Scientific Gossip (39-2)
Contains 100% gossip from concentrate
Safety Survey
At international conferences, scientists from the US are 120 times more likely to be carrying a gun than are scientists from other nations, according to a survey conducted by Linda Revson of the University of Bellington. The survey's sponsor, the American Gun Science Foundation, says that this explains why so few American scientists have been killed at research conferences.
Animal Wrongs
What limits are appropriate concerning the use of animals in scientific research? Scientists, animal rights advocates, medical patients and others have hotly contested the issue for many years. To help the various parties understand each others' viewpoints and perhaps reach a working arrangement, Dr. R.R. Smith and his colleagues visited a medical research convention last month in Paris. Smith is the founder of Non-Extremists for Moderate Change (NEMC), an organization whose goal is expressed by its name. In every country except Finland, NEMC members have been greeted with scorn, projectiles, violent attack, and police arrest. At the medical convention in Paris, they were assaulted, verbally and physically, by animal rights protesters, researchers, physicians, medical administrators, and bystanders.
Quantifying the Elusive
Philosophers have written, less than half in jest, that the history of science consists of a parade of new units of measurement. Each of these units epitomizes a new way of looking at the world. Now the broad, loose collection of techniques and ideas known as “chaos theory” has added its two bits of sense: the Butterfly Wingflick Equivalent (BWE). Also known as the metric Papillon, the BWE is defined as the amount of patterned turbulence induced in the atmosphere at conditions of 50% humidity and 15 degrees Celsius by a flick of the wings of a standard monarch butterfly at one meter above mean sea level when the barometric pressure is adjusted to one standard atmosphere. The unit was first proposed by David L. Arnold of the University of Louisville. Arnold has filed a trademark application for the name.
A Genius for Cultivation
There has been no letup in the repercussions from the announcement that several researchers have successfully cloned human embryos. An embryo bank is being set up in California to hold frozen, cloned embryos from any of the state’s citizens who wish to use the facilities. Funded under a proposed enabling statute, the bank would allow parents to eventually replicate those rare children (estimated variously at between .0001% and .01% of the general population) who at age 22 have demonstrably grown into geniuses.
Nightlight Savings Time
A new international agreement to standardize the time zone at the North Pole will go into effect next January 1 at 12:31 a.m. Because all the world’s longitudinal meridians meet in a single point at the North Pole, northern hemisphere nations have long been at odds as to which time zone contains the Pole. A similar agreement has been proposed for the South Pole.
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