Letters

Recall personal history, too

In your Oct. 17 issue, I was dismayed to see the incorrect attribution of the recent Nobel Prize in Physics to Stormer, Tsui, and Laughlin of Columbia, Princeton, and Stanford Universities, respectively, and the prize in chemistry to Pople of Northwestern University. While these institutions are indeed the current affiliations of these eminent workers, in both cases the lauded work occurred elsewhere. The work of Stormer and others was performed at Bell Laboratories. Similarly, the vast majority of Pople’s work was performed whilst at Carnegie Mellon University, not at Northwestern. Giving only the current affiliations of these individuals is clearly both misleading to the reader and potentially an impediment to the continued funding of such far-reaching research at the respective institutions.

Marcus Weldon
Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies
Murray Hill, N.J.

Space constraints always force us to limit the information we can include in our stories. Your point is well taken. Generally, we include current affiliations to enable readers to contact the scientists for further information. —The editors

They couldn’t get there from here

I found your article "Robotic weather-vane-to-be crosses sea" (SN: 8/29/98, p. 132) quite interesting as well as a heartwarming validation of America’s ability to still produce marvels of engineering reliability.

The chronology of events, though, leaves me a little confused. Given that Laima’s 26-hour flight would have crossed about four time zones (but not the Greenwich Meridian), the total flight time from Newfoundland (local time) to Scotland (local time) could not have possibly been spread over more than 3 calendar days. Laima’s arrival on 21 Aug. speaks to a departure from Newfoundland no earlier than 18 Aug. If Laima was only the first of four nearly identical aircraft, launched between 17 Aug. and 20 Aug., to successfully make the Newfoundland-Scotland flight, what happened to the aircraft launched on the 17th? Did the earlier launch fly slower, or take a less direct route?

Philip G. Kaster
Belmont, Calif.

None of Laima’s sister aircraft finished the flight. One crashed immediately after takeoff. The other two vanished en route and were not recovered. —P. Weiss

The burrs came first

A National Park Service ranger is quoted as saying that burdock burrs are "nature’s Velcro" ("Botanical ‘Velcro’ entraps hummingbirds," SN: 10/17/98, p. 244). As I understand the invention of Velcro, the hooks on burrs were exactly what led its inventor to his final design. Burdock is not "nature’s Velcro." Just the opposite:

CORRECTION

In the article on the Leonid meteors (SN: 10/31/98, p. 280), the caption for a drawing of what a Leonid storm might have looked like to a Sioux tribe should have stated that the storm occurred in 1833, as noted in the body of the story.

 

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