National Science Board Honors

National Science Board Honors
Public Service Awardees and Science Leaders
The National Science Board (NSB) hosted a ceremony and reception on May 6 honoring annual winners of key awards in science and engineering, and public service. The awards were presented at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Primatologist Jane Goodall and Public Broadcasting's NOVA television series, produced by WGBH, Boston, received the NSB's first annual Public Service Award for major contributions toward public understanding of science and engineering. An audio file of the ceremony proceedings is available at: http://www.nsf.gov/nsb/awards/98start.htm    More...

Global Seismic Network
Now Extends to the Deep Oceans
In April, scientists with the Ocean Drilling Program (ODP) will install one of many planned Geophysical Ocean Bottom Observatories (GOBO), in which a permanent seismograph station will be established on the sea floor for monitoring earthquake activity. ODP is funded in large part by the National Science Foundation (NSF). "Installing a seismic station in an ocean basin will be like filling in missing portions of a mirror or lens in a telescope," says Bruce Malfait, director of ODP at NSF. "It will allow us to examine regions of the earth's interior that are only poorly imaged at present by stations on a few islands, or the 30% of the earth's surface occupied by continents."    More...

New Insight Into Protein Structure
May Lead to "Designer Drugs"
NSF-supported research by scientists Rudolf Gilmanshin and Robert Callender of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine and Brian Dyer of Los Alamos National Labs have determined the first step in how the protein myoglobin, an essential protein that carries oxygen in cells, folds up. "As an important consequence of this research," explains Kamal Shukla, director of NSF's molecular biophysics program, which funded the research, "it should be possible to design new proteins with desirable properties, as in 'designer drugs,' and also to understand how proteins reach forms that have undesirable consequences, like what happens in 'mad cow disease.'"    More...