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| For more information on these science news and feature story tips, please contact the public information officer at the end of each item at (703) 292-8070. Contents of this News Tip:
SCIENTISTS DEVELOP NEW AIRCRAFT ICING PREDICTION SYSTEMA new icing prediction and display system developed by NSF funded scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado is now being tested at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport. From December through March, surface weather stations, snow weighing gauges, and Doppler radars are being used to measure snowfall accumulation, temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, as well as the water content of snow. The data will be processed instantly and displayed graphically on video monitors at the American and United Airlines station controls, the city of Chicago "snow desk," and the United Airlines Meteorology Department. More accurate information will make winter takeoffs safer, and help airlines stick more closely to their schedules, while also saving money through efficient deicing procedures. [Cheryl Dybas]
NEW WEB SITE HIGHLIGHTS IMPACT OF COMPUTERS ON TODAY'S WORLDA new World Wide Web (WWW) site for the NSF's computer and information science and engineering directorate features both program information for scientists and an exciting array of computer-related information. With links to images, video and sound, as well as accompanying text, the site vividly highlights the impact of computers on today's world. The site emphasizes the role of computer and computational sciences in many discoveries. Links to NSF-funded supercomputer centers illustrate the many exciting discoveries in all fields of science that involved the use of high-speed computing and communications. The site also describes NSF's role in the development of the Internet and the creation of Mosaic, the original WWW software which gave great impetus to the Web's explosion over the last two years. "The World Wide Web is a natural way for the National Science Foundation, especially the Computer and Information Science and Engineering directorate to reach out and share the excitement generated by computers," said Paul Young, NSF assistant director for CISE. The URL is: http://www.cise.nsf.gov [Beth Gaston]
INTERNATIONAL TEAM SETS NEW RECORD, PEERS DEEP WITHIN THE EARTHAn international team of researchers, funded in part by the NSF, has peered deeper into the Earth than ever before -- about 110 miles down -- yielding new information about the structure of the mantle. The goal of Project URSEIS, or Urals Reflection Seismic Experiment and Integrated Studies, is to understand how continental collisions occur and how mountain-building evolves. Using seismic reflection profiling technology, the scientists have "imaged" previously known features of the mantle deep under the Ural Mountains of Russia. "This is a major milestone," says James Knapp, a geologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. "We have used this technique to image the Earth down to much greater depths than we had previously thought possible." the area under study is connected to major oil and gas basins, and includes rich mining regions of the Urals. Scientists from the U.S., Russia, Germany, and Spain surveyed a 350-mile stretch of the southern Ural Mountains from June through November of this year. Says Knapp, "The Urals seem to be frozen in time: they're the only major mountain belt that has remained intact since the existence of the supercontinent Pangaea in the Mesozoic Era. All other mountain belts broke apart as the super-continent divided." The mantle features imaged by the geologists may, says Knapp, "actually be the base of the plate, lending support to one of the fundamental aspects of plate tectonic theory." [Cheryl Dybas]
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