Science

There were no reported doping cases at the other major competition held
in Athens this summer, the 2004 International Mathematical Olympiad, but clean matchups between mathletes may soon be endangered. Anjan Chatterjee, a physician at the University of Pennsylvania, warns that we are entering the era of cosmetic neurology, when kids will swallow memory-boosting pills to cram for the SATs and pilots will regularly take drugs to make them more alert in emergency situations.

For most scientists, a career in research is gamble enough. But Scottish physicist Jim Hough couldn’t resist when the British betting house Ladbrokes offered 500:1 odds against the possibility that scientists will directly detect gravity waves before 2010. As director of Geo 600, an observatory in Germany designed to do just that, Hough had to lay down some pounds sterling.


First predicted by Einstein’s general theory of relativity, gravity waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime. When black holes collide or stars

Modern giraffes are boring compared with the exotic long-necked creatures that roamed the Earth millions of years ago. Chun Li, a paleontologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, recently discovered the newest addition to this mix, a marine reptile called Dinocephalosaurus orientalis (“terrible-headed lizard from the Orient”) that lived 230 million years ago. Previously, paleontologists believed that aquatic reptiles caught their prey by moving their necks around like slithering eels. Li’s lizard, with its expandable neck, may have had a hunting style all its own.

For some of the 200,000 people each year who suffer pain severe enough to require lower-back surgery, a new solution has arrived. The Charit Artificial Disc is expected to receive FDA approval for degenerative disc disease by the end of 2004, making it the only artificial spinal disc available in the U.S. “This is the first major breakthrough in back surgery since the 1940s,” says orthopedic surgeon Richard Guyer of the Texas Back Institute in Plano.

$150 billion Amount the U.S. spent on HIV/AIDS between 1982 and 2004


$100 billion Cost to date of the International Space Station


$120 billion Estimated amount the U.S. has spent on the war in Iraq


850,000 Estimated number of people infected with HIV in the U.S.


25 Estimated percentage that are unaware of their infection


7 Percentage of female AIDS patients in the U.S. in 1986


26 Percentage of female AIDS patients in the U.S. in 2002

An ingenious new device could lead to an eye implant that restores sight to the blind.
This summer, physicist Mark Peterman and his Stanford University colleagues reported that they had constructed an artificial stand-in for photoreceptors, eye cells that register incoming light and dispatch chemical signals to relay that information to the brain. Their prototype is a one-square-

By 1948 the bridge-and-skyscraper-style Erector Set had been around for 30 years. But the newest of the construction kits came with crank-powered motors and wheels, enabling kids to fashion walking robots like the one we featured on our cover. And somewhere in the ancestry of the Roombatoday's roaming, saucer-shaped robo-vacwas the Electrocar, which reversed direction when its spring-loaded bumper struck a wall. A child-size vacuum cleaner was also on our 1948 gift list.

At press time, no new launch date had been set, but if you’re following Swift closely or have an insatiable love for exotic astrophysical phenomena, you might enjoy a little tune written and performed by an a cappella group known as the Chromatics. Here’s an excerpt from the aptly titled “Swift Song,” concerning the function of the observatory:


Swift is the satellite that swings/
Onto those brightly bursting
things/
To grab the multi-wavelength
answer to what makes them glow.

The average wristwatch gains or loses about one second every few days, and undoubtedly, few of us notice the difference. But marking time accurately is crucial to some modern technologies. Atomic clocks—which base their ticks on the oscillations between the nucleus of an atom and its surrounding electrons—enable GPS navigation and ensure the proper timing of space probe launches and landings.

He still lacks a lower set of teeth, but a German man who had his jaw removed during a painful battle with mouth cancer just received a replacement. What makes his story unusual, however, is how his jaw was created. The risk of infection and the patient’s medication prevented doctors from taking the standard approach—constructing a substitute out of bone material grafted from other parts of his body. Instead surgeons at the University of Kiel in Germany grew a new jaw in the man’s back. Here is the simplified recipe.

Serbian Education Minister Ljiljana Colic briefly banned the teaching
of evolution in Serbian schools
earlier this year. Although this was not a notably tragic event in a country scarred by a decade of widespread ethnic and religious violence, the
reaction was swift and strong. After the Serbian government endured
two days of pointed criticism from scientists and teachers, Deputy Education Minister Milan Brdar suddenly announced that the ban had been lifted. Colic, Brdar’s boss, couldn’t make the announcement herself,

Now it’s really serious: Global warming could endanger champagne. French physicist Grard Liger-Belair, author of the forthcoming book Uncorked: The Science of Champagne, says that changes in the climate of the Champagne region of France could affect the local grapes. Warmer weather would boost photosynthesis in the leaves of the vine, producing added sugars, which migrate into the grape. This would reduce the acidity in the grapes and, as a result, disturb champagne’s delicate taste.

Forget about jumping back to the age of the dinosaurs. In Primer, a time- travel movie opening this month, the characters barely backtrack a full workday. When Shane Carruth, the writer, director and co-star, set out to make a film about two friends who construct a time machine in a garage, he wanted to offer an unconventional take on the genre. “In other stories, people seem to 'jump' from one point in time to another,” Carruth says, which didn’t make sense to him.

One in 12 women, and one in 45 men, will be victims of stalking in their lifetime, according to the National Center for Victims of Crime. But for such a common crime, stalkers aren't common criminals. More often than not, they are—or once were—lovers, spouses or friends of their victims.

For years, scientist Bill McGuire of University College London has been warning the world about Cumbre Vieja, a volcano on the island of La Palma off the African coast. If it erupts, he says, it could force a Manhattan-size rock to splash down into the Atlantic Ocean, kicking up 300-story-high waves that would travel out from the island at jet speeds. Within nine hours, 85-foot-high swells would slam Florida’s Cape Canaveral. Now scientists at the University of Hawaii say that this wild scenario has historical precedence: A similar event unfolded 120,000 years ago in the Pacific.