Cover; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Staff Editor; 1 Page(s)

Table of Contents; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Staff Editor; 2 Page(s)

From The Editors, including Masthead; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Rennie; 1 Page(s)

Alarmed by the public's continuing enthusiasm for the paranormal, the illogical and the unreasonable, many scientists and skeptics have gone on the defensive. They warn that this wave of irrationalism threatens to engulf society and, in the process, impede science by robbing it of support and brains suitably equipped for the rigors of future research. Mindful of these consequences, Gary Stix, Sasha Nemecek and Philip Yam of Scientific Americans editorial board therefore took a closer look at the ominous phenomenon that has come to be known as antiscience. Their report appears on page 96.

They quickly discovered that defining antiscience, let alone assessing its danger, is no easy task. Antiscience has become like "political correctness," an all-purpose slur that defines the position of the person using the phrase better than it does the thing being described. Are astrology columns, creationist textbooks, television programs about angels and tracts on feminist physics all antiscience? Are they all antiscientific in the same way? Does calling them antiscience do much to explain or refute them? For that reason, it seemed most sensible and informative to get past the broad heading and instead examine a few of the movements labeled antiscientific in their particulars.

Letters to the Editors; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Staff Editor; 1 Page(s)

I am always sorry to see Scientific American stray from science into politics, as you did in October 1996 with the article "Single Mothers and Welfare," by Ellen L. Bassuk, Angela Browne and John C. Buckner. You are not very good at it, which perhaps is not surprising, since scientists are not in general any better at such issues than anyone else. There is no reason, though, why people with credentials in psychiatry and psychology should not say something sensible about welfare economics. But when an article is obviously a tendentious piece of political pleading, you should at least attempt to solicit some contrary remarks from actual economists.

I read "Single Mothers and Welfare" with great interest because I spent seven years as a social worker in a public welfare agency in Alabama. I left the field of social work, however, because of a profound sense of disillusionment with the welfare system. One problem I never see addressed is that welfare bureaucracies actually benefit from having unsuccessful clients. If a caseworker gets her clients to find jobs and become selfsupporting, she works herself out of a job. The authors of the study--who reveal their own bias against the recent welfare bill, labeling it "draconian"--fail to address the problems with a system that encourages self-destructive behavior and a bureaucracy that requires more clients so it can exist and grow.

50, 100 and 150 Years Ago; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Staff Editor; 1 Page(s)

Using a radar-transmitter tube and a horn antenna, an unusual cooker, called Radarange, bakes biscuits and gingerbread in 29 seconds, cooks hamburgers with onion in 35 seconds, and grills a frankfurter and roll in ten seconds. The equipment beams the radio-frequency output into the food being cooked. In operation, when cooking is completed, a timer automatically shuts off the machine and the food is ready to eat, according to the Raytheon Manufacturing Company.

Vibration tests are absolutely essential in aircraft and rockets designed to approach the speed of sound. The principle of resonant vibration is now being utilized for structural tests. Electronic shaker units, essentially like a radio loudspeaker, are positioned near the structure being tested. The moving element of each shaker is coupled to a metal rod that fits onto a rubber suction cup attached to the structure. The shaker need only be energized at the natural vibrating frequency of the structure in order to produce, in a few minutes, vibrating forces so strong that iron beams snap in two and 30-ton bombers actually bounce off their landing wheels.

The 1996 Nobel Prizes in Science; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Staff Editors; 4 Page(s)

Robert F. Curl, Harold W. Kroto and Richard E. Smalley won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for their 1985 discovery of buckminsterfullerene, a third form of carbon, in which the atoms are arranged to form a closed, cagelike sphere. (The other two forms of carbon are graphite and diamond, which are, respectively, sheetlike and tetrahedral.) The archetype of the fullerene family is carbon 60 (C60), which has the shape of a soccer ball. The name derives from the molecule's resemblance to the geodesic dome designed by the American architect and inventor Buckminster Fuller. Five years after the discovery, others uncovered a way to make macroscopic quantities of them easily, thus opening an entirely new branch of organic chemistry.

Curl, Kroto and Smalley, along with Rice graduate students James R. Heath and Sean C. O'Brien, found "buckyballs" serendipitously. At Sussex, Kroto had been studying the carbon-rich atmospheres of red giant stars and, through spectroscopy, noted that they contain long chains of carbon and nitrogen molecules.

