Search

Reports on the lawsuit filed surfers, the Surfrider Foundation in Los Angeles, California against two papermills for polluting the sea that they surf in. Payment of fines and damages by Louisiana-Pacific Corp. and the Simpson Paper Co.; Pollution limits for the companies; Provisions of the Clean Water Act of 1984; Recommendations to reduce the toxic content of their effluent.

The article reports on the study led by Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton at the University of California, Berkeley which allowed the students to infer the examiner's view of women. The study asked 170 undergraduate females to take a written test. They had progressive decor such as overtly sexist posters of women and breast cancer awareness banner, or neutral objects such as a stack of papers. The study suggests that black people prefer overtly racist whites than with those who behave ambiguously.

The weak force is one of the fundamental forces of nature, but unlike electromagnetism it exerts its effects over such a short range that they are usually only felt inside subatomic particles. The force is involved in radioactive decay, for example. Now, to get a direct measurement of weak charge, physicists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in California have fired bunches of a hundred billion electrons into a target of liquid hydrogen. The team reports in a paper to be published in "Physical Review Letters," that electrons are more likely to be deflected if they are spinning clockwise along their direction of motion, rather than anticlockwise.

Two teams of biologists are collaborating in a bid to unravel the 1 billion bases that make up the turkey's 40 chromosomes. One team, led by biologist Dave Harry of Nicholas Turkey Breeding Farms in Sonoma, California, has already published the first set of 100 or so "signpost" genes— markers around which a map of the entire genome can be assembled. Another second team, led by Dave Burt, head of bird genomics at the Roslin Institute in Edinburgh, Scotland, will publish a similar paper identifying another 100 or so markers.

Reports on the development of a technologically-advanced polymer that mimics litmus paper by the California-based Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory that can instantly detect microorganisms that cause disease. Features of the polymer; Customization of the polydiaccetylene film to target different microorganisms and their toxins; Testing of the polymer.

Reports that the University of California has won the right to distribute on the World Wide Web the internal documents and memos from cigarette manufacturer Brown & Williamson suggesting that the company was aware of the addictive and cancer-causing nature of cigarettes at least 30 years ago. Brown & Williamson's legal action to get the papers back, claiming that they had been stolen; Web site address.