Sources:

New Crowd at the Solar System's Edge

A mammoth, icy body recently discovered beyond the orbit of Neptune may represent a new population of objects.

Sources:

Martin J. Duncan
Department of Physics
Queen's University
Kingston, ON K7L 3N6
Canada

Jane Luu
Astronomy Department
Harvard University
60 Garden Street
Cambridge, MA 02138

Unclogging arteries? Radiation helps

Giving balloon angioplasty a radiation chaser appears to increase the chance that vessels will stay unclogged.

Sources:

Howard I. Amols
Department of Radiation Oncology
Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center
622 W. 168th Street
New York, NY 10032

Stephen E. Epstein
National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute
10 Center Drive, Room 7B15
Building 10
MSC-1650
Bethesda, MD 20892-1650

Paul S. Teirstein
Division of Cardiovascular Diseases, SW-206
Scripps Clinic and Research Foundation
10666 N. Torrey Pines Road
La Jolla, CA 92037

Faulty protein repair spurs mouse seizures

Mice lacking an enzyme that repairs damaged proteins die from seizures within two months of birth.

Sources:

Steven Clarke
University of California, Los Angeles
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry
P.O. Box 951569
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1569

Social sense may heed uneven inheritance

A still-unidentified gene on the X chromosome apparently contributes to one's ability to gauge others' social reactions and to inhibit impulsive acts.

Sources:

Peter McGuffin
Division of Psychological Medicine
University of Wales College of Medicine
Cardiff CF4 4XN
United Kingdom

Jane Scourfield
Division of Psychological Medicine
University of Wales College of Medicine
Cardiff CF4 4XN
United Kingdom

David H. Skuse
Behavioural Sciences Unit
Institute of Child Health
30 Guilford Street
London WC1N 1EH
United Kingdom

Nevada's Basin and Range: Down on its luck

Fossil leaves topple a longstanding theory about how the western landscape formed.

Sources:

Brian Wernicke
Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences 170-25
California Institute of Technology
Pasadena, CA 91125

Jack A. Wolfe
Department of Geosciences
University of Arizona
Tucson, AZ 85721

Keys to an antibody's near-perfect fit

Immature antibodies change shape easily to bind to foreign substances, and they develop their characteristic lock-and-key property only as they age.

Sources:

Sandra Smith-Gill
Division of Basic Sciences
National Cancer Institute
Building 37, Room 2B10
Bethesda, MD 20892
E-mail: smithgil@helix.nih.gov

Raymond C. Stevens
Department of Chemistry
University of California
Berkeley, CA 94720
E-mail: stevens@adrenaline.berkeley.edu

Martin G. Weigert
Department of Molecular Biology
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544
E-mail: mweigert@molbiol.princeton.edu

Divide and conquer for quantum computers

Quantum computations, in theory, can be speeded up significantly by letting many quantum computers work together on data encoded as particles in an entangled quantum state.

Sources:

Lov K. Grover
3C-404A
Bell Labs
600 Mountain Avenue
Murray Hill, NJ 07974
E-mail: lkgrover@bell-labs.com

Clinton calls for ban on human cloning

President Clinton asks Congress to enact cloning legislation based on the findings of a national bioethics commission.

Sources:

Arthur Caplan
Center for Bioethics
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104

Alta Charo
Law School
University of Wisconsin
Madison, WI 53706

Ezekiel Emanuel
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute
44 Binney Street
Cambridge, MA 02115

Lee Silver
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ 08544

Research Notes:

Astronomy

Leonids: The coming storm

Earth is poised to plunge headlong into the most intense interplanetary dust storm it has encountered in 33 years.

Sources:

Peter Brown
Department of Physics
University of Western Ontario
London, ON N6A 3K7
Canada

Biology

HIV may spare cells -- for a short time

To allow itself time to reproduce, HIV may have developed a strategy that prevents infected cells from committing suicide quickly.

Sources:

David Kaplan
Institute of Pathology
Case Western Reserve University
Biomedical Research Building
2109 Adelbert Road
Cleveland, OH 44106-4943

Stopping cellular traffic in pregnancy

The presence of a protein called Fas ligand on cells in the uterus and placenta of pregant mice suggest that the body seeks to limit immune cells from traveling between the mother to the fetus.

Sources:

Joan S. Hunt
Department of Anatomy and Cellular Biology
University of Kansas Medical Center
3901 Rainbow Boulevard
Kansas City, KS 66160

A bacterium that munches on solvents

Scientists have isolated a bacterium that can convert chlorinated solvents to a harmless gas; the advance may lead to new ways of cleaning contaminated groundwater.

Sources:

Stephen H. Zinder
Section of Microbiology
Cornell University
Wing Hall
Ithaca, NY 14853

Computers

Quantum cheating

Researchers identify a loophole in certain cryptographic schemes that take advantage of quantum effects to achieve a high level of security.

Sources:

H. F. Chau
Department of Physics
University of Hong Kong
Pokfulam Road
Hong Kong

Hoi-Kwong Lo
BRIMS
Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
Filton Road, Stoke Gifford
Bristol BS12 6QZ
United Kingdom

Dominic Mayers
Princeton University
Department of Computer Science
35 Olden Street
Princeton, NJ 08544-2087

Earth Science

Florida air loaded with African dust

Dust from northern Africa could put Florida and other eastern states in violation of proposed EPA regulations.

Sources:

Joseph Prospero
Division of Marine and Atmospheric Chemistry
University of Miami
Miami, FL 33149

New Jersey's link to a global crisis

Ancient sediments drilled in New Jersey chronicle the events that killed off the dinosaurs and other life 65 million years ago.

Sources:

Richard K. Olsson
Department of Geological Sciences
Rutgers University
Piscataway, NJ 08855

Articles:

Galaxy Formation Theory Meets Its Match

From gas clumps to galactic clusters

Theories of galaxy formation that involve cold dark matter indicate that galaxies finished assembling relatively late in the universe, a prediction that appears borne out by recent observations.

Sources:

Simon D.M. White
Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics
Karl-Schwarzschild-Strasse 1
85740 Garching bei Munich
Germany

Harbinger of a Heart Attack

Does a protein in the blood foretell heart trouble?

Inflammation may play a role in the development of heart disease.

Sources:

Charles H. Hennekens
Preventive Medicine
Brigham and Women's Hospital
900 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, MA 02215-1204

Paul Ridker
Preventive Medicine
Brigham and Women's Hospital
900 Commonwealth Avenue
Boston, MA 02215-1204

Russell Ross
Department of Pathology
University of Washington School of Medicine
Seattle, WA 98195

Table of Contents - 6/14/97

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