The bodies that filed the lawsuits claim that the ACS has created a
lucrative mono poly for itself selling abstracts drawn from the society’s
chemical journals. The critics accuse the society of achieving this monopoly
by exploiting its charitable status to avoid paying taxes on its profits.

The ACS last week attacked Dialog Information Services, one of its legal
opponents, citing ‘fraudulent accounting practices’, and filed a countersuit
against the company to claim $10 million (about Pounds sterling 6 million)
in royalties that are allegedly owed to the ACS. If the Dialog suit and
a separate suit initiated by the city of Columbus, Ohio, succeed, the ACS
stands to lose more than $150 million. Both lawsuits focus on the ACS’s
lucrative Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), which provides about half of
the tax-exempt society’s $180 million budget every year. The CAS has published
the Chemical Abstracts, a compilation of virtually all the world’s chemical
knowledge, since 1907. In the 1970s, with some financial help from the US
government, the CAS rewrote the Chemical Abstracts on computer databases.
The CAS started its own online information service in 1980.

The CAS allows Dialog, based at Palo Alto in California, to access some
of the databases in return for royalties, but Dialog accuses the CAS of
keeping the best databases for its own online service. In a lawsuit filed
in June, Dialog claimed that the ACS’s tax-exempt status as a non-profit
scientific society gave it ‘a government-subsidised monopoly over the databases’.
The CAS, claim Dialog officials, ‘is seeking total control over the online
chemical information market both here and abroad’.

Dialog also claimed that the original government contracts required
that the databases be widely available at a reasonable cost. The US government
supplied more than $25 million to construct the database, says Robert Simons,
Dialog’s chief lawyer.

The CAS rebuts Dialog’s claims and contends that Dialog filed the suit
to draw attention away from the company’s ‘fraudulent accounting practices’.

ACS representatives state that Dialog’s claims are ‘patently false’.
They say that federal funds were used mostly to write computer software
for the database, and that the CAS no longer receives any government money.
Therefore the CAS is not obliged to share any of the information in the
chemical abstracts outside the society’s own online information service.

‘The CAS is competing fairly in the marketplace,’ said James Seals,
the vice president of marketing for the CAS. ‘Dialog’s agenda seems to be
one of limiting competition rather than encouraging it.’

Ironically, this claim to be competing in the marketplace may backfire
in the case brought by the city of Columbus, Ohio. City officials claim
that the CAS is just like any other business and should be taxed as such.

‘They’re not entitled to a tax exemption,’ says Jeffrey Rich, a lawyer
for the city schools of Columbus, the group that would benefit from taxes
on the CAS. ‘They would be entitled if they offered services to the public
with no recompense, but they are a major computer industry competing with
companies in the private sector that do the same thing.’ In 1980, Rich says,
the CAS received over $90 million in revenue, of which about $60 million
went to expenses. This left $31 million in ‘reserves’, which are profits
in a supposedly non-profit organisation, Rich contends.

Michael Salmon and his colleagues at Florida Atlantic University in
Boca Raton, studied newly hatched leatherback, loggerhead and green turtles.
These creatures have a strong, instinctual drive to launch themselves from
the beach where they hatched and, during a 24-hour frenzy of swimming, leave
the shore as far behind as possible. Out in the open ocean, there are fewer
predators, such as birds and fish, to worry about.

Salmon captured turtle hatchlings at night as they escaped from their
nest, and carried them 11 kilometres out into the ocean. He placed them
in circular cages and found that all the turtles swam into the waves. If
the sea was flat, the hatchlings swam in circles.

Off Florida’s east coast, prevailing winds always push waves from the
east or south east during hatching. This makes the waves a good guide to
the most direct path out to sea, says Salmon.

To determine whether the hatchlings felt the waves or saw them by starlight,
Salmon and his colleagues released turtle hatchlings in an indoor tank in
darkness and generated artificial waves. The hatchlings persisted in swimming
into the waves, so Salmon concluded that the turtles did not need to see
the waves to find their way.