In Focus: Flight of Fancy; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Schneider, Gibbs; 2 Page(s)

To the oohs and aahs of a handpicked audience and the whir of camera shutters, Graham S. Hawkes gently tugs away a logoemblazoned veil to reveal a new and truly odd submarine. Adorned with tail fins, stubby wings and a hull hardly bigger than a coffin, Deep Flight would look more at home on a movie set than on this corner patio of the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. That is probably no coincidence--the eight-year project was funded in large part by television and film companies. But Hawkes, a veteran ocean engineer and the craft's creator, sketches a grandiose vision of the science to be enabled by his new designs.

"We live on an aquatic planet with most of the biosphere under the sea. The bulk of it remains unexplored," he expounds. Current tools for oceanic research, he asserts, are too slow, cumbersome and expensive: "To open up access to the deep ocean, we're going to have to learn how to fly underwater." Hence Deep Flight's strange stature. In other submersibles that can transport a human to the ocean's depths, the pilot sits upright and maneuvers using directional thrusters. In this sub, which is designed to dive down to one kilometer, the pilot lies prone as the craft flies through the water. Puttering slowly around the shallows near the aquarium, Hawkes shows how flaps on the vehicle's wings and tail allow it to turn, dive and roll--much like an airplane with its wings on upside down. The sub even floats toward the surface if it stops (and the wings stall), a feature that makes the craft safer but also prevents it from hovering over the bottom.

Steps To Recovery; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Beardsley; 2 Page(s)

Nerves throughout most of the body regenerate when they are damaged, just like any other tissue. Damage to the central nervous system, however--the brain and spinal cord--is different. Something goes tragically wrong. Nerve bundles start feebly to repair themselves but then degenerate around the site of the injury. For many patients, that means life confined to a wheelchair.

Experiments in two laboratories now seem to bear out earlier indications that the degeneration is not because of an intrinsic inability of spinal nerves to regrow. Rather it seems to be a consequence of a separate effect that may be controllable.

Field Notes: Suburban Amber; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Mukerjee; 1 Page(s)

The moist, black lignite breaks into rough planes studded with weathered grains of red amber. Carefully, I crumble away the matrix to extract the globules, some only five millimeters wide. A few feet away David A. Grimaldi of the American Museum of Natural History takes a pickax to a large chunk of earth, breaking into curses when he discovers in its depths the fractured remnants of a fist-size piece of amber. The extremely brittle fossilized globs of tree sap are 93 million years old. In them are stuck flowers, leaves and insects that lived in a grove of giant conifers, at a time when the first flowering plants appeared.

We are in New Jersey, an hour and a half from New York City. The taxi driver had looked quite suspicious when we asked to be dropped off at the roadside, at no address at all. (For security reasons, the location is kept secret.) Slouched in the sun on a vast sandy riverbed, we are sorting through soil that a bulldozer has just excavated from 10 feet below. A few hundred yards away, forming a horizon, sit brand-new rows of boxlike prefab housing. Bordering the empty riverbed are cliffs that harbor exquisitely preserved flowers, turned into charcoal by an ancient forest fire; a heap of old tires lies at their base.

In Brief; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Leutwyler; 3 Page(s)

Morphine, codeine, Percodan. These mu-opioids, which mimic the body's own painkilling endorphins, are among the most powerful drugs around. Until now, kappa-opioids, chemical cousins that act on different endorphin receptors in the brain, were considered second rate. But a recent study at the University of California at San Francisco has found that kappa-opioids can work as well and cause fewer side effects, but only in women. Lead researcher Jon D. Levine speculates that testosterone counteracts the kappa-agonists in men or that the brain circuitry for pain relief differs between the sexes.

The public-key encryption schemes and digital signatures that secure your bank card can now be crippled through brute force, report Bellcore scientists Dan Boneh, Richard DeMillo and Richard Lipton. They describe an algorithmic attack that gleans critical information from computational errors liable to occur when a smart card--or any other tamperproof device used in networked transactions--undergoes physical stress. Because the method does not rely on solving the difficult problems, such as factoring large numbers, on which most encryption schemes are based, it presents an allnew kind of threat.

