IN^TheNews

USA Today quoted Carnegie president Maxine Singer in an August 14 story about human cloning. Singer served on a National Academy of Sciences panel that recommended banning the cloning of human beings.

A front-page article in the August 6 Wall Street Journal talked about Embryology’s Andrew Fire’s groundbreaking discovery with Craig Mello in 1998 of using double-stranded RNA to silence targeted genes. The process is known as RNA interference. The story said that the commercial sector is using the technique extensively and that the discovery has significantly advanced our understanding of how genes operate.

National Geographic magazine ran a sidebar in its July issue that talked about Carnegie’s centennial and its astrobiology work. James Scott, Staff Associate at the Geophysical Laboratory, was quoted about his research with common bacteria that were subjected to extreme conditions and lived.

An article about Mercury and the MESSENGER mission to the innermost planet appeared in the October Astronomy Magazine . It quoted Sean Solomon, mission Principal Investigator and director of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, extensively.

George Cody of the Geophysical Laboratory was quoted in the June 4 New York Times in an article about astrobiology. Sara Seager, the newest Staff Member at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism (DTM), was also quoted. In addition, the article noted the work of DTM’s Paul Butler in the search for extrasolar planets.

News outlets from around the world reported on the announcement made by Paul Butler and team of the first solar

system found that is analogous to our own. The system is around a Sun-like star, 55 Cancri, and features a planet with a mass and orbit similar to Jupiter’s. On June 15 Butler was interviewed about the discovery on NBC’s Today . The story appeared in national publications such as Time magazine, the New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, and the L. A. Times. Many local papers, science publications, and international media including the BBC and the Sydney Morning Herald also carried the news. In addition to Butler, Alycia Weinberger of DTM participated in the NASA news briefing announcing the find.

A monumental roundup on the state of cosmology that appeared in the July 23 New York Times featured several Carnegie scientists: Allan Sandage, Staff Member Emeritus of the Observatories;Alan Dressler, also of the Observatories; and Vera Rubin of DTM.

The work to determine the expansion rate of the universe, headed by Observatories’ Wendy Freedman, was cited in the May 4 Science News .

The Chilean publication La Segunda ran an article in June about the different observatories in Chile. It described Las Campanas and the Magellan Project, and talked about George Preston’s work on first-generation stars. It also mentioned night assistant and comic illustrator Herman Olivares and Oscar Duhalde, instrument specialist and codiscoverer of Supernova 1987A.

DTM’s Alan Boss answered a question on why the Earth spins, posed by an 11-year-old reader, for the Washington Post ’s Kids Post section. A paper he cowrote with DTM’s George Wetherill and Nader Haghighipour, which appeared in the March issue of Icarus, attracted a lot of attention. The paper explained how Uranus and Neptune could have formed under the disk instability model in a chaotic nascent solar system. The work was featured in the June 17 San Francisco Chronicle, the July Sky & Telescope, Astrobiology Magazine, and SPACE.com, among other publications. Images from Boss’s model on planet formation were also featured in the August Sky & Telescope .

Attention-Getting

Conference at Carnegie

The field of extrasolar planets is one of the most intriguing areas in science today. On June 18-21 Carnegie and NASA cosponsored a conference on the subject titled “Scientific Frontiers in Research on Extrasolar Planets.” DTM’s Sara Seager and Alan Boss helped organize the meeting. Researchers came from all over the world to the conference site at Carnegie’s administration building in Washington, D.C. Many members of the press also attended.

A press conference was held in the library on June 19. William Herbst, an astronomer at Wesleyan University who was a postdoc at DTM between 1976 and1978, announced that his team found evidence suggesting that dust and gas, the precursors to planets, and possibly something larger may be orbiting the distant star KH 15D. The find could give scientists a view of what goes on during early planet formation. Reporters from news organizations such as CBS News, the Associated Press, United Press International, the Voice of America, and the publications USA Today, Nature, and Sky & Telescope were present at the announcement. Others watched the proceedings via a live webcast conducted by Carnegie’s Web manager, John Strom. Alan Boss participated in the event by fielding questions from reporters. News coverage was extensive.