‘We call this a surface wave compass,’ says Salmon. Although some invertebrates
living along the shore, such as the sea slug, the blue crab and the horseshoe
crab, use waves as a directional guide, this is the first time the behaviour
has been observed in a species of the open sea.

The biologists also found strong evidence that loggerhead hatchlings
use a ‘magnetic compass’ as well as the wave compass. The magnetic compass
is calibrated by its first exposure to light, says Salmon.

Salmon and his colleagues placed the little loggerheads in a circular
tank and exposed each one for an hour to a light from the east, which the
turtles swam towards vigorously. When the researchers turned off the light,
the hatchlings circled. Occasionally, however, they paused and struck out
in a particular direction, usually to the east. According to Salmon, the
preference was ‘extremely clear-cut statistically’.

The scientists then turned on an artificial magnetic field with a polarity
opposite to the Earth’s field. They found that the hatchlings now preferred
to swim towards the west.

Salmon and his colleagues exposed another group of hatchlings to a light
from the west. When they turned off the light, they found that the hatchlings
preferred to swim west. When the magnetic field in the tank was reversed,
they swam east.

The biologists took another group of hatchlings and did not expose them
to an initial light. They found that the turtles seemed unable to use a
magnetic field at all and circled the tank continuously.

Using first light to calibrate such a compass makes sense because turtles
initially find the ocean by crawling across the beach towards the brighter
oceanic horizon, Salmon explains.

Vice president Dan Quayle, chairman of the National Space Council, said
on Monday that he had asked NASA’s administrator Richard Truly to set up
the task force in order to review ‘the future long-term direction’ of the
American space programme.

Quayle’s request follows mounting concern in Congress over the way that
NASA runs its activities. This criticism surfaced at a series of crowded
and often tense hearings on Capitol Hill last week, with various members
of Congress calling for precisely the type of review which the White House
is now requesting.

Even as the NASA investigators began to narrow the field of questions
about what went wrong with the Hubble Space Telescope, politicians from
both parties asked for the inquiry to be broadened. The politicians want
to investigate other NASA projects, such as the Earth Observation System
and the space station.

‘The Hubble experience raises questions about the approach NASA is taking
to design and test such complex systems,’ said Robert Roe, the chairman
of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.

Senator Albert Gore, in his second hearing on the subject in two weeks,
lectured NASA’s leaders about what he perceived as the agency’s scrimping
on quality control to save money. Tempers rose when Gore pressed NASA officials
about a report from the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment which
asserts that there is an 88 per cent chance of another shuttle being lost
during the next three years.

While refusing to cite an exact percentage, James Thompson, the deputy
administrator of NASA, replied that ‘very clearly, over the next decade
we’re going to lose one’.

Gore replied: ‘If you get the space station half-built and you lose
a shuttle and crew do you think the American people are going to support
its completion?’

‘I think they will,’ Thompson said. ‘If we don’t take risks we might
as well say ‘let’s not launch the next one.’ After the hearings, NASA officials
rejected the case for an overall review of the space agency. They claimed
that management practices had been completely reviewed and changed after
the challenger disaster. The Hubble’s mirror and the faulty valves that
grounded the shuttle fleet were all produced before that time, they said.

Meanwhile, NASA officials now say that they suspect an error in manufacturing
gave Hubble’s primary mirror an incorrect shape, contradicting earlier statements
suggesting that the error might lie in the design. ‘We’ve checked the prescription
(for the mirror) and believe the prescription was proper,’ said Truly.

Suspicion now centres on a ‘null corrector’, a device that allows telescope
builders to check how closely a mirror fits the proper form during the grinding.
If the corrector does not work properly the resulting mirror will be perfectly
smooth but ‘perfectly wrong’, said Lennard Fisk, NASA’s chief scientist.
Apparently the null corrector was never checked by independent methods because
it is so easy and straightforward to build, added another NASA scientist.

