Scientists

In the latest urgent call for improvements in primary and secondary schools a panel of experts and politicians has recommended national curriculum standards and tests. The message of the National Council on Education Standards and Testing, like that of an Education Department report in September, is that inadequate education, particularly in mathematics and science, threatens our economic well-being, national identity and democratic institutions. Conspicuously absent from the debate has been any mention of a political issue integral to the problem: Students' poor performance mirrors their parents' alienation from those who decide about the risks and benefits of science and technology.

In a research program getting under way this summer, shipboard scientists will punch thousands of holes in the ocean bottom and take samples from greater depths than ever before. They will be investigating the biology, chemistry and physics of "inner space," the vast world hidden beneath the seas. The Integrated Ocean Drilling Program, led by American and Japanese scientists, begins in June with a 10-month expedition to plumb the crust beneath the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. The layers of rock below the seafloor are an archive of global change, tens of millions of years old, that scientists say can help them understand what's happening to our world today.

Standing before a group of professional scientists, most of whom had their chins in their hands and were murmuring the obligatory "umm . . . interesting," Michael LaLena worked his way through a computer program that creates mazes and their solutions. He must have explained it pretty well, because within the hour the senior at La Salle College High School was given first prize at the Naval Air Development Center's first science fair. The fair was part of an open house Saturday at the facility in Warminster.

There she stood, this would-be open-heart surgeon, untangling cat intestines as she spoke of how she once had wanted to be a hairdresser. Chanel Reed, 14, had wanted to be a hair stylist because she liked being creative with her hands. But since she became part of Camden's pipeline to the sciences last year, her hands aim for higher pursuits. Now, she said, "I want to explore the body, explore what it can do, what goes on inside yourself, makes you tick. " Reed, who is entering her sophomore year at Camden High School, has participated for the last two summers in the Camden Science Pipeline, a three- year program designed to stir enthusiasm for math and science, to increase the students' chances at succeeding in those subjects in high school and college, and to help them make science a career.

An international team of scientists, alarmed by the threat to the Earth's ozone layer, is gathering in California today to prepare for the largest study ever done of the Arctic atmosphere. During the next two weeks, they will fine-tune scientific instruments in preparation for a $30 million expedition involving 200 scientists from seven nations that will be centered in Stavanger, Norway, from late December through mid-February. The scientific team - which includes William Brune of the Pennsylvania State University - will use high-altitude aircraft, balloons, satellites and sophisticated computers to seek to understand how the ozone layer is being eroded by manmade chemical pollutants in the Northern Hemisphere.

While scientists have known for some time how the AIDS virus destroys the immune system, they have not understood how it enters the brain and central nervous system. Today, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania report the discovery of a possible way that the AIDS virus infects nerve cells - through a certain "docking point" on a cell. "Until now this has been a big puzzle," said Francisco Gonzalez-Scarano, associate professor of neurology and microbiology at Penn. "We now believe we have discovered the mechanism by which this infection occurs.

Hilary Koprowski, an internationally known scientist who helped develop vaccines against rabies and polio, was awarded the prestigious Philadelphia Award last night. The $25,000 award, which is given annually to a Philadelphian who has set an example by serving the "best and largest interests of the community," was presented to Koprowski during ceremonies at the College of Physicians at 19 S. 22d St. Koprowski, 73, is giving the award to the Wistar Institute, which he has directed since 1957.

For the initiated, the license plate says it all. GENOME is the moniker on Beatrice Mintz's light-blue Chevrolet in the staff parking lot at the Fox Chase Cancer Center. Lay folk who can't rattle off a definition of that word might prefer others to describe Mintz - words such as biologist, researcher, pioneer, member of the National Academy of Sciences and, as of last month, member of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. But her vanity plate expresses in only six PennDOT-approved letters the subject of the life's work that has brought the Fox Chase scientist so many honors.

Most members of Congress who want to unravel a scientific controversy call a hearing. There, witnesses with opposing views make their best case. Or they call the National Academies of Science or another independent panel for expert advice. Not Texas Republican Joe Barton, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. He has opted for a witch hunt. Last month, Barton launched an investigation into the research and backgrounds of three prominent climate scientists.

Last spring, when physicist David Wright began asking Cornell University faculty members to sign a pledge refusing to participate in "Star Wars" research, a colleague told him he would be lucky if 10 percent agreed to sign. But Wright, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, felt that it was important to take a stand against the Reagan administration's plan to develop a shield against nuclear attack. He felt that the Strategic Defense Initiative, commonly known as Star Wars, was both technically unworkable and morally wrong.

