Cover; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Staff Editor; 1 Page(s)

Table of Contents; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Staff Editor; 2 Page(s)

From the Editors, including Masthead; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Rennie; 1 Page(s)

Letters to the Editors; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Staff Editor; 2 Page(s)

50, 100 and 150 Years Ago; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Staff Editor; 1 Page(s)

DECEMBER 1948 OPINION POLLS--However wrong George Gallup, Elmo Roper and other pollsters may have been in their forecasts of the recent election [Harry S Truman against Thomas E. Dewey], no social scientist believes that public opinion polling itself was thereby discredited as a useful tool. Science often learns more from mistakes than from successes. In this case, the polling fiasco of 1948 had at least two healthy results: 1) it demonstrated dramatically that polling is far from being an exact science (which apparently needed public demonstration) and 2) it will force more rigorous standards upon the polling business.

FISHY FOOD--In response to the twin pressures of world food needs and severe overfishing, fishery experts are advocating the wide use of fertilizer to speed up the growth of fish. About two years ago a Scotch biologist fertilized a closed-off arm of the North Sea with superphosphate and sodium nitrate, greatly increasing the plant food supply and the number of fish. Similar experiments with fresh-water fish at the Alabama Polytechnic Institute used a nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium mixture. For $20 of fertilizer, the yield of fish was increased fivefold.

In Focus: Nothing but Light; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Stix; 2 Page(s)

The Internet-fueled boom in data communications has set off a grab for bandwidth--the additional network capacity needed to transmit Monica Lewinsky¿s grand jury testimony or the Taliban¿s Web page. Traffic on the Internet as much as quadruples every year, whereas plain old voice calls chug along at 8 to 13 percent annual growth. To sate the bandwidth crunch, longdistance telecommunications carriers have begun to demand optical communications technologies that had languished in university and industrial laboratories until the mid-1990s. "There¿s a useful place for the technology to go," notes Steve W. Chaddick, a senior vice president at Maryland-based Ciena, a leading optical network equipment manufacturer. "That wasn¿t true just a few years back."

Five years ago networks that incorporated what is called a dense wavelength division multiplexer (DWDM) were to be found in U.S. and European government-industry research consortia that were showcasing new technologies. This heavy-handed engineering term describes networking equipment that has, in the interim, rescued long-distance carriers such as the telecommunications provider Sprint from a bandwidth drought. The multiplexer sends laser light of different wavelengths down a single optical fiber. Meanwhile components of the transmission system in the path of the fiber reflect individual information-carrying wavelengths, allowing them to be diverted onto or off a high-capacity link. DWDM systems work in concert with optical amplifiers that can boost the strength of many wavelengths at once without having to convert the wave back into an electrical signal.

Andro Angst; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Zorpette; 2 Page(s)

The cloud that hovered briefly over Mark McGwire¿s sunny march to baseball immortality this past summer was the revelation that he was taking androstenedione, a hormonally based supplement reputed to help weight lifters add muscle. Writers wagged their fingers and raised questions about whether performances achieved with the substance are somehow tarnished or less valid. (Major League Baseball and some other athletic organizations permit its use; most others ban it.) But the editorial sputtering did little to elucidate the central question: Are such compounds merely dietary supplements, as the U.S. Food and Drug Administration classifies them, or are they just another form of musclebuilding (anabolic) steroid?

Many endocrinologists insist that the differences between supplements like androstenedione and traditional anabolic steroids (which are legal only for certain medical conditions) are trivial. "They are all steroid hormones," says Charles E. Yesalis, professor of health and human development at Pennsylvania State University. "The only debate is whether they are anabolic or not."

In Brief; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Leutwyler; 3 Page(s)

Mini-Mammal When the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology met in October, Jonathan Bloch of the University of Michigan presented a very small find--in size, at least: a fossil jaw from the tiniest mammal ever discovered. A distant relative of shrews , the creature, named Batodonoides, weighed no more than 1.3 grams. Its existence challenges earlier theories about the smallest body that can be supported by a warm-blooded physiology (small bodies generally do not retain body heat as well as large ones); for its size, Batodonoides must have been extremely active. Bloch came across the remains within limestone that was taken from the badlands in Wyoming and dates to some 65 to 37 million years ago.

