November 1998 Contents

ARTICLES

Exposing Life's Limits with Dimensionless Numbers

A crude device for quantification shows how diverse aspects of distantly related organisms reflect the interplay of the same underlying physical factors -- Steven Vogel

The World Wide Web and High-Energy Physics

The Web--what you may now be using to buy an airline ticket or look up Miles Davis's discography--began as a tool for improving the flow of information at CERN -- Bebo White

Superconductor-Insulator Transitions in the Two-Dimensional Limit

Increasing the disorder of an ultrathin superconducting film may produce a quantum phase transition at zero temperature to an insulating state -- Allen M. Goldman and Nina Markovi

DEPARTMENTS

Search and Discovery

• Adrift on the ice pac, researchers explore changes in the arctic environment

• Molecules are magnetically trapped

• Revisiting the rain of cometary snowballs

Washington Reports

• Budgets surplus and Congressional boosters help raise research funding for FY 1999

• Washington ins & outs: New science board members, new DOE and NSF posts

Physics Community

• Space scientists split on proprietary data rights

• Sloan survey spurs ROSAT to release All-Sky Survey data

• California's science standards slammed for demanding too much, too early

• Classroom poster sums up nuclear science concepts

• Physics baccalaureates: numbers down, salaries up

• Congressional fellows bring science to government

• Web Watch

Books

Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project, P. B. Hales (reviewed by W. Happer)

Electronic Genie: The Tangled History of Silicon, F. Seitz and N. G. Einspruch (reviewed by A. B. Flowler)

Pluto and Charon: Ice Worlds on the Ragged Edge of the Solar System, A. Stern and J. Mitton, (reviewed by I. de Pater)

The Babylonian Theory of the Planets, N. M. Swerdlow (reviewed by J. D. North)

Particle Astrophysics, H. V. Klapdor-Kleingrothaus and K. Zuber, translated from the German by S. M. Foster and B. Foster (reviewed by B. Sadoulet)

Theoretical Fluid Dynamics, B. K. Shivamoggi (reviewed by S. A. Berger)

Functional and Smart Materials: Structural Evolution and Structure Analysis, Z. L. Wang and Z. C. Kang (reviewed by K. Uchino)

Plus ...

Our regular sections: Physics Update, Letters, New Products, We Hear That, and Information Exchange.