All In The Timing; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Powell; 2 Page(s)

Over the years, astronomers have gained new perspectives on the universe by exploring sections of the electromagnetic spectrum invisible to human eyes. More subtly, they have also learned to broaden their perspective on time, looking for events that happen so swiftly that we might never notice them. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's orbiting Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) has a clever talent for both kinds of insight. It focuses on the energetic xrays that originate in violent processes occurring around hyperdense objects such as neutron stars and black holes. And unlike previous x-ray observatories, RXTE can observe lightning-fast flickerings that reveal unprecedented details of their underlying phenomena.

When seen through RXTE's eyes, the sky flares with radiation from a class of variable stars known as x-ray binaries. In these misfit duos, one member has evolved either into a neutron star--a dense stellar corpse just 20 kilometers across--or into an even smaller yet more massive black hole. The collapsed star's powerful gravity snatches material from its partner, a more sedate star like the sun. Gas spiraling inward grows fiercely hot, emitting the observed x-rays.

Awaiting The Big Bang?; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Schneider; 3 Page(s)

When a volcano becomes restless, people living nearby often turn to scientific specialists to help them judge the danger. Residents of the Caribbean island of Montserrat did just that in July 1995, when the long-dormant Soufriere Hills volcano became clearly active. But after more than a year of monitoring seismic rumbling, gas venting and bulging of the mountain, the experts are still struggling to anticipate what exactly the volcano will do next. Although stunningly advanced in comparison to earthquake prediction, forecasting volcanic eruptions remains uncomfortably inexact.

The ongoing crisis on Montserrat may be a perfect example of the challenges of forecasting volcanic hazards. After the first series of steam-driven eruptions in the summer of 1995, public officials on Montserrat evacuated thousands of people from the southern part of the island. But after three weeks without a catastrophic eruption, residents were allowed to return home--temporarily.

Anti Gravity: Chewing the Fat; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Mirsky; 1 Page(s)

In any list of history's greatest inventions, the usual suspects include the telephone, the automobile, the computer. The thermos bottle always gets a few votes. (Keeps hot things hot, cold things cold--how does it know?) But has humanity ever really come up with anything better than cream cheese? The phone is merely a convenient way to order cheesecakes. The car serves as a vehicle for getting to where the bagels are. The home computer is just a way for millions to work just steps from their chilled cream cheese caches. And the thermos, of course, holds the coffee to go with the cakes and bagels.

Cream cheese's standing thus demonstrated, what then to make of a scientific study in which human subjects fasted for 10 hours, then got rewarded with cream cheesecovered crackers every five minutes for an hour, which they dutifully chewed until the resulting smoothness danced on every taste bud? And which they then spit into a bucket?

By the Numbers: Threatened Mammals; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Doyle; 1 Page(s)

For some time, many naturalists have felt that the world is entering a period of major species extinction, rivaling five other periods in the past half a billion years. A new study by the World Conservation Union (also known as the IUCN), issued in October 1996, provides strong support for this theory. Using more thorough study methods than previously, the IUCN finds a much higher level of threat to several classes of animals than was generally thought. It found that an astonishing 25 percent of mammal species--and comparable proportions of reptile, amphibian and fish species--are threatened. Of five classes of animals, birds are the least at risk [see bar chart].

Of the 4,327 known mammal species, 1,096 are at risk, and 169 are in the highest category of "critically endangered"-- extremely high risk of extinction in the wild in the immediate future. (The other two are "endangered," meaning very high risk in the near future, and "vulnerable," a high risk in the medium-term future.) Of the 26 orders of mammals, 24 are threatened. Among the most affected are elephants, primates and Perissodactyla species (such as rhinoceroses and tapirs).

Profile: Milo Medin; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Zorpette; 2 Page(s)

Outside, a chilly rain is pelting Silicon Valley on a miserable gray afternoon. Inside, comfortably ensconced in a fake living room at Home--or, technically, @Home--my colleague Wayt Gibbs and I are basking in the glow of a 33-inch, $5,000 Mitsubishi monitor. Officially, I have come to interview Milo Medin, @Home's vice president of networking and Silicon Valley's genius of the moment. Unofficially, we've both come to see whether one of the first Internet services delivered by television cable, rather than by telephone line, is all it's cracked up to be.

@Home was founded on an alluring premise. Cable television systems are broadband: they convey signals occupying a wide piece of the radio-frequency spectrum. They are in effect "fat pipes" that can carry data at up to 10 million bits per second. This capability--with a fair amount of supporting hardware--could make them a much better medium for connecting to the Internet than the narrowband telephone network, which by comparison is a bunch of soda straws, with data poking along at several thousand, or at most tens of thousands, of bits per second.