His Pill Male contraceptives may one day be based on a discovery reported this past fall in Science. Postdoctoral fellow Chunghee Cho and his colleagues at the University of California at Davis found that sperm lacking the protein fertilin-beta can rarely get near an egg, let alone penetrate it, even though these sperm look and move like any other. The group studied mice lacking the gene for fertilin-beta, a binding protein found on cell surfaces. As it turned out, the fertility rate in these animals was 98 percent less than that in normal mice.

Pioneering Gas Leak?; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Musser; 2 Page(s)

Scientists are victims of their own success: as theories improve, it becomes harder to distinguish genuinely new phenomena from boring experimental errors. The recent announcement of discrepancies in the motions of distant space probes is a case in point. When Pioneer 10 and 11--launched in 1972 and 1973 to visit Jupiter and Saturn-- ventured beyond the realm of the nine planets in the early 1980s, researchers began monitoring their orbits for evidence of the long-hypothesized Planet X. They found no such planet, in accordance with later observations, but they did notice that the Pioneers have been slowing down faster than predicted by Einstein¿s general theory of relativity. Some extra tiny force--equivalent to a ten-billionth of the gravity at Earth¿s surface-- must be acting on the probes, braking their outward motion.

"I started out looking for Planet X but stumbled on this instead," says John D. Anderson of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. In 1994 Michael Martin Nieto of Los Alamos National Laboratory and his colleagues suggested that the anomaly was a sign that relativity itself had to be modified.

Leaping Leptin; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Ezzell; 2 Page(s)

What do body weight, the immune response and the growth of new blood vessels have in common? The answer, according to several recent studies, is a hormone called leptin.

Within the past few months, researchers have discovered receptors for leptin-- which was originally identified because of its link to obesity in mice--in newly sprouting capillaries and in the T cells of the immune system. The findings are changing scientists¿ views of the hormone and are suggesting that leptin might be involved in conditions as diverse as compromised immunity and cancer.

By the Numbers: Human Rights througout the World; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Doyle; 2 Page(s)

Two fifths of the world¿s people live under tyranny, while another two fifths live under governments that often act arbitrarily and unaccountably. The remaining one fifth live in Western-style democracies, in which their political and civil rights are generally respected, although minorities are sometimes not accorded the full protection of the law.

The worst countries--those in which basic rights were denied in 1997--are coded on the map as "poor." These countries have been designated as "not free" by Freedom House, a Washington, D.C.-based group that has been tracking human rights since 1941. Among the worst are Saudi Arabia, which denies suspects the right to counsel, and Afghanistan, where women cannot leave their homes without a male relative. For sheer, arbitrary violence, few rival Algeria, where Islamic groups are pitted against the army, with both sides periodically committing mass murders of adults, children and infants. Not shown on the map separately but in the same poor group are Freedom House¿s worst-rated territories: East Timor and West Papua (Indonesia), Kashmir (India), Kosovo (Yugoslavia) and Tibet (China).

The Population Slide; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Mukerjee; 2 Page(s)

In 1975 a typical Bangladeshi woman would have had seven children in her lifetime; today she would probably have three. This sudden decline, known as a fertility transition, is the most extreme case in a pattern that has emerged throughout South Asia. It occurred first in Sri Lanka, then in India and most recently in Bangladesh and Nepal.

The drop has demographers baffled. In the West, fertility started falling after an advanced stage of development had been reached. But the new declines are not directly correlated with such commonly cited factors as increased literacy or alleviation of poverty: Bangladesh remains one of the 20 poorest countries in the world.

Anti Gravity: A Leg to Stand On; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Mirsky; 1 Page(s)

Avery old, very bad story talks about this guy who happens onto a farm where he notices a pig with a wooden leg. Naturally, he asks the farmer about his asymmetrical companion and gets told that this pig is indeed some special porker. (The correct telling of this joke takes about 12 minutes, so we¿ll just summarize.) Turns out the pig saved the farmer¿s family by running through the house and waking them up during a fire. So, the guy asks, he lost his leg in the blaze? No, the farmer explains. A pig that great, you don¿t eat him all at once.

A very new, very good story is the one about Primrose, a burro in Colorado, which, like the limping pig in the joke, happens to have an artificial leg. At the age of three weeks, Primrose was attacked by dogs, which bit her legs severely. A resulting infection led to bone damage that under most circumstances would have led to the burro being destroyed. But this particular region of Colorado, near the state university at Fort Collins, happens to be home to Carl and Theresa Conrath. This husband-and-wife team have combined their backgrounds in human prosthetics and veterinary science to create an unusual specialty and family business: Veterinary Brace and Limb Technologies, which literally helps animals get a leg up once again.

