News archive - May 1995

I. Microcrystals while you wait

The idea of this is to grow crystals of coloured metal compounds in drops of water on glass slides, under a biological microscope. A drop of water will completely dry up and crystallize in 30 minutes, so if you start 'em 15 minutes before class, students can observe the progress of crystal growth They don't quite grow visibly, but almost: have the students check them every 2 minutes or so

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These days, one hears a lot of talk about the 'Information Super Highway'. Often, one wonders what this actually means to us as individuals or as professional scientists. As soon as you discover the delights of Internet and the National Center for Supercomputing Application's program called 'Mosaic', you’ll see that the super highway has a lot to offer. Mosaic is an information browser that runs on the 'World Wide Web'. This enables documents to be linked together with information or images somewhere else on the Internet.