Terrorism Countermeasures
Restrict Freedom
of Scientific Inquiry in USA.
"An American Institute of Physics survey of universities showed that at least 20 percent of foreign students in physics admitted to U.S. schools had problems entering the country last year," the Associated Press reports. Why? Continued fallout from Nine Eleven has severely resricted the ability of foreign graduate students and postdoctoral researchers to obtain visas. That's not all. "Influential researchers and academic organizations complain that inquiry has been hindered by new anti-terrorist laws, tightened national security and stricter immigration practices," the AP reports. How seriously do restrictions on freedom of scientific inquiry threaten the ability of USA science to accomplish research? The AP article offers a hard look at the issue.
Counterintuitive Physics:
a Persistent Problem
in the History of Science.
"In America's high schools, physics teachers routinely wrestle with the clash between students' intuitions and the realities of physics," writes Keay Davidson in the San Francisco Chronicle (August 4, 2003). The intellectual conflict between a person's preconceived notions and the realities of hard science extends beyond the classroom into many aspects of life, including the recent investigation into the destruction of Space Shuttle Columbia. Researchers have named this associative disconnect "counterintuitive physics," which Science Writer Davidson explores in the Chronicle article. You can read "Common Sense Doesn't Always Fly" by clicking here for passage to another realm of the World Wide Web.
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Dr. Heather
Woolverton
Spring, 2004
NASA "is giving serious consideration to bringing back a new version of the Apollo capsule," TIME Online Edition reports. Read Broward Liston's analysis of current thinking about how the U.S. might put women and men into space in the climate of caution following the loss of Shuttle Columbia.
A solar flare can create up to a pound of antimater, the Astrophysical Journal Letters reports in an overview of a project drawing data from NASA's Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI) spacecraft.
Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have cooled a sodium gas to the lowest temperature ever recorded — only half-a-billionth of a degree above absolute zero.
The Antarctic ozone hole is bigger than it has ever been at this time of year, threatening populated regions of south America and New Zealand with harmful levels of ultraviolet radiation, the Financial Times of London reports.
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1420 Syllabus 