Profile: Smashing through Science's Glass Ceiling; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Beardsley; 2 Page(s)

Rita R. Colwell knows all about the "glass ceiling" in science-- an unsubtle sexism that denies important positions to women. When she was still in high school in the 1950s, her chemistry teacher announced that chemistry was not a profession for women. And after Colwell gained a bachelor¿s degree in bacteriology (with distinction) at Purdue University, her department chairman denied her request for a fellowship to earn a master¿s degree, explaining that the department did not waste them on women. "Of course, you wouldn¿t hear that now," adds Colwell, who is 64. "What would happen is that they¿d simply say, ¿Well, they¿ve all been given out.' And gender discrimination in science, she declares, "gets worse the higher you go."

Despite the career-thwarting efforts of some academics, Colwell has gone just about as high as you can go in science. After making pivotal discoveries about Vibrio cholerae, the bacterium that causes cholera, she became in 1987 head of the University of Maryland¿s Biotechnology Institute and in 1995 began a one-year stint as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Recently Colwell assumed a post that makes her one of the most powerful scientists in the federal government. As director since August of the National Science Foundation (NSF), she is responsible for a $3.5-billion budget that supports most of the nonbiomedical civilian research in the U.S. The first woman to head the agency and the first biologist in 25 years, she brings to the job a radical agenda to support an expansion of funding for information technology, enhanced efforts in science and math education, and a new focus on what she terms "biocomplexity."

Shading the Twinkle; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Gary Stix; 1 Page(s)

Astronomers have surmised the existence of a dozen or so planets outside the solar system by the "wobble" in light received by telescopes as a planet orbits around a nearby star and exerts its gravitational pull on the gaseous body. A real picture of an extrasolar planet, however, is worth a thousand wobbles. But these images are not often there for the taking. A parent star, millions of times brighter than a planet, simply washes out the lesser image.

An experiment reported in a recent issue of Nature by the Center for Astronomical Adaptive Optics at the University of Arizona at Tucson marked an important step toward building an instrument capable of taking planetary snapshots. Philip M. Hinz and his collaborators demonstrated a starlightshading device, called a nulling interferometer, that was fitted to the Multiple Mirror Telescope on Mount Hopkins in Arizona.

Where no Brush Can Reach; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Schneider; 2 Page(s)

Medical researchers have long known that not all of the bacteria in dental plaque fosters tooth decay. And years ago some investigators began working to create vaccines against the destructive ones, in hopes that eliminating them might prevent more cavities than trying to kill all microbes present would. Now materials scientists have started thinking in similar terms about the bacterial films that coat the inside of water-carrying metal pipes. They plan to use genetically engineered strains of bacteria to prevent corrosion of such conduits, a problem that affects many industrial settings, from cooling systems to electric power stations and sewage treatment plants.

Researchers are going to such extremes because biologically induced corrosion of metal pipes is hard to prevent. Paint invariably wears off, and dosing the water with biocides is costly and can threaten the environment when released. Substituting a tougher metal (say, stainless steel for iron) can help a great deal but is often prohibitively expensive. So why not attack the bacteria responsible for speeding corrosion?

Beating the Tempest; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Grossman; 2 Page(s)

Just because you¿re paranoid doesn¿t mean they aren¿t out to get you. Most computer users would be startled to realize that somebody parked outside their home with the right kind of (very expensive) receiving equipment can read the data that appear on their computer screens. The receiver uses the monitor¿s radio emanations to reconstruct the screen¿s contents. The U.S. Department of State and other organizations spend a fortune buying shielded hardware to defeat these signals, known as Tempest radiation, after the code name for a government program aimed at tackling it.

Now Ross Anderson, a computer scientist at the University of Cambridge, and graduate student Markus G. Kuhn say they have developed methods for controlling Tempest radiation. What¿s different about their techniques is that they run in software, making them much cheaper and easier to deploy.

Computing with Chaos; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Gibbs; 2 Page(s)

It is a sure sign that a physical science has reached maturity when it yields a new kind of computer. Charles Babbage¿s brass-geared difference engine crowned 19th-century mechanics, ENIAC¿s vacuum tubes put atomic theory to a tough test, and microchips proved the power of early materials science. More recently, geneticists have coaxed DNA to do math, and physicists have dodged the uncertainty principle to build simple quantum computers.

