EMBARGO: NOT FOR PUBLICATION BEFORE 1900 HOURS GMT WEDNESDAY, 4 FEBRUARY 1998
ORDER #1: JUST THE TICKET
Passengers using a new bus service will no longer have to guess when the
next bus will arrive. They can check how the vehicles are running on the
internet before they leave home. Researchers at BT Laboratories are
tracking buses by satellite, and relaying their position to within 100
meters straight onto a Web site. Page 16
ORDER #2: ALARMING GIZMO
People who habitually sleep through their train stations could soon be woken
up in good time to get off thanks to a newly invented alarm. The device is
preprogrammed with the name of the station where the owner wants to get off.
Page 11
ORDER #3: LONG-HAUL BIRDS DUMP SURPLUS BAGGAGE
Some birds that migrate over huge distances destroy part of their gut,
kidneys and liver to save weight, say researchers from the Netherlands and
the US, who studied the bar-tailed godwit. The wading birds binge before
they migrate and reduce the size of their internal organs by up to 25 per
cent to compensate. page 24
ORDER #4: COOL FUTURES
Car radiators could be made the size of a matchbox if they used a highly
efficient heat exchanger developed at Bristol University. The exchanger,
with an array of tiny steel tubes, could have wide application including
being used to build air-breathing engines for hypersonic aircraft. Page 21
ORDER #5: A NECESSARY EVIL
DDT was the highly toxic chemical banned in many countries in the West after
the discovery that it caused environmental damage. But public officials in
tropical countries such as Belize and Brazil, where DDT is acting as a
public health tool, killing mosquitoes and preventing malaria, are doing
everything they can to avert the ban. Pages 18-19
ORDER #6: CHINESE FOR COMPUTERS
Programmers at IBM have cracked how to make computers understand Chinese.
Modern Standard Chinese is a far more difficult language for computers than
English because syllables can have many different tones. The computer
program works out the probability of words appearing, given a collection of
vowels and tones it has heard before. Page 7
ORDER #7: LET THERE BE LIGHT
After the big bang came the age of darkness. Then, sometime in the next
billion years, the stars began to shine. How did it happen? Physicists are
now tracing the origins of the very first light. Pages 26-30
ORDER #8: SUPERCONDUCTORS IN A TWIST
Materials that banish electrical resistance have been a flop - all because
of the spiralling currents that rage inside them. Now the race is on to
tame these miniature whirlwinds. Pages 32-35
ORDER #9: DAMAGE CONTROL
Precision chemical instruments that snip out sections of DNA have astounding
potential. Switching off cancer genes is just a start. Pages 36-39
ORDER #10: BLOW-UP
NASA scientists hope to revive an orbiting camera capable of mapping the
entire world in extraordinary detail. Pages 40-43
PLEASE REMEMBER TO MENTION NEW SCIENTIST AS THE SOURCE OF THESE ITEMS.
-ENDS-
Issue cover date: 7 February, 1998
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