WASHINGTON - Worldwide levels of the chief greenhouse gas that causes global warming have hit a milestone, reaching an amount never before encountered by humans, federal scientists said Friday. Carbon dioxide was measured at 400 parts per million at the oldest monitoring station, which is in Hawaii and sets the global benchmark. The last time the worldwide carbon level was probably that high was about two million years ago, said Pieter Tans of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

The lunch-hour rush is under way at the convoy of food trucks that line Spruce Street near the University of Pennsylvania campus. From inside the cramped Chez Yasmine, Jihed Chehimi is serving gourmet street fare from around the globe - heaping salmon sandwiches sprinkled with caviar, homemade couscous, and cups of Indian red lentil soup - all with a side of conversation that occasionally turns to the science of AIDS. For more than two decades, the Ph.D. in viral immunology was an HIV/AIDS researcher, first at Penn and then at the labs of the Wistar Institute, where the senior scientist explored innate and adaptive immunity.

By Ravi Parikh President Obama's 10-year "BRAIN Initiative" will bring together scientists from private and public institutions to investigate how the brain's 100 billion cells interact with each other. Many researchers believe that brain mapping could unlock the secrets behind complex diseases like Alzheimer's and autism. While some scientists praise BRAIN (it stands for Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies), others have criticized its chances of success and the price tag - $100 million in 2014 and up to $3 billion over the next decade.

Do animals have a sense of fairness? Do they empathize with another's pain? A few decades ago, such questions would have been dismissed as nonsense. Even today, they'd be rejected by many ethicists who argue that moral reasoning is unique to humans. Frans de Waal begs to differ. He holds that morality springs from our instincts as social animals, not from God, Society, Reason or any other capitalized Higher Being. The Dutch-born primatologist, who will speak at the Free Library of Philadelphia on Thursday at 7:30 p.m., has spent three decades upending our assumptions about the origin of morality.

GENEVA, Switzerland - It is one of the cosmos' most mysterious unsolved cases: dark matter. It is supposedly what holds the universe together. We can't see it, but scientists are pretty sure it's out there. Led by a dogged, Nobel-winning gumshoe who has spent 18 years on the case, scientists put a $2 billion detector aboard the International Space Station to try to track down the stuff. And after two years, the first evidence came in Wednesday: tantalizing cosmic footprints that seem to have been left by dark matter.

Holy Hogwarts! Scientists are one step closer to creating a real version of Harry Potter's Cloak of Invisibility. A team of physicists announced Monday they had successfully hidden a seven-inch cylinder from a microwave imaging device with a "three-dimensional stand-alone mantle cloak. " The cloak is constructed out of a "metasurface," an ultrafine mesh of copper-tape filaments, each thinner than a human hair, according to the team's paper published in the New Journal of Physics . The fishnet design of the metasurface scattered radiowaves in a pattern that was opposite to those reflected from the cylinder, said the team which is based at the University of Texas at Austin.

GENEVA, Switzerland - The search is all but over for a subatomic particle that is a crucial building block of the universe. Physicists announced Thursday that they believe they had confirmed discovery of the particle, which will go a long way toward explaining what gives electrons and all matter in the universe size and shape. The elusive particle, called a Higgs boson, was predicted in 1964 to help fill in our understanding of the creation of the universe, which many theorize occurred in a massive explosion known as the big bang.

Remember the fanfare a while back about a compound in red wine that seemed to extend the life span of bees, flies, and worms? It never looked like much of a good bet for humans, as the equivalent amount of wine was something like 100 glasses a day - plus, scientists were not even sure why it worked in the "lower" organisms. On Thursday, scientists from Harvard and Sirtris, a GlaxoSmithKline company in Cambridge, Mass., said they now know for sure. In the journal Science, the team said it had verified that the key to this antiaging process was activating an enzyme in the human body called SIRT1.

Federal officials warned this week that "nightmare bacteria" - including the deadly superbug that struck a National Institutes of Health facility two years ago - are increasingly resistant to even the strongest antibiotics, posing a growing threat to hospitals and nursing homes nationwide. "It's not often that our scientists come to me and say we have a very serious problem and we need to sound an alarm," Thomas Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, told a news conference Tuesday.

ORACABESSA BAY, Jamaica - Mats of algae and seaweed have shrouded the once-thick coral in shallow reefs off Jamaica's north coast. Warm ocean waters have bleached out the coral, and in a cascade of ecological decline, the sea urchins and plant-eating reef fish have mostly vanished, replaced by snails and worms that bore through coral skeletons. Now, off the shores of Jamaica, as well as in Caribbean islands from Bonaire to St. Croix, conservationists are planting fast-growing coral species to try and turn things around by "seeding" reefs.