age when, in what is now North African desert, hippos and crocodiles abounded, Neolithic fishermen thrived on the shores of numerous shallow lakes, and grasslands stretched to the horizon.