Fetal Checkup; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Beardsley; 1 Page(s)

Geneticists have devised numerous tests to learn whether a fetus is likely to develop a serious inherited disease during gestation. All these tests, however, need a specimen of fetal cells. Until now, that has meant either amniocentesis or chorionic villus sampling. Both techniques involve putting a needle into the uterus to extract cells from either amniotic fluid or embryonic membrane, and both can be painful for the mother-to-be. More disturbing, once in every 50 to 100 pregnancies, the procedures trigger a miscarriage, and there are suggestions that villus sampling can very occasionally cause limb deformities in the fetus.

Separate teams of researchers in Japan and California have recently demonstrated a novel way to obtain fetal cells without any such risk. The scientists have found an apparently reliable way to isolate immature red blood cells belonging to the fetus from a sample of the mother's blood. They have also shown that they can use the cells successfully to perform various kinds of genetic tests on the fetus.

Chilling Chips; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Beardsley; 1 Page(s)

A smoke ring can be a pleasing thing to look at. At the Georgia Institute of Technology, Ari Glezer and Mark G. Allen are building devices that could boost the power of computer chips by blowing similar vortices of fresh air.

Keeping chips cool is a crucial requirement in electronic design. Fans are the traditional solution, but they are cumbersome and inefficient. Glezer and Allen adapted the principle behind a smoke-ring generator to make a device that efficiently cools circuits and can be made small enough to chill individual chips. The concept is straightforward: a box has one flexible wall and a hole, or several holes, in the opposite wall. Vibrating the flexible wall at a suitable frequency causes cooling jets of vortices to emerge from the holes.

More Gallons Per Mile; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Beardsley; 2 Page(s)

Prospecting for oil and gas used to be a matter of simply looking for places where oil seeps to the surface, drilling nearby and hoping for the best. These days the search for civilization's lifeblood is more scientific, and oil companies spend many millions of dollars studying the types of rock formations most likely to have trapped worthwhile reserves. Now they have a new tool that could help find places worth exploring--and so eliminate some expensive dry holes.

Researchers have identified in oil a pair of molecules that seems to reveal how far the oil has migrated from its site of origin. Oil moves laterally through the ground an inch or so every year as the force of buoyancy pushes it up from the depths where it was formed through inclined layers of porous rock. Sometimes it is trapped at accessible depths hundreds of miles from where it started. Explorers already use chemical analysis to try to infer what kind of source rocks are likely to have yielded a given sample. By adding information about how far the sample has moved, they should rule out some suspects.

Bandwidth, Unlimited; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Gibbs; 1 Page(s)

These should be the best of times for telephone companies: demand for their services is surging thanks to long-distance price wars and burgeoning Internet use. But many firms were caught off guard by the run on bandwidth. The trunks of their fiber-optic networks are perilously full, and some central offices are running out of switches during peak periods. In response, many phone companies are embracing a relatively new technology that can increase the data capacity of their optical networks by 100-fold--perhaps, within a decade, by 1,000-fold.

Last spring research groups at AT&T, Fujitsu and Nippon Telegraph and Telephone (NTT) announced that they had successfully sent data at more than one trillion bits per second over many kilometers of a single optical fiber. Seven months later NEC Corporation doubled the record, demonstrating speeds 1,000 times those used on commercial longdistance networks. "These so-called hero experiments are carefully orchestrated," points out Rajiv Ramaswami, manager of optical network systems for the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center. "If you add a kilometer of fiber or change the temperature of the room by 10 degrees, they probably wouldn't work. But they demonstrate what is possible." To demonstrate what is practical, major telephone companies have formed four alliances, each of which is building its own experimental network.

Cyber View; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Browning; 1 Page(s)

Fear of computers is creeping back into political debate. Sure, lawmakers still thump about the Internet to show how much they love progress. But underneath the enthusiasm is a fresh emergence of an old fear. In France, politicians are discussing shortening the workweek to share a pool of jobs, which, they say, is being steadily shrunk by the progress of automation. In Belgium, the economics minister proposed that computers be taxed and the proceeds used to subsidize threatened blue-collar jobs. And in the U.S., author and rabble-rouser Jeremy Rifkin is echoing the French call for a shorter workweek.

