Fill a Staff Position on Capitol Hill Two ACS Congressional Fellowships Available To Begin Fall 1983 The objectives of the fellowship program are: • To provide an opportunity for scientists to gain firsthand knowledge of the op erations of the legislative branch of the federal government, • To make available to the government an increasing amount of scientific and technical expertise, and • To broaden the perspective of both the scientific and governmental com munities regarding the value of such scientific-governmental interaction.
Applications should be submit ted bv January 31, 1983 to: Dr. Annette T. Rosenblum Department of Public Affairs American Chemical Society 1155—16th St., N.W. Washington, D.C. 20036
Applications consist of a letter of intent, resume, and two letters of reference. The letter of intent should include a description of the applicant's experience in publicoriented projects in which scientific or technical knowledge was used as a basis for interaction and a statement that tells why they have applied for the Fellowship and what they hope to accomplish as an ACS Congressional Fellow. The resume should describe the candidate's educa tion and professional experience and in clude other pertinent personal informa tion. Letters of reference should be so licited from people who can discuss not only the candidate's competence but also the applicant's experience in publicoriented projects. Arrangements should be made to send the letters of reference directly to ACS. For further information call (202) 872-4384.
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C&EN Nov. 22, 1982
Newscripts
Yelling for relief Susan Feeney reported recently in The Wall Street Journal, "At pre cisely 11 o'clock most evenings, hun dreds of Cornell University students throw open their dormitory windows and yell like crazy for 10 minutes." The yelling is alleged to relieve the hideous pressures of schoolwork and is said to reach its peak during pre liminary and final exams. The loudest yelling, Feeney says, comes on nights preceding exams in* Chemistry 207. The course is a premedical require ment and, according to Feeney, pre cipitated the shouting sessions in 1980. Planes may seed clouds by flying through them Peter Hobbs and Art Rangno at the University of Washington believe that airplanes may seed clouds with ice crystals simply by flying through them. The two have compiled nine possible instances of the phenomenon caused by their B-23 research aircraft. Their findings may warrant re-ex amination of some cloud-seeding ex periments and many studies of the structure of clouds. In rainmaking experiments, sci entists often compare the growth of ice crystals in unseeded clouds with that in clouds seeded with silver io dide or dry ice. But on the second trip through clouds, the Washington duo suspects, they may be counting ice crystals produced by the aircraft on the first trip. While probing the structure of cu mulus clouds, Hobbs and Rangno found high concentrations of ice particles sized with a uniformity usually found only with dry-ice seeding. They found such particles only after they had penetrated the cloud at least twice. The two use a laser to count and size particles; laser-produced shadowgrams give a picture over time of the particles the aircraft encounters. Typically they find very few ice particles per liter of cumulus cloud, but they found hun dreds of them when they'd been through the cloud once before. Laboratory experiments suggest that ice particles form when moisture contacts the aircraft's skin—a process called riming—and then are shed. Hobbs and Rangno, however, think ice particles may form from the plane's exhaust rather than through riming. Substances such as lead in the
by Κ. Μ. Reese
exhaust may promote formation of ice, says Hobbs, "but at this point we can only guess." A big problem in studying the phenomenon is flying through exactly the same part of a cloud twice. Rangno manages at the moment by eyeballing the cloud from the B-23's plastic turret. The difficulty of re entering at the same point, he says, may help to explain why plane-caused seeding previously has not been ob served directly. Trivia from St. Louis The November issue of Chemical Bond, published by the ACS St. Louis Section, carries some trivia assembled by Jane Miller, the section's histo rian. The section once scheduled a talk on "Fire Risks in Chemical Fac tories," Miller reports, only to have the meeting place, the Missouri Ath letic Club, burn down the night be fore. At the ACS national meeting in St. Louis in 1928, Anheuser-Busch was said to have served a "sumptuous lunch and liquid refreshments," causing "several dyed-in-the-wool Republicans to think seriously about voting for Al Smith." At the time, the land was parched by Prohibition, and Smith, the Democratic candidate for President, opposed it. In 1903, Miller goes on, the St. Louis Chemical Society ejected two founding members, a father and son, for ungentlemanly and unprofes sional conduct. Where the gold is International Gold Corp., the mar keting arm of the South African gold mining industry, has lately published an analysis of where all the gold is that's been mined. It's titled "Above-Ground Stocks of Gold— Amounts and Distribution." Among the findings: Close to 89,000 tons of gold has been mined in the world; 42% of it is held by monetary authorities and official institutions; 30% is held in the form of jewelry; 11% is held by private parties as coin bullion. Private stocks of gold coin and bullion have risen 350%, to an esti mated 10,000 tons, during the past 20 years. The U.S. accounts for almost 14% of total privately held stocks of gold bullion.