Even after the mirror was built, NASA could have detected the spherical
aberration in the mirror with a simple test ‘like the old guys did’, long
before lasers were invented, Fisk admitted. Previously, NASA officials said
that tests to identify the mistake in the mirror would have cost hundreds
of millions of dollars.

NASA officials also indicated that they missed the glaring error because
of their preoccupation with making sure the mirror was perfectly smooth.
Many tests were done to make sure that the mirror was smooth to within 0.008
micrometres. Apparently no one thought that the overall shape could be out
by 250 times as much as that.

NASA also announced last week that Robin Lawrence, a representative
of the European Space Agency, would become a member of one of the panels
investigating the cause of the Hubble’s problems.

Robotic devices have been used for some time to position tools for surgeons,
but this is the first time one has been programmed to actually do the cutting,
according to Hap Paul, a researcher at the University of California’s Davis
School of Medicine and the veterinarian doing the surgery.

To replace a hip, doctors remove the head of the leg bone and insert
a metal pin with a ball-joint at one end. Making a hole in the leg into
which the pin will fit snugly is crucial to the success of the operation,
but the usual technique of cutting out a hole with a steel bit and a mallet
‘doesn’t work too well’, Paul says.

The researchers approached IBM four years ago to try to find a better
method. Under an agreement between Paul and IBM, all dogs that are used
to develop the machine are in need of surgery. In the first stage of the
operation the doctors inserted steel reference pins into the dog’s leg to
help the robot to position itself for cutting. Paul then studied scans produced
by computer tomography so that he could feed this information into a program
called ‘Orthodock’, which will tell him the best position for the artificial
joint. He then programmed the computer controlling the robot with this optimum
orientation for the joint. The robotic arm, guided by its computer, then
cut a hole in the bone using a sharp, rotary tool.

‘The robot is very steady and we are able to program the robot with
the exact dimensions of the prosthesis so that we get a perfect match to
the bone. That’s impossible to do manually,’ Paul says. A tight fit with
the bone should improve the stability of the implant, reduce pain after
surgery, and encourage the bone to grow round the implant more quickly,
he adds.

Paul estimates that surgeons carry out more than 160,000 total-hip replacements
on humans each year in the US, and that a comparable number take place in
Europe. About 1000 conventional hip operations are carried out each year
on dogs with hip problems, he estimates.

Paul believes many other operations could benefit from the surgical
precision of the robot. ‘I’d like to see it used in knee replacement, and
some neurosurgeons are interested in using it for spinal surgery,’ Paul
says.

A group of companies planning to build a robot to perform brain surgery
looks set to receive funding from Britain’s Department of Trade and Industry.
The robot would be controlled by an expert system, software programmed to
draw on the knowledge of real surgeons. The expert system would plan the
operation from a series of scanned images of the brain, although a surgeon
would oversee the operation itself.

The robot could operate close to vital areas of the brain where a human
surgeon may not be prepared to take the risk, its developers claim. Also,
it need cut a hole only a few millimetres in diameter to conduct its operation,
whereas a human surgeon would need to remove several square centimetres
of the skull.

The group includes Fulmer Research, an automation company called SAC
Hitec, Imperial College and the London Human Computer Interaction Centre.

Participants in the conference noted that dramatic political changes
in the Soviet Union create new possibilities for increased scientific collaboration,
but carry dangers as well. ‘I’m worried about the future of ‘big science’,’
said Sergey Kapitza, chairman of the Physical Society of the USSR. ‘Such
projects have been fuelled by the arms race. What will happen to those projects
and the scientific manpower in our countries as the arms race recedes?’
asked Kapitza.

Many members of the Soviet delegation, which included three members
of the Supreme Soviet, emphasised the need to make the US a more reliable
partner in international scientific projects. Congressman George Brown of
Southern California admitted that the US had gained a bad reputation in
such projects as the space station. ‘We’re going to have to put some teeth
in our agreements,’ Brown said.

These problems, however, can be overcome, argued Eugeni Velikhov, vice-president
of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR and one of a handful of science advisers
to President Gorbachov. For instance, he said, there is a ‘very good chance’
that the Soviet Union, the US, Japan and Europe will agree to support the
International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) by the November
deadline.