Now it appears that chaos theory, the scientific debutante of the 1980s, has grown up as well. In September, William L. Ditto of the Georgia Institute of Technology and Sudeshna Sinha of the Institute of Mathematical Science in Madras, India, published the first design for a chaotic computer. Their novel species of machine would exploit the very instabilities that other kinds of computers do their utmost to squelch.

Cyber View; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Gibbs; 1 Page(s)

Every year must have its wildly overhyped computer "breakthrough"; the award for 1998 clearly goes to dictation software--or, as its promoters grandly call it, "speechrecognition technology." Dictation programs rival SaladShooters for the title of all-time champion in the unwieldysolution- to-an-insignificant-problem category. But this year also saw a truly new approach to polishing computers¿ conversational skills, an invention that might just do for the telephone what the World Wide Web did for computers.

The contrast between the two technologies is instructive. On one hand, we have a brute-force method that, ever since Apple first introduced voice control of its operating system in 1993, has sucked up every last processor cycle and bit of memory available as it attempts to match your utterances to words in its dictionary. Every year, as computers have grown in power, programmers have added a little grammar checking here, a touch of learning ability there--always just enough smarts to bring your computer to its knees.

The Evolution of Galaxy Clusters; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Henry, Briel, Böhringer; 6 Page(s)

The royal Ferret of Comets was busy tracking his prey. On the night of April 15, 1779, Charles Messier watched from his Paris observatory as the Comet of 1779 slowly passed between the Virgo and Coma Berenices constellations on its long journey through the solar system. Messier¿s renown in comet spotting had inspired the furry moniker from King Louis XV, but on this night he took his place in astronomy history books for a different reason. He noticed three fuzzy patches that looked like comets yet did not move from night to night; he added them to his list of such impostors so as not to be misled by them during his real work, the search for comets. Later he commented that a small region on the Virgo-Coma border contained 13 of the 109 stationary splotches that he, with the aid of Pierre Mechain, eventually identified--the Messier objects well known to amateur and professional astronomers today.

As so often happens in astronomy, Messier found something completely different from what he was seeking. He had discovered the first example of the most massive things in the universe held together by their own gravity: clusters of galaxies. Clusters are assemblages of galaxies in roughly the same way that galaxies are assemblages of stars. On the cosmic organizational chart, they are the vice presidents--only one level below the universe itself. In fact, they are more massive relative to a human being than a human being is relative to a subatomic particle.

Cloning for Medicine; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Wilmut; 6 Page(s)

In the summer of 1995 the birth of two lambs at my institution, the Roslin Institute near Edinburgh in Midlothian, Scotland, heralded what many scientists believe will be a period of revolutionary opportunities in biology and medicine. Megan and Morag, both carried to term by a surrogate mother, were not produced from the union of a sperm and an egg. Rather their genetic material came from cultured cells originally derived from a nine-day-old embryo. That made Megan and Morag genetic copies, or clones, of the embryo.

Before the arrival of the lambs, researchers had already learned how to produce sheep, cattle and other animals by genetically copying cells painstakingly isolated from early-stage embryos. Our work promised to make cloning vastly more practical, because cultured cells are relatively easy to work with. Megan and Morag proved that even though such cells are partially specialized, or differentiated, they can be genetically reprogrammed to function like those in an early embryo. Most biologists had believed that this would be impossible.

Making Ultrabright X-rays; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Altarelli, Schlachter, Cross; 8 Page(s)

The construction of extremely bright sources of x-rays has been one of the great--and infrequently told--success stories of science and technology over the past few decades. These facilities, based on evacuated, circular tubes several hundred meters in diameter, carry electrons at nearly the speed of light, giving off brilliant bursts of radiation that enable experimenters to examine matter on a scale measured in atoms. Using this extraordinary light, scientists have gained invaluable insights into diverse objects and phenomena, including the structure of molecules, advanced semiconductors and magnetic materials, and the details of complex chemical reactions.

Such scientific achievements have been made possible by equally impressive engineering advances. Using the brightness of these x-ray sources as a yardstick, their rate of improvement since the early 1960s is matched by few other technologies. For example, the increase in computational speed available with the highest- performance computers is often cited as an example of the rapid pace of information- age progress. Yet the increase in brightness of the x-ray sources over the same period has occurred far faster.

Combating Prostate Cancer; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Garnick, Fair; 10 Page(s)

The death rate from prostate cancer in the U.S. has been declining for several years, but the disease still claims too many lives. It will strike an estimated 184,500 men this year and prove fatal in 39,200, making it the second leading cancer killer of men, behind lung cancer. For such reasons, we and others continue to seek ever better ways to manage this disorder, which is especially prevalent in those older than 65. We cannot claim the ideal solution for every patient is at hand, but a spate of exciting recent discoveries deserves notice.

