New Shock Treatment — Neither electric stimulation nor convulsion may be necessary components in the electroshock treatment of certain types of mental illness…. A group of 97 mental patients … were assigned at random to one of five treatment groups: 1. conventional electroshock therapy (EST); 2. a combination of EST and the drug, anectine; 3. EST and truth serum (pentothal); 4. pentothal alone, and 5. laughing gas (nitrous oxide) alone…. All types of treatment led to marked improvement in the patient as measured by psychiatric evaluations and psychological tests. There were no statisti...

June 30–July 3 The Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition. Visit www.summerscience.org.uk/ July 6–10 Growers and researchers gather in Romania, for the European Association for Potato Research’s four-day congress. Visit www.eapr2008-brasov.com August 1 Total solar eclipse visible in parts of Canada, Greenland, Russia and China. Visit eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse.html SN Online www.sciencenews.org

June 15 Baseball as America opens at the Boston Museum of Science. Visit www.mos.org/exhibits_shows. June 29–July 3 The Ninth International Conference on Permafrost at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Visit www.nicop.org July 27/28 Southern δ-Aquariids meteor shower peak. Visit www.imo.net/calendar/2008

Carbon dioxide changes undifferentiated cells

A little gravity “Britain’s biggest meteorite strike” (SN: 4/12/08, p. 238) states that “gravitational anomalies” make an offshore area a prime candidate as the possible impact site of a meteorite. Wouldn’t that be magnetic anomalies instead? If it is a gravitational anomaly, I would sure like an article on that alone! Thanks for the great magazine. PETER LINDSAY, SEATTLE, WASH. The craters from extraterrestrial impacts can create measurable gravitational as well as magnetic anomalies (SN: 6/15/02, p. 378), albeit exceedingly small ones. For the area off the Scottish coast, the...