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February 1, 1997
Solar Cloud Hits Earth's MagnetosphereA billion-ton magnetic cloud hurled from the sun on Jan. 6 reached Earth 4 days later, dumping energy into and squeezing the planet's magnetosphere.
Sources:
Mauricio Peredo
International Solar Terrestrial Physics Program
NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center
Greenbelt, MD 20771
Finalists in the 56th Westinghouse Science Talent Search are announced.
Sources:
Yvonne V. Tilghman
Science Service
1719 N Street, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036
E-mail: youth@scisvc.org
Animal tests of a new oral drug show that it can cure influenza.
Sources:
Norbert Bischofberger
Gilead Sciences, Inc.
353 Lakeside Drive
Foster City, CA 94404
E-mail: norbert_bischofberger@gilead.com
Ancient Australian rocks reveal that continents appeared on Earth far sooner than previously thought.
Sources:
Samuel Bowring
Earth, Atmospheric, and Planetary Science
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA 02139
A. W. Hofmann
Max-Planck Institut fur Chemie
Postfach 3060
55020 Mainz
Germany
Paul Sylvester
Research School of Earth Sciences
Australian National University
Canberra ACT 0200
Australia
After a decade-long hunt, researchers have discovered a mutant gene that causes a rare, aggressive form of glaucoma and perhaps other versions of the disease.
Sources:
Wallace Alward
Department of Ophthamology
University of Iowa College of Medicine
Iowa City, IA 52242
Val C. Sheffield
Department of Pediatrics
University of Iowa College of Medicine
Iowa City, IA 52242
Atom laser demonstrated in chilled dripsThe detection of a matter-wave interference pattern demonstrates that the atoms of a Bose-Einstein condensate are in a coherent state and thus constitute an atom laser.
Sources:
Eric A. Cornell
JILA
University of Colorado
CB 440
Boulder, CO 80309
Wolfgang Ketterle
Room 26-243
77 Massachusetts Avenue
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, MA 02139-4307
E-mail: wolfgang@amo.mit.edu
FDA allows heart health claims for oatsLow-fat oat-rich foods receive the first federally sanctioned health claim for a manufactured food.
Sources:
Steven L. Ink
Quaker Oats Co.
617 W. Main Street
Barrington, IL 60010
David Jenkins
Department of Nutritional Sciences
Faculty of Medicine
University of Toronto
Toronto M5S 1A8
Canada
Joyce J. Saltsman
Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition (HFS-165)
Food and Drug Administration
200 C Street, S.W.
Washington, DC 20204
Phone: 202-205-5916
Jur Strobos
Suite 1000
1300 Connecticut Avenue
Washington, DC 20036
E-mail: strobosj@gtlaw.com
The immune cells that destroy insulin-secreting pancreatic islet cells, and therefore cause diabetes, do so by inducing the islet cells to commit suicide.
Sources:
Jonathan D. Katz
Washington University School of Medicine
Department of Pathology and Center for Immunology
660 South Euclid Avenue
Campus Box 8118
St Louis, MO 63110
Not all mice afflicted with a neurological disorder similar to mad cow's disease exhibit accumulations of a protein thought to transmit the fatal disease.
Sources:
Corinne I. Lasmezas
Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique, Service de Neurovirologie
DSV/DRM/SSA
B.P. 6, 60-68 avenue du General Leclerc
92265 Fontenay-aux-Roses Cedex
France
E-mail: corinne.lasmezas@cea.fr
Contrary to a popular evolutionary theory, organisms do not evolve larger bodies over geologic time.
Sources:
Stephen Jay Gould
Museum of Comparative Zoology
Harvard University
26 Oxford Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
David Jablonski
Department of Geophysical Sciences
University of Chicago
5734 South Ellis Avenue
Chicago, IL 60637
Researchers forecast an above-average number of Atlantic hurricanes in 1997.
Sources:
Robert W. Burpee
Tropical Prediction Center
National Hurricane Center
11691 S.W. 17th Street
Miami, FL 33165
William M. Gray
Department of Atmospheric Sciences
Colorado State University
Fort Collins, CO 80523
The Hubble Space Telescope has spied about 600 stars that belong to no galaxy, some 60 million light-years away in the Virgo cluster.
Sources:
Harry C. Ferguson
Space Telescope Science Institute
3700 San Martin Drive
Baltimore, MD 21218
Planetary nebulas -- generated by the winds blown out of dying stars -- show filaments, loops, and other features that may have been caused by gas jets from brown dwarfs and massive planets.
Sources:
Raghvendra Sahai
Jet Propulsion Laboratory
4800 Oak Grove Drive
Pasadena, CA 91109
Debate continues over whether gamma-ray bursts originate in the Milky Way or in a galaxy billions of years distant.
Sources:
Samuel Larson
Department of Physics and Astronomy
University of California
405 Hilgard Avenue
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1562
What caused the spectacular extinctions at the end of the Permian period?
Scientists are seeking to explain why vast numbers of organisms died out 250 million years ago.
Sources:
Richard K. Bambach
Department of Geological Sciences
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
Blacksburg, VA 24061
Bruce Bohor
U.S. Geological Survey
Box 25046
MS 972
Denver, CO 80225
Douglas Erwin
Department of Paleobiology
National Museum of Natural History
Washington, DC 20560
Andrew Knoll
Botanical Museum
Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 20138
Gregory J. Retallack
Department of Geological Sciences
University of Oregon
Eugene, OR 97403-1272
Paul Wignall
Department of Earth Scieces
University of Leeds
Leeds LS2 9JT
United Kingdom
Chinks in Digital ArmorExploiting faults to break smart-card cryptosystems
Tampering with a smart card can force it into making errors in the calculations used for encrypting data, potentially allowing the code to be broken.
Sources:
Ross Anderson
University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory
New Museums Site
Pembroke Street
Cambridge CB2 3QG
United Kingdom
E-mail: Ross.Anderson@cl.cam.ac.uk
Burton S. Kaliski Jr.
RSA Data Security, Inc.
10 Twin Dolphin Drive
Redwood City, CA 94065
E-mail: burt@rsa.com
Paul C. Kocher
P.O. Box 8243
Stanford, CA 94309
E-mail: pck@cryptography.com
Richard Lipton
Department of Computer Science
Princeton University
35 Olden Street
Princeton, NJ 08544-2087
Table of Contents - 2/1/97