Some of the newer findings address a vexing flaw in the sole noninvasive screening test for detecting microscopic prostate cancer, the form most amenable to a cure. The test measures the level in the blood of prostate-specific antigen (PSA), a protein released by prostate cells. Both normal and malignant prostate cells secrete this substance, but when cancer is present, the levels in the circulation often rise. Elevated PSA levels can thus warn that the prostate gland harbors cancer even if the tumor is too minute for a doctor to feel. The other main screening test, the digital rectal exam, can identify only tumors that are no longer microscopic. In that procedure, a doctor inserts a finger into the rectum and, through its wall, feels the prostate for hardness or lumps.

Leafy Sea Dragons; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Groves; 6 Page(s)

The water is clear, calm and dark. As I drop off the rear of the boat with my fellow divers into the icy water, a chill runs up my spine--both from the cold and from my growing sense of anticipation. We are night diving in the Southern Ocean off the southwestern coast of Australia, in search of creatures that sound almost mythical. We are hunting for dragons--More precisely, leafy sea dragons. And for our breeding program at Underwater World Perth, we want to catch a male--a pregnant male.

The leafy sea dragon (Phycodurus eques) and its more common cousin, the weedy sea dragon (Phyllopteryx taeniolatus), are the only sea dragons in the world. Along with sea horses and pipefish, they are members of the family Syngnathidae, fish characterized by a hard external skeleton arranged as a series of rings around the animal¿s body and by a long tubular snout with no teeth. Sea dragons are distinctive in that frondlike appendages branch out from their armor-plated bodies. As befits their names, the leafy sea dragons¿ appendages are broader and flatter than the more stringy ones of the weedy dragons. Both creatures are endemic to the southern Australian coastline. The waters off the islands of the Archipelago of the Recherche where we are diving are a favorite haunt for sea dragons. These huge, sparsely vegetated granite islands are a refuge for an amazing array of exotic animals, some of them found nowhere else in the world. Beneath the waves, the vertical granite faces plunge for hundreds of meters into the inky depths.

Building the Better Bug; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by O'Brochta, Atkinson; 6 Page(s)

An extraterrestrial visitor would surely acknowledge humanity to be the dominant species on the earth. Should that visitor move past individual species and up the levels of taxonomic classification, however, the alien¿s field report might well give the class Insecta top billing. More than one million insect species have been identified, accounting for five sixths of all species of animals. Each U.S. acre averages 400 pounds of insects, compared with only 14 pounds of people. Where humans and insects interact, vast economic interests hang in the balance. Even more profoundly, the clash of humans and insects that carry diseases is often a matter of life and death.

A few insect species, most notably those that feed on blood, are still responsible for spreading major human diseases, such as malaria, yellow fever, trypanosomiasis and dengue, as well as some conditions affecting livestock. Malaria alone accounts for between 300 million and 500 million clinical cases annually and some 1.5 million to 2.7 million deaths. About 200,000 people come down with yellow fever annually, and 30,000 die. Some 50 million people contract dengue every year; mortality can reach 15 percent without treatment. In many developing countries, nonfatal but debilitating conditions, such as dysentery, can be transmitted by insects, including the common housefly.

Physicists in Wartime Japan; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Brown, Nambu; 8 Page(s)

Between 1935 and 1955 a handful of Japanese men turned their minds to the unsolved problems of theoretical physics. They taught themselves quantum mechanics, constructed the quantum theory of electromagnetism and postulated the existence of new particles. Much of the time their lives were in turmoil, their homes demolished and their bellies empty. But the worst of times for the scientists was the best of times for the science. After the war, as a numbed Japan surveyed the devastation, its physicists brought home two Nobel Prizes.

Their achievements were all the more remarkable in a society that had encountered the methods of science only decades earlier. In 1854 Commodore Matthew Perry¿s warships forced the country open to international trade, ending two centuries of isolation. Japan realized that without modern technology it was militarily weak. A group of educated samurai forced the ruling shogun to step down in 1868 and reinstated the emperor, who had until then been only a figurehead. The new regime sent young men to Germany, France, England and America to study languages, science, engineering and medicine and founded Western-style universities in Tokyo, Kyoto and elsewhere.

