Number 48, September 19, 1991 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein
MUCH OF BRITISH SCIENCE IS IN A MESS , says Nature Magazine's "Manifesto for British Science," an overview which serves both as a "recipe for revitalizing British science," and as a sort of organized exhortation of politicians to take science policy seriously as Britain approaches a general election sometime next year. Nature considers that the state of British science, "while desperate, is far from hopeless," and that things can be turned around if high priority is given to the production of a highly-skilled science workforce. (Nature, 12 September 1991.)
C-76 HAS BEEN ISOLATED by scientists at UCLA. Unlike C-60, which is spherically symmetric, C-76 has a complicated double-helical cagework of carbon pentagons and hexagons. The molecule's chiral structure, the UCLA researchers believe, may result in interesting optical properties. (Nature, 12 September 1991.)
THE FARTHEST QUASAR EVER OBSERVED , with a redshift of 4.897, has been discovered by a Princeton-Caltech team using the Hale Telescope (the finding is reported in the September issue of The Astronomical Journal). The same team, led by Maarten Schmidt of Caltech, had found the previously-known farthest quasar. (New Scientist, 14 September 1991.)
TITAN HAS AN ANTI-GREENHOUSE EFFECT , report scientists analyzing Voyager 1 data. Saturn's largest moon has a surface pressure of 1.5 atm.; its atmosphere of nitrogen, methane, and hydrogen gives rise to a greenhouse effect which increases surface temperature by 21 K. But, the Voyager scientists note, a high-altitude haze of organic molecules, absorbent at solar wavelengths but transparent at thermal-infrared wavelengths, has a cooling effect, reducing surface temperatures by an estimated 9 K. (Science, 6 September 1991.)
THE REVIEW OF PARTICLE PROPERTIES is a compilation published every two years, most recently in Physics Letters B (vol. 239, pp. 1-516, 1990) by the Particle Data Group. The latest edition enumerates the properties of 200 elementary particles, including heavyweights like the Z boson---whose vital statistics are based on 51 cited articles---and others that have never been observed, such as the Higgs boson---whose whereabouts are circumscribed by no less than 80 papers. (The Scientist, 16 Sept.)
THE AMERICAN PHYSICAL SOCIETY MEMBERSHIP SURVEY explores the demographics of American physics. For example, 30% of the members polled work for industry; 2% are Black, Native American, or Hispanic; 6.6% are women. 80% of the married female physicists are married to other scientists, whereas only 16% of married male physicists are married to scientists, indicating that women are disproportionately confronted with the problem of securing proximal jobs for both wife and husband. Regarding federal funding support, plasma and accelerator physicists, not surprisingly, were found to be the most dependent, while polymer and condensed matter physicists (many of whom work in industry) were the least dependent on government help. (APS Bulletin, September 1991.)
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