Some American scientists and politicians noted that decisions on projects
such as ITER may rely more on the outcome of difficult budget discussion
in the US than on the state of relations between the US and USSR.

A NEW avenue for harvesting the Sun’s energy has been opened up by a team of American researchers. They have invented an artificial molecule which mimics photosynthesis, the process that plants use to capture the power of sunlight. Photons – particles of light – cause the molecule to become electrically charged, and that charge is maintained long enough for it to be stored or fed into an electric circuit.

The molecule, known as a pentad, was created by a team of scientists from the Center for the Study of Early Events in Photosynthesis at Arizona State University. When a photon hits the molecule anywhere along its length, it excites the molecule and drives an electron into a higher energy state. This electron comes from one of the ring structures in the centre of the molecule, known as porphyrin rings.

‘When an electron there gets boosted into a higher orbit it wants to relax, and we’ve constructed the molecule in such a way that the path of least energy carries it away from where it started,’ says Devens Gust, one of the researchers. The excited atom jumps to a lower energy state on a neighbouring atom. It continues to make further jumps to lower states on other atoms, and the molecule is constructed so that these jumps carry the electron away from its starting place. This series of steps carries the electron to the end of the long molecule, giving it a positive charge at one end and a negative charge at the other.

Such ‘charge separation’ stores about half of the photon’s energy as chemical potential energy. Plants and some bacteria use charge separation to initiate the chemistry of photosynthesis.

¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵs have previously created similar molecules that harvested as much light energy, but charges stayed separated for only about 300 nanoseconds before losing the energy as light or heat. The pentad created by Gust and his colleagues Thomas Moore and Ana Moore holds the charges separated for 55 microseconds, enough time to allow the charge to be gathered by conductors or other chemicals, says Gust.

The pentad is a construction of chemical groups called porphyrins, carotenoids and quinones. These chemical groups are the same as those used in plants and bacteria to collect light, only in different configurations.

If the pentad is positioned across a membrane with the two ends on opposite sides of the membrane, the charges can drive chemical reactions which store the energy for later use, similar to the way a battery stores energy. Alternatively, the molecules could be embedded in a thin film with electrical conductors linked to each end, Gust suggests. Charge separation in the molecule could then contribute to an electrical current.

In the future such molecules might also be useful for molecular electronics, Gust adds. Other scientists are trying to build electronic circuits out of individual molecules, and the pentad, or molecules like it, could be useful as solar cells. ‘Shine a light on it, you get a charge; hook a wire to the ends and you get a current,’ Gust says.

Without the extra funds, the physicists say, there will be a retrenchment
in high-energy physics projects other than the SSC, including a possible
withdrawal of American support for experiments at CERN and other European
laboratories. American politicians say it is highly unlikely that this extra
money will be given to them on top of the extra funds authorised for the
SSC.

A panel advising the Department of Energy in the US recommended the
increased funding after examining how other physics projects would fare
during the decade it takes to build the SSC. The panel conducting the study
was asked to assume that the DOE budget during the decade would remain constant
at $621 million per year for projects other than the SSC.

The study group quickly found that it is impossible to maintain competitive
physics in the US if such year-to-year spending is kept constant, according
to Frank Sciulli of Columbia University in New York, who chairs the panel.
Instead, the budget must be constant if averaged over 10 years, with higher
spending during the next few years, the report states.

‘Continuation of scientific programmes past 1995 will require some investment
early,’ says Sciulli. ‘The most sensible thing is to take money from the
last half of the decade and use it in the beginning.’

However, any idea of approving a budget for even two years, much less
10, is dismissed by US legislators and budget officials, who say that such
budgeting is never done. ‘There won’t be any multi-year spending,’ says
Thomas Bevill, chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee for Energy
and Water Development. ‘It may look good on paper, but it doesn’t work at
all well.’

