nation than a scientific study. The sena- tor wore a cardiovascular monitor dur- ing the flight to measure his heart rhythms and blood pressure and a sleep monitor to gauge his brain waves and eye movements while he was slumber- ing. He also provided blood and urine samples to determine how quickly his bones and muscles were deteriorating in zero gravity. When researchers analyze the data, they will look for unusual re- sults that may justify full-scale studies in space. “We won’t get any answers from these experiments,” says Andrew Mon- jan, chief of the neurobiology branch of the National Institute on Aging. “But we may get some interesting questions.” Overlooked in the media frenzy over Glenn’s return to space were the more sig- nificant scientific accomplish- ments of the mission. The shuttle crew successfully re- leased and retrieved the Spar- tan 201 satellite, which pro- vided striking images of the sun’s corona. The crew also tested a platform of instru- ments that will be installed on the Hubble Space Tele- scope in 2000. In addition, dozens of experiments were conducted in the shuttle’s Spacehab laboratory, in- cluding a study to determine whether near-perfect crystals of human insulin can be grown in zero gravity. After the flight, Glenn was a little wobbly on his feet, but after a good night’s sleep he said he was back to nor- mal. When the seven crew members re- turned to Houston—home of the NASA Johnson Space Center—1,000 people gathered at the airport to welcome them. Houston Mayor Lee Brown said the flight had “renewed an American love affair with space travel.” The question now is: Will the love last?—Mark Alpert News and Analysis 32 Scientific American January 1999 A Weapon against MS Positive results are in from the most extensive clinical trial of a drug to treat a form of multiple sclerosis, in which the body’s immune system attacks the coatings of nerve cells. The study, which involved more than 500 patients in nine countries, looked at interferon beta 1a. Derived from genetically modified hamster cells, the drug is identical to the human body’s own interferon beta, which acts to suppress wayward immune responses. As reported in the November 7, 1998, Lancet, the drug reduced relapse rates by up to one third, slowed the pro- gression to disability by 75 percent and decreased brain lesions—all without substantial side effects. Tag-Team Voting The Minnesota gubernatorial election of former pro-wrestler Jesse “The Body” Ventura, nemesis of Hulk Hogan, may not have been democratically fair, argues Donald G. Saari, a mathematician at North- western University. In the three-way race, Ventura won but did not receive more than half of all votes. Saari says such plurality elections are akin to ranking a student who earned three As and two Fs higher than one who got two As and three Bs. Elections using weighted votes (two for the first choice, one for the second, zero for the third), first proposed by French mathematician Jean-Charles Borda in 1770, can more accurately reflect an electorate’s wishes. Where the Money Goes The National Science Foundation recently issued a report describing trends in venture-capital spending. In the U.S., such investments reached $9.4 billion in 1996; the biggest recipient was the computer-technology business, which got 32 percent of the funds. Medical/health care and telecom- munications companies were other big winners. In Europe, which invested an equivalent of $8.6 billion in 1996, the focus was on industrial equipment, high-fashion clothing and consumer products, which received more than 30 percent of the money; computer- related companies took in only 5 percent. In both the U.S. and Europe, seed money for new firms accounted for only 3 to 6 percent of the total; the bulk, more than 62 percent, went to back company expansions. —Philip Yam In Brief, continued from page 30 SA JOHN GLENN SUITS UP at the Kennedy Space Center in preparation for his nine- day shuttle flight. M eteorites have been called the poor man’s space probe—cheap samples of the beyond. In that case, cosmic rays must be the poor man’s particle acceler- ator. A cosmic-ray particle coming from the direction of the constellation Auri- ga, detected by an instrument in Utah in 1991, had an energy of 3 × 10 20 elec- tron volts—more than 100 million times beyond the range of present accelera- tors. Such natural largesse achieves what purpose-built machines have long sought: a probe of physics underlying the current Standard Model. For years, people thought the 1991 ray and a few similar ones—registered, for example, by the Akeno Giant Air Shower Array (AGASA) west of Tokyo—might have been flukes. But last summer Masahiro Takeda of the Uni- versity of Tokyo and the rest of the AGASA team reported five more such events. Roughly one is seen by the array each year, and there is no indication of any limit to their energy. Current theories say that is impossible. If these cosmic rays are protons or atom- ic nuclei, as the experiments hint, they must be moving almost at the speed of light. At that clip, the cosmic microwave background, a tenuous gas of primordial radiation that fills space, looks like a thick sea. Particles wading through it lose energy until they fall below 5 × 10 19 eV, known as the Greisen-Zatsepin- Kuzmin cutoff. After traveling 150 mil- lion light-years, no ordinary particle could still have the observed energies. Yet astronomers have seen no plausi- COSMIC POWER Superenergetic cosmic rays could reveal the unification of the forces of nature PHYSICS Governor of Minnesota AP PHOTO SHELLY KATZ Gamma Liaison Copyright 1998 Scientific American, Inc.