Like all bad ideas, these are not just wrong but also counterproductive. Computers don't destroy jobs; they create them. But they do so by changing the nature of work beyond all recognition. In that transformation, the notion of the workweek becomes about as accurate a measure of work and opportunity as the erg is a measure of financial success.

Cosmic Rays at the Energy Frontier; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Cronin, Gaisser, Swordy; 6 Page(s)

Roughly once a second, a subatomic particle enters the earth's atmosphere carrying as much energy as a well-thrown rock. Somewhere in the universe, that fact implies, there are forces that can impart to a single proton 100 million times the energy achievable by the most powerful earthbound accelerators. Where and how?

Those questions have occupied physicists since cosmic rays were first discovered in 1912 (although the entities in question are now known to be particles, the name "ray" persists). The interstellar medium contains atomic nuclei of every element in the periodic table, all moving under the influence of electrical and magnetic fields. Without the screening effect of the earth's atmosphere, cosmic rays would pose a significant health threat; indeed, people living in mountainous regions or making frequent airplane trips pick up a measurable extra radiation dose.

Understanding Parkinson's Disease; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Youdim, Riederer; 8 Page(s)

One of the more emotional moments of the 1996 summer Olympics in Atlanta occurred at the opening ceremonies, even before the games started. Muhammad Ali--the former world heavyweight boxing champion and a 1960 Olympic gold medal winner--took the torch that was relayed to him and, with trembling hands, determinedly lit the Olympic flame. His obvious effort reminded the world of the toll Parkinson's disease and related disorders can take on the human nervous system. Ali, who in his championship days had prided himself on his ability to "float like a butterfly, sting like a bee," now had to fight to control his body and steady his feet.

Ali's condition also highlighted the urgent need for better treatments. We cannot claim that a cure is around the corner, but we can offer a glimpse into the considerable progress investigators have made in understanding Parkinson's disease, which afflicts more than half a million people in the U.S. alone. Although still incomplete, this research has recently begun suggesting ideas not only for easing symptoms but, more important, for stopping the underlying disease process.

Tackling Turbulence with Supercomputers; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Moin, Kim; 7 Page(s)

We all pass through life surrounded--and even sustained--by the flow of fluids. Blood moves through the vessels in our bodies, and air (a fluid, properly speaking) flows into our lungs. Our vehicles move through our planet's blanket of air or across its lakes and seas, powered by still other fluids, such as fuel and oxidizer, that mix in the combustion chambers of engines. Indeed, many of the environmental or energyrelated issues we face today cannot possibly be confronted without detailed knowledge of the mechanics of fluids.

Practically all the fluid flows that interest scientists and engineers are turbulent ones; turbulence is the rule, not the exception, in fluid dynamics. A solid grasp of turbulence, for example, can allow engineers to reduce the aerodynamic drag on an automobile or a commercial airliner, increase the maneuverability of a jet fighter or improve the fuel efficiency of an engine. An understanding of turbulence is also necessary to comprehend the flow of blood in the heart, especially in the left ventricle, where the movement is particularly swift.

Transgenic Livestock as Drug Factories; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Velander, Lubon, Drohan; 5 Page(s)

Exactly one year after her own birth, Genie, our experimental sow, was serenely nursing seven healthy piglets, her milk providing the many nutrients these offspring needed to survive and grow. But unlike other pigs, Genie's milk also contained a substance that some seriously ill people desperately need: human protein C. Traditional methods of obtaining such blood proteins for patients involve processing large quantities of donated human blood or culturing vast numbers of cells in giant stainless-steel reactor vessels. Yet Genie was producing copious amounts of protein C without visible assistance. She was the world's first pig to produce a human protein in her milk.

Genie's ability to manufacture a therapeutic drug in this way was the outcome of a research project conceived almost a decade ago. In collaboration with scientists from the American Red Cross who specialized in providing such blood proteins, we began to consider the possibility of changing the composition of an animal's milk to include some of these critically needed substances. In theory, this approach could generate any required quantity of the various therapeutic blood proteins that are regularly in short supply.

