Friday, 4 April 97 Washington, DC
1.
CASH CEILING LIMITS PROJECT ON CONTRIBUTIONS OF WOMEN.
The
idea was to document the contributions of 20th Century women to physics as
part of the 1999 Centennial of the American Physical Society. There turned
out to be far more contributions than even the originators of the project
realized. So far 167 scientific biographies have been collected and 29 are
ready for viewing on the project's Website (http://www.physics.ucla.edu/~cwp). To pay
for the project, the volunteers who are putting it together have managed to
raise about $37K from a variety of sources. But to finish the job, they say
the project will need another $200K.
2. DOE: ANOTHER "DISTINGUISHED PANEL" IS NAMED TO LOOK AT DOE.
First it was
the Galvin Task Force on the future of the DOE labs, which declared the labs
to be "oversized" and micro managed, but declined to make any recommendation
about closure (WN 3 Feb 95). Even before the
Galvin panel reached that point of non-decision, Secretary of Energy O'Leary
had named the Yergin Task Force on Strategic Energy R&D to set priorities.
Instead, the Yergin panel punted, concluding that energy R&D had already been
cut too much. Last week, the formation of yet another panel to review energy
R&D was announced. But this panel, headed by John Holdren of Harvard, will be
under the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Its
report is due by October 1997.
3. EMF: DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY IS PULLING THE PLUG ON RESEARCH.
The EMF Research and Public Information Dissemination (RAPID) Program, created
by Congress in 1992, gave DOE responsibility for developing technologies to
characterize and mitigate EMF while the National Institute of Environmental
Health Sciences(NIEHS) was charged with health effects research. Now that the
National Academy of Sciences has announced that there are no EMF health
effects (WN 1 Nov 96), DOE has decided to shuck the
whole thing.
4. LOW-EARTH ORBIT: SPACE STATION MIR IS HAVING A BAD AIR DAY.
Even as
the House Space Subcommittee prepares for hearings on ISS, Mir has oxygen
problems, the aging shuttle Columbia has launch problems, and ISS construction
is postponed for 7 months.
5. DEEP SPACE: NASA WON'T ACCEPT ANY MORE CALLS FROM PIONEER
10.
Launched more than 25 years ago, the tiny 570-pound spacecraft is
more than six billion miles from Earth. The first spacecraft to venture
beyond the orbit of Mars, Pioneer 10 went on to chart the last traces of solar
wind to the very edge of interstellar space, while surviving on less energy
than it takes to operate a porch light. Suffering the infirmities of old age,
its mechanical limbs were arthritic; its senses were dimmed by the battering
of radiation and micro meteoroids; its nuclear furnace was growing cold. Its
younger sibling, Pioneer 11, died several years ago. No matter, Pioneer 10
was expendable. Requiescat in pace.
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