Even informal planning for such spending is difficult, officials say.
‘I’m not sure it is a political reality to get long-term planning,’ says
a DOE representative on the High Energy Physics Advisory Panel. ‘I don’t
know if you can get higher funding for two or three years and get Congress
and the Office of Management and Budget to believe that physicists will
ask for less money in later years,’ he says.

The physicists conducting the study said that building a main injector
for the Tevatron accelerator at the Fermilab centre in Illinois is their
highest priority, other than building the SSC. But without an increase in
funds, the $200 million injector cannot be built without taking money from
other projects and making improvements at other laboratories impossible,
they say.

Physics laboratories in the US ‘can’t last as interesting facilities
for 10 years without significant improvements’, says Burton Richter, director
of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California. ‘If we said, ‘Let’s
burn out the machines we have,’ run them for five years and shut them down,
sure we could do that,’ he explained. Richter is not a member of the panel
making the study.

A lack of money ‘would leave the field poorly positioned to pursue research
at the SSC or elsewhere’ the report states. Such a situation ‘would cut
the heart out of high-energy physics research’, according to Marjorie Shapiro
of the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California, another member of the
panel.

Physicists on the panel indicated that all existing areas of research
would have to be examined if the extra money is not available. These include
American support for experiments conducted at CERN and at other foreign
laboratories, even though maintaining such support is considered important
by the DOE study.

Under the scheme, countries in the middle-income bracket would receive
loans at low interest rates to finance environmental projects. The loans
would cover the kind of projects that would not earn the borrowing country
income and which would risk going unfunded otherwise. They include projects
tackling deforestation, deserti fication and the problems facing the environment
in Eastern Europe.

Conable said that the fund ‘goes beyond the environmental work we’re
already doing’. It relates, he added, to ‘global environmental issues that
may not neatly fit into the large area of overlap between development and
the environment’.

The scheme has the support of many major environmental groups, such
as the Audubon Society. However, six organisations, including the Environmental
Defense Fund (EDF) and the National Wildlife Federation, criticised the
proposal in a letter to James Baker, the Secretary of State.

They acknowledged the need for such a programme, but questioned whether
the World Bank could administer it before making environmental reforms in
its existing programmes. Bruce Rich, director of EDF’s international programme,
said: ‘The bank lends out $25 billion a year, and the bulk of it directly
opposes what the fund would support.’

Robert Repetto of the World Resources Institute disagrees. ‘Everybody
agrees that the World Bank should do more to promote the sutstainable use
of natural resources,’ Repetto said. ‘That does not negate the fact that
the resources available to address pressing environmental problems are far
too limited. We need to both change existing programmes and create new (ones).’

Astronomers presented the results last week at a meeting of the American
Physical Society in Washington DC. Although the results confirm those released
earlier, they are from observations of the whole sky rather than from just
a small portion (This Week, 20 January).

COBE was launched earlier this year to observe the cosmic background
radiation, the remnant radiation of the big bang in which the Universe was
born 15 billion years ago. The radiation was created a mere 300 000 years
after the big bang. By determining how smoothly that radiation is distributed
across the sky we can learn how smoothly matter was distributed at that
epoch.

‘These measurements are more and more puzzling,’ says Michael Hauser
of the NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center. The COBE data show that 300 000
years after the big bang, the matter of the Universe had a density uniform
to one part in 10 000.

Many of the scientists at the meeting expressed concern that many accepted
theories of galaxy formation will have to go if the data build up and continue
to show there is no variation in the background radiation. Galaxies could
only have condensed from the stuff of the big bang if it was lumpy.

‘We will be surprised if we don’t start seeing wiggles at the level
of one part in 100 000 of accuracy,’ said David Wilkinson of Princeton University.
‘If COBE gets to (one part in a million) and still sees things smooth big
bang theories will be in a lot of trouble.’

According to George Smoot of the University of California, Berkeley,
the data from COBE are really more accurate than one part in 10 000, but
the scientists are not revealing these data until they have a chance to
correct for any systematic errors. They hinted, however, that they have
found nothing even at this level of detail.