Table of Contents January 2006

Oil on Troubled Waters: Benjamin Franklin and the Honor of Dutch Seamen
Men who worked at sea knew of the calming effects of oil on water long before Franklin began his investigations. Was their practical knowledge any different from the later scientific knowledge of the learned? — Joost Mertens

Benjamin Franklin and Lightning Rods
Franklin's work on electricity and lightning earned him worldwide fame and respect—ideal assets for brokering aid from France during the American Revolution — E. Philip Krider

Vehicle Design and the Physics of Traffic Safety
Light trucks cannot safely coexist with passenger cars under existing conditions. The problem becomes particularly urgent as more and more light trucks are used simply as car substitutes — Marc Ross, Deena Patel, and Tom Wenzel

Departments

Physics Update

Reference Frame

Letters

Mixed Reactions to 'No New Einstein'

Discussing (or Not) Our Nuclear Future

Teaching Students How to Learn

Corrections

Search & Discovery

Electrons in atomically thin carbon sheets behave like massless particles
Traditionally found in particle-physics and cosmology contexts, the relativistic Dirac equation also describes how electrons move in a unique two-dimensional condensed matter system, graphene.

Densely packed positronium atoms interact chemically
For the first time, experimenters have seen atoms made from an electron and a positron exchange spins and perhaps form diatomic molecules.

Optical trap resolves thestepwise transfer of genetic information from DNA to RNA
The assembly of RNA can now be tracked with a precision finer than the distance between its bases.

Issues & Events

Basic science funding flat, as war, deficit, and hurricane recovery squeeze federal budget
NASA's new manned space vehicle program did well in the FY 2006 federal budget, but most other R&D agencies barely held their own in yet another year of modest science funding. A proposed across-the-board 2% cut could push many science programs into the red.

Mauna Kea telescopes step up collaborations
Tight budgets and pricey instruments are fueling a trend among observatories to swap time. To work, though, cultural, technical, financial, and administrative wrinkles need to be ironed out.

Probing dark energy through baryon acoustic oscillations
Dark energy makes up more than 70% of the universe, but no one knows what it is.

Evolution wins in Pennsylvania, loses in Kansas
A slate of "real-world" candidates swept the intelligent design majority off the Dover, Pennsylvania, school board, while in Kansas antievolutionists not only weakened science standards, but redefined science itself.

Building for Pakistan's quake zone
Pervez Hoodbhoy's mission is to erect buildings that can withstand a major earthquake, like the one that killed more than 70 000 people, injured 200 000 more, and made 2.8 million homeless in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Northern India last October.

Democrats offer innovation plan
Democrats in the US House of Representatives unveiled an "innovation agenda" in mid-November intended to maintain US leadership in science and technology through a blend of scholarships, a doubling of federal research funding, universal broadband internet access, and greater steps toward using alternative energy.

Physicists protest US nuclear policy
Do not undermine the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). That's the message two physics professors at the University of California, San Diego, are trying to spread with a web-based petition they launched last fall.

News Notes

Web Watch