Sizing Up Software; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Jones; 6 Page(s)

Modern society has become increasingly reliant on software--and thankfully so. Computer programs routinely execute operations that would be extraordinarily laborious for an unaided person-- handling payrolls, recording bank transactions, shuffling airline reservations. They can also complete tasks that are beyond human abilities--for example, searching through massive amounts of information on the Internet.

Yet for all its importance, software is an intangible quantity that has been devilishly tricky to measure. Exactly how should people determine the size of software?

The Amateur Scientist; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Carlson; 2 Page(s)

The most wonderful private garden I have ever seen is tucked away behind a modest house in La Jolla, Calif., not far from where I live. The gardener is a British-born psychology professor and dear friend who sends me home with fruit and flowers each time I visit. Recently I noticed that two of his plants, though very different in shape, produced flowers of the exact same shade of purple. This observation made me wonder whether the two species might be related.

One normally traces evolutionary connections by identifying physical similarities between species. So I decided to extract and isolate the pigments in the two flowers so that I could compare them in detail. That process is actually much easier than it sounds. In fact, using a simple technique called electrophoresis, I could carry out the experiment in about an hour for very little money.

Mathematical Recreations; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Stewart; 2 Page(s)

Abig man and a small man were sitting in the restaurant car of a train, and both ordered fish. When the waiter brought dinner, the big man promptly took the bigger fish; the small man complained that this was extremely impolite.

"What would you have done if you¿d been offered first choice, then?" asked the big man, annoyed. "I would have been polite and picked up the small fish," the small man said smugly.

Reviews: The Scientific American Young Readers Book Awards; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Morrison, Morrison; 6 Page(s)

Matej, going on four, lives not too far from Ladder Company 20, NYCFD. He has shelves of rolling fire- fighting toys and likes anything red. His first words on arising may be "fire truck." Peter S¿s ought to know, for Matej is his son. Running out of new fire truck books to read from, talented Peter wrote one of his own, Matt approving. Make way for a fiery fantasy.

One day young Matej awoke, a red fire truck himself! He was part of it, resembling his little red bed, but much larger, here painted across two full pages. It had one driver, two ladders and everything else you might count, up to 10 big boots. He raced around on six wheels, eight sirens blaring, rescued a cat and a teddy bear and put out a fire, all in the living room. Then Matt smelled something special, parked in red cap and suit at the kitchen table, and the little boy ate his pancakes.

Commentary: Connections - Tea, Anyone?; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Burke; 2 Page(s)

The other day I was reading for this column while abstractedly stirring some sugar (too much, as it turned out) into my cuppa, thinking how the English tea-drinking thing is all a myth. It was the Dutch who really started the craze. In 1610 the first shipment of chai from China arrived in Amsterdam and turned Holland into a nation of addicts. Within a few years the eminent Dutch physician Cornelius Bontekoe was prescribing 200 cups a day for the general health. By 1650 the Dutch East India Company was importing tons of tea, reexporting it as far as New York, making a million and going back east for more. Tea (and the porcelain cups it went into) made Holland very rich. And paid for all those instrument makers working on things like barometers and telescopes (and such) that would make it easier for company navigators to find China every time, pick up the magic leaves, then head home. And find Amsterdam every time.

As usual, this was another case of the bottom line driving science and technology. Precision at sea required instruments that soon made possible precision in measurement of all kinds. Which is what (as I described in a recent column) drove German Daniel G. Fahrenheit to do what he did around 1713. And here I owe you an apology for a sin of omission in that previous column. What I left out of the account was that in 1708 Fahrenheit snitched the idea for which he is famous from the ex-mayor of Copenhagen. This guy, Ole R¿mer, had come up with the idea of the thermometer scale way ahead of Fahrenheit. All the latter did was to fiddle with the numbers. Shortly thereafter, all R¿mer¿s research notes were destroyed in a fire, and Fahrenheit was happily home free.

Annual Index 1998; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Staff Editor; 3 Page(s)

Working Knowledge; December 1998; Scientific American Magazine; by Poynter; 2 Page(s)

Parachutes have changed over the past five centuries. The "round" (actually flat-circular) canopies of old depended on the air they captured (drag) to slow the descent of the suspended load or user. Today¿s skydivers use rectangular canopies with an airfoil shape that produce lift to further slow their descent. These new canopies fly forward at some 20 miles per hour and can be flared for tiptoe landings. Gone are the days when parachutists were at the mercy of the wind.

Over the years, sport parachutes have become smaller and lighter. Both weight and volume have been reduced through design changes, new materials and the elimination of some parts.