This Just In ...

Unique Public-Private Partnership Announces Science Challenge to America's Youth
A unique alliance of government, public and private organizations today unveiled "JumpStart 2000, Your Chance to Build a Better Century," the largest appeal ever to the nation's youth to use science and technology to create real solutions for a better life in the 21st century. JumpStart 2000 is a national science and technology challenge for students in grades K-12. Developed and sponsored by PARADE and react magazines, the National Science Board, the governing board of the National Science Foundation in partnership with the White House Millennium Council, the program invites all students to identify and share their hopes and concerns for the future and to apply science and technology to propose innovative solutions to important national or global issues.    More...

	This 5 December 1975 satellite image has a nominal spatial resolution of 8 meters, 10 times better than Landsat imagery of the same era. It shows one of the few parts of Antarctica that have no permanent ice cover.

President Clinton Releases Satellite Image of Antarctica
A 1975 surveillance satellite image of Antarctica's McMurdo Dry Valleys, made public by President Bill Clinton on September 15, 1999, will help scientists measure environmental fluctuations in one of Earth's harshest environments known to harbor life. The image and others were released under a cooperative project of the National Science Foundation, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, and the DCI Environmental Center. The action makes Cold War products available for research on a continent reserved by treaty for peace and science.    More...

(Note: This image, obtained by ASU scientists Zuo, Kim, O'Keefe and Spence using electron and x-ray diffraction techniques, represents the first time the covalent bonds between atoms have ever been "seen" in cuprite.)

Breakthrough Image of Atomic Bonding Will Advance the Science of New Materials
Researchers funded by the National Science Foundation have produced the first experimental image of atomic bonding in copper oxide. Atomic bonds, or molecular orbitals, are the "glue" that holds atoms together and gives materials most of their properties. The image produced by scientists at Arizona State University and published in the journal Nature, provides a direct experimental mapping of the molecular orbitals that connect atoms in a solid material, which has never before been seen. "The evidence of covalent bonding between metals is likely to make them rewrite the chemistry textbooks," said Arizona State University researcher John Spence, who teamed with Jian-Min Zuo, Miyoung Kim, and Michael O'Keefe to synthesize the image from measurements of electron and X-ray scattering. "Chemistry has always assumed that these are only possible between copper and oxygen in this material."    More...

Mustard Weed Could Provide Cancer Clues
The mustard weed may be the curse of the growing season, but to plant biologists at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, it's a blessing that may someday reveal secrets about the nature of both plants and people. Their research is supported by an NSF grant. Biologists Eric Richards and Jeffrey Jeddeloh have discovered a gene in the mustard weed, Arabidopsis thaliana, that plays a vital role in a process called DNA methylation, a chemical modification in cytosine, one of the four chemical subunits of DNA. Without proper DNA methylation, higher organisms from plants to humans have a host of developmental problems, from dwarfing in plants to tumor development in humans to certain death in mice.    More...

Knowledge-Centered Awards Jump Start NSF Focus on I.T. for the 21st Century
The National Science Foundation (NSF) this week awarded $50 million in grants for broad-based research in knowledge and distributed intelligence (KDI). The awards are for projects as varied as knowledge networking in biocomplexity, earthquake computer modeling and case studies in intellectual property. The 31 grants to two dozen institutions in 20 states "clearly demonstrate the enormous impact that the explosive growth in computer technology has had across all areas of science and engineering," says Richard Hilderbrandt, NSF program manager for the multi-disciplinary awards. "These awards are a solid foundation for NSF's new initiative in information technology for the 21st Century (IT²)."    More...

Male/Female Salary Gaps in Engineering Less Than in Many Other Occupations
Recent studies have found that in the United States, women earn as little as 71-74 cents on every dollar earned by men. This is not quite the case in the engineering profession, says a newly published NSF Issue Brief, which asks in its title, "How Large is the Gap in Salaries of Male and Female Engineers?" In engineering, the salary gap was as small as 13 percent in 1995, based upon an NSF survey covering employed full-time engineers, which included 1.5 million college graduates of all ages in 16 engineering occupations. Controlling for years of experience and other variables in a process called multivariate regression analysis, the gender gap in salaries actually shrinks to as little as three percent or less.    More...

Poll Shows Americans' Concern over "Y2K" Continues to Drop
As the end of 1999 approaches, Americans say they are less worried now about Year 2000-related computer problems than they were six to nine months ago, according to a recent Gallup poll conducted in partnership with the National Science Foundation and USA Today. "We believe that a well-informed and educated public is better able to deal with and understand the consequences of 'Y2K,'" said George Strawn, NSF's Computer Networking Division Director. "Notice that as the public's knowledge and awareness of 'Y2K' has risen over the past six to nine months, its level of worry or concern has declined," Strawn added.    More...