Defining death Allowing doctors to absolutely define death (“Doctors debate death definition for transplants,” SN: 9/13/08, p. 5) as “irreversible brain damage” is a slippery slope. There is a lot of pressure from transplant coordinators for body parts. While there is no absolute point in brain damage, heart stoppage is an absolute point. Allowing a vague definition will certainly lead to earlier and earlier use of such a definition. Temptation—the need for organs to maintain transplant programs and the cost of caring for a dying child—will certainly increase the pressure to back...

PIONEER LACKED EXTRA PUSH —Pioneer, man’s first space probe, came within a fraction of the 35,250-foot-per-second velocity needed to put it into an orbit around the moon. It reached a maximum velocity of 34,400 feet per second. Even though the vehicle burned up in the earth’s atmosphere, its successful flight to a distance of 79,316 miles from the earth’s center showed the chances are good for hurling a rocket around the moon very soon.… Dr. T. Keith Glennan, administrator for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, stressed the international value and significance of Pion...

November 15 The Museum of Science in Boston will unveil a skeleton of Triceratops horridus as part of its Colossal Fossils: Triceratops Cliff exhibit. Visit www.mos.org December 7–12 The 4th IEEE International Conference on e-Science will be held in Indianapolis. Visit escience2008.iu.edu April 30, 2009 Deadline for Nikon’s Small World Photomicrography Competition. Visit www.nikonsmallworld.com

October 16–25 Imagine Science Film Festival to be held in New York City. Visit www.imaginesciencefilms.com October 28–30 ChemEng08 to be held in Birmingham, England. Visit www.chemeng08.com November 1 The Dibner Hall of the History of Science opens at The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, Calif. Visit www.huntington.org

Fishy Conversations — Spiny lobsters are like men, their voices become deeper as they grow older. This is one of the preliminary findings of Dr. James M. Moulton of Bowdoin College, Brunswick, Me., who spent this summer at the Bermuda Biological Station eavesdropping on the conversations of undersea life. In countless other marine biological stations and research laboratories throughout the world, other researchers like Dr. Moulton are studying the various aspects of the oceans. The aim is twofold: They hope to unravel some of the mysteries of what many scientists feel is the “last frontie...

Only in the north It is not clear in the fine article on volcanoes (“Disaster goes global,” SN: 8/30/08, p. 16) how dust from the eruption of Huaynaputina, well south of the equator, in 1600 could affect only the Northern Hemisphere. David Bronson, Biddeford Pool, Maine For one thing, there’s less real estate in the Southern Hemisphere to have been affected. Also, the apparent lack of agricultural effects probably stems from population distribution at the time this eruption popped off. Australia was inhabited only by Aborigines until 1787 or so, and Cape Town, South Africa, wasn’t...

PARKINSON’S DISEASE NO LONGER INCURABLE — Parkinsonism, or shaking palsy, is no longer a hopeless, progressive, incurable disease. A five-year follow-up study of 700 brain operations for Parkinsonism revealed that 80% of the properly selected cases found relief from the tremor, rigidity, deformity and incapacitation of parkinsonism after basal ganglia surgery. Furthermore, these symptoms can be relieved by operation without fear of any psychological or neurological damage to the patient, Drs. Irving S. Cooper and Gonzalo J. Bravo of the department of surgery, New York University-Bellevue M...

October 3 Grid Fest at CERN in Geneva marks LHC's computing grid going live. Visit lcg.web.cern.ch/LCG/lhcgridfest October 12–18 Earth Science Week 2008, sponsored by the American 
Geological Institute, celebrates “No Child Left Inside.” Visit www.earthsciweek.org October 20–21 Orionids meteor shower expected to peak. Visit 
www.imo.net/calendar/2008

A climate tipping point In Janet Raloff’s article “Forest invades tundra” (SN: 7/5/08, p. 26), there seems to be a paradox. Raloff says that the albedo from normal snow coverage of the tundra “helps maintain the region’s chilly temperatures,” implying that the coverage also preserves the mats of plant matter. A little later in the article, Ken Tape explains how the arrival of tiny shrubs traps snow, insulating and warming the soil beneath and stimulating the growth of bacteria. At what point does snow’s effect change from a chilling blanket that preserves the tundra ecology to...

RNA INFLUENCES CELL DIFFERENTIATION — Ribonucleic acid has been pinpointed as having an essential role in cell differentiation, the process by which the early embryo’s look-alike cells become nerve, bone, skin and other organs. Working with extremely small quantities of cellular material, 20 to 50 cells, taken from embryonic newt and salamander tissue, Dr. M. C. Niu of the Rockefeller 
Institute for Medical Research, New York, found that the presence of ribonucleic acid is critical for the formation of specialized tissues. He used cells removed from two-to-five-day-old fertilized egg...

September 7–9 The first INCF Congress of Neuroinformatics. To be held in Stockholm. Visit www.neuroinformatics2008.org Sept. 21–Nov. 2 The walk-through Spider Pavilion opens at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. Visit the museum’s website at www.nhm.org Sept. 27–Oct. 12 Wired magazine’s NextFest in Chicago’s Millennium Park showcases global innovations. Visit www.wirednextfest.com

Disturbing numbers I found the “Sizing up science” Science Stat (SN: 8/2/08, p. 4) somewhat disconcerting with regard to the opinion about medicine. Basic medical research, in which ties to pharmaceutical companies and the like are not limited, may be “scientific” in the usual sense, but once you enter the arena of clinical research, the “scientific” is scarcely applicable. Objectivity and truth in reporting are not exactly encouraged in the current clinical medical research climate. It should be unsettling that a paper reporting an important negative result — one that ne...

September 14 Secrets of the Dinosaur Mummy premieres on the Discovery Channel. Visit http://www.dsc.discovery.com October 5–9 International Banana Conference in Mombasa, Kenya. Visit http://www.banana2008.com October 18 Climate Change: the threat to Life and Our Energy Future opens at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Visit http://www.amnh.org

NO “SAFE” RADIATION DOSE — There is no period of safety after exposure to harmful radiation, a geneticist reports. Radiation has been found to affect the primitive germ cell from which the sperm develops. Chromosome abnormalities may be transmitted to offspring in dangerous numbers for a long time after irradiation of the male. This also is important evidence that there is no such thing as a “minimum permissible dose of radiation,” says Dr. A.B. Griffen of the Roscoe B. Jackson Memorial Laboratory, Bar Harbor, Me. Until now many scientists had believed the effects of irradiation on t...

Disturbing numbers I found the “Sizing up science” Science Stat (SN: 8/2/08, p. 4) somewhat disconcerting with regard to the opinion about medicine. Basic medical research, in which ties to pharmaceutical companies and the like are not limited, may be “scientific” in the usual sense, but once you enter the arena of clinical research, the “scientific” is scarcely applicable. Objectivity and truth in reporting are not exactly encouraged in the current clinical medical research climate. It should be unsettling that a paper reporting an important negative result — one that ne...