How the Blind Draw; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Kennedy; 6 Page(s)

I first met Betty, a blind teenager in Toronto, as I was interviewing participants for an upcoming study of mine on touch perception in 1973. Betty had lost her sight at age two, when she was too young to have learned how to draw. So I was astonished when she told me that she liked to draw profiles of her family members. Before I began working with the blind, I had always thought of pictures as copies of the visible world. After all, we do not draw sounds, tastes or smells; we draw what we see. Thus, I had assumed that blind people would have little interest or talent in creating images. But as Betty's comments revealed that day, I was very wrong. Relying on her imagination and sense of touch, Betty enjoyed tracing out the distinctive shape of an individual's face on paper.

I was so intrigued by Betty's ability that I wanted to find out if other blind people could readily make useful illustrations--and if these drawings would be anything like the pictures sighted individuals use. In addition, I hoped to discover whether the blind could interpret the symbols commonly used by sighted people. To bring the blind into the flat, graphical world of the sighted, I turned to a number of tools, including models, wire displays and, most often, raised-line drawing kits, made available by the Swedish Organization for the Blind. These kits are basically stiff boards covered with a layer of rubber and a thin plastic sheet. The pressure from any ballpoint pen produces a raised line on the plastic sheet.

Experimental Flooding in Grand Canyon; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Collier, Webb, Andrews; 8 Page(s)

For more than three decades, Glen Canyon Dam has impounded the flow of the Colorado River above Grand Canyon, the vast winding chasm in America's southwestern desert that ranks as one of the wonders of the natural world. Although many people recognized that damming the flow would destroy the river upstream, few anticipated that there might be serious environmental consequences downstream. But over the years, scientists, government officials and professional river guides have become increasingly aware of troubling changes within Grand Canyon.

These alterations have occurred because the dam replaced the Colorado's natural pattern of forceful summer flooding with a gentle daily ebb and flow dictated entirely by the electrical power demands of distant cities. The dam thus eliminated the normal seasonal variation in river flow and ended the immense floods that had annually washed through the canyon. Although these floods had lasted only a few weeks of the year, they had been the principal force sculpting the river corridor. The floodwaters routinely stripped all but the highest vegetation from the channel banks, deposited sandbars and plucked boulders out of rapids. After Glen Canyon Dam went into service, exotic flora encroached, sandbars disappeared and boulder piles clogged the main channel.

The Einstein-Sziland Refrigerator; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Dannen; 6 Page(s)

In July 1939 Leo Szilard visited Albert Einstein to discuss the danger of atomic bombs. Szilard was alarmed by the recent discovery of uranium fission: he had realized almost six years earlier how a "chain reaction" could dangerously multiply such a process. Szilards warning that nuclear weapons might be possible--and that Nazi Germany might build them--convinced Einstein to write his famous letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt urging faster research efforts.

When Szilard visited Einstein on Long Island, N.Y., that day, he was also reviving a collaboration dating from Berlin's golden age of physics. It is part of the lore of physics that Szilard and Einstein held many joint patents, filed in the late 1920s, on ingenious types of home refrigerators without moving parts. But little information beyond the patents was thought to survive.

Science versus Antiscience?; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Staff Editors; 6 Page(s)

Science has long had an uneasy relationship with other aspects of culture. Think of Galileo's 17th-century trial for heresy before the Catholic Church, which formally admitted its error just four years ago, or poet William Blake's rants against the mechanistic worldview of Isaac Newton. The schism between science and the humanities has, if anything, deepened in this century, as C. P. Snow documented in his classic 1959 essay The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.

Until recently, the scientific community was so powerful that it could afford to ignore its critics--but no longer. As funding for science has declined, scientists have denounced "antiscience" in several books, notably Higher Superstition, by Paul R. Gross, a biologist at the University of Virginia, and Norman Levitt, a mathematician at Rutgers University; and The Demon-Haunted World, by Carl Sagan of Cornell University.

The Amateur Scientist; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Carlson; 3 Page(s)

On March 9, beginning 41 minutes after midnight Universal Time, a few hardy souls willing to brave the Siberian winter will witness a total eclipse of the sun. As the lunar shadow rushes northward across the subzero landscape, intrepid observers will see, in addition to the usual spectacular solar corona, a streak of light painting the darkened sky. Comet Hale-Bopp (known to astronomers as C/1995 O1), predicted to be the brightest comet in more than two decades, will be just 22 days away from perihelion and only 13 days short of its closest approach to the earth. Its brilliantly illuminated tails should produce a dazzling display.

If a trek to subarctic Siberia doesn't fit your plans, don't worry. Hale-Bopp promises sensational views from anywhere on the planet. It also offers amateurs a chance to contribute to cometary research: the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass., is coordinating a global net of observers, and anyone can participate.

