In Brief

Baruch Blumberg, winner of the 1976 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine and director of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, was appointed as senior adviser to NASA Administrator Daniel S. Goldin in October. In this capacity, Blumberg will help NASA’s newly created Office of Biological and Physical Research to develop an interdisciplinary research program that will bring together physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering. He will also continue as director of the institute.

Robert H. Romer, editor of the American Journal of Physics since 1 June 1988, will be retiring on 30 June both as editor and as a professor of physics at Amherst College. Following his retirement, he plans to go “back to the lab,” he says. Jan Tobochnik, a professor of physics and computer science at Kalamazoo College, will take over the editorship on 1 July.

This year’s Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology (Theoretical) and Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology (Experimental) were awarded this past November at the eighth Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology in Bethesda, Maryland, in recognition of “major advances in the ability to build useful devices and structures with atomic precision,” according to the Foresight Institute, which sponsors the prize. The theoretical prize went to Uzi Landman, Regents and Institute Professor of Physics and Fuller E. Callaway Chair at the Georgia Institute of Technology, for “his pioneering work in computational materials science for nanostructures. Such computer modeling provides deep insights into the nature and properties of matter at the nanoscale, and is essential in predicting what could be built at the molecular level, reducing time spent on expensive ‘wet’ lab experiments.” The experimental prize went to the multidisciplinary team of R. Stanley Williams, director of the Quantum Science Research Laboratory at HP Labs in Palo Alto, California; Philip Kuekes, a senior scientist in the Quantum Science Research Laboratory; and James Heath, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at UCLA. They were cited for “building a molecular switch, a major step toward their long-term goal of building entire memory chips that are just a hundred nanometers wide, smaller than a bacterium.”