Beam weapons still science fiction

Biological weapons: the facts not the fiction.

Attempts to use biological weapons date back to before the First World War, but at that time the Germans tried to produce biological weapons which would have been effective against animals and plants. A German spy was caught in Norway with 18 sugar cubes, each containing a small vial of anthrax solution. Erhard Geissler’s thorough research1 on biowarfare in the Second World War suggests that th...

Science and prohibited weapons.

T his year, on 17 June, the Geneva Protocol, an international treaty prohibiting the use of asphyxiating or poisonous gases and bacteriological methods of warfare, turned 80 years of age. It was fostered in part by a 1918 appeal in which the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) described the use of poisonous gas against soldiers as a " barbarous invention which science is bringing to...

Fiction informed by science.

Science Fiction and Macdonald's Polynomials

This work studies the remarkable relationships that hold among certain m-tuples of the Garsia-Haiman modules M and corresponding elements of the Macdonald basis. We recall that in 10], M is deened for a partition`n, as the linear span of derivatives of a certain bihomogeneouspolynomial (x; y) in the variables x 1 ; x 2 conjecturedin 6], 10] that M has n! dimensionsand that its bigraded Frobeniu...

Organ printing: fiction or science.

Aggregates of living cells (i.e. model tissue fragments) under appropriate conditions fuse like liquid drops. According to Steinberg's differential adhesion hypothesis (DAH), this may be understood by assuming that cells are motile and tissues made of such cells possess an effective surface tension. Here we show that based on these properties three-dimensional cellular structures of prescribed ...