Mathematical Recreations; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Stewart; 3 Page(s)

The magic square, in which every row, column and diagonal sums to the same total number, has long been a staple of recreational mathematics. According to Chinese legend, the simplest example was revealed to the emperor Yü on the back of a turtle in the 23rd century B.C. The common total, or "magic constant," of this square is 15, and its size, or "order," is three. Magic squares of all the larger orders exist, as well as a plethora of generalizations--magic cubes, hexagons, octagons, circles.

One would think that everything that can be said about such constructs was said long ago. But 10 years ago Lee Sallows invented an entirely new breed, the alphamagic square. Sallows, an expert on word games, specializes in combining these with recreational mathematics. (Another of his inventions, "new merology," was described in this column in March 1994.)

Reviews; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Hayflick, Powell, Wallich; 5 Page(s)

Either you are already old, or the odds are better than even that you will become old. This statistic became true only 40 years ago. Aging is an artifact of a highly developed civilization. For more than 99.9 percent of the time that human beings have inhabited this planet, life expectancy at birth has been no more than 30 or 40 years. It is only after we learned how to avoid animal predators, massive homicides, starvation, most causes of accidents and infectious diseases that it has become possible for a substantial portion of the population of developed nations to grow old.

Although the desire for long life or even immortality has been a common theme in human thought throughout recorded history, it is just in the past 20 years or so that biogerontology--the biology of aging--has become an important area of interest to both the scientific community and the public at large. Earlier neglect of biogerontology was motivated in significant part by ageism--negative stereotypes about old people--even among ostensibly objective scientists. The potential political, social and economic impact of large numbers of older persons, however, has galvanized studies of how people and animals age.

Wonders: Doing the Poincaré Shuffle; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Morrison; 2 Page(s)

Happy New Year! On 1 January 1997, at about 6 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, Earth will come nearer to the sun than at any other time that year. The elliptical orbit we all travel is no flattened figure but a near circle. The main mark of its ellipticity is that off-center sun. The simplest Newtonian orbital system comprises two bodies, like our sun and planet, free to move under mutual gravity alone, with a unique result: once they begin to circle each other, their orbit will remain for all time a closed ellipse.

Planetary orbits are not all so orderly--or so boring?--as this closed ellipse. Only for the case of two bodies does the eternally fixed ellipse work. For three (or more) interacting bodies, we cannot in general predict for very long even the overall shape of the orbits. How can such a difference appear between two bodies and three? You can grasp why without mathematics, by an appeal to the mechanical intuitions of our life on Earth.

Connections: A Bit of a Flutter; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Burke; 2 Page(s)

I suppose my view of history tends away from the orderly and more toward the chaotic, in the sense of that much overused phrase from chaos theory about the movement of a butterfly's wing in China causing storms on the other side of the world. So, not to be outdone, I decided to have a go at reproducing the butterfly effect on the great web of knowledge across which I travel in these columns.

That thought came at the sight of a giant cabbage white in a Lepidoptera exhibit at the Natural History Museum in London, reminding me of the other great natural history museum, the Smithsonian. Which owes its life to one Robert Dale Owen. The two-term Democrat from Indiana almost single-handedly pushed through Congress the 1846 bill accepting the Englishman James Smithson's bequest of $10 million and change (in today's money) that helped to set up the esteemed institution.

Working Knowledge; January 1997; Scientific American Magazine; by Brown; 1 Page(s)

Snowflakes, despite their varied geometries, all have a sixfold symmetry. The micrograph at the left shows the hexagonal shape of an ice crystal magnified 4,200 times. The dark speck at the flake's center is Snomax, a protein produced by a nontoxic, nonpathogenic, freeze-dried strain of the bacterium Pseudomonas syringae. It attracts water molecules and helps them nucleate into crystals.

So that winter-sports enthusiasts can enjoy prime conditions, most ski resorts blanket their slopes with man-made snow. Freezing water to make snow might seem easy, but it is a fascinating manufacturing process. Natural snowflakes usually crystallize around dust motes or pollution--particles on which water molecules can condense. These "ice nucleators" are essential; pure distilled water can otherwise remain liquid even at 40 degrees Celsius, a phenomenon known as supercooling. So resort snowmakers sometimes add nucleators to their recipes.