Paul Thompson, Jeri Watson, Caty Weaver and AviArditti.

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This is SCIENCE IN THE NEWS, in VOA Special English. I'm BobDoughty.

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And I'm Sarah Long. This week: the Nobel Prize winners forscience…melting ice in Antarctica…and more about an award-winningsupercomputer.

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But first, news about a vaccine to protect against the diseaseinfluenza…

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The United States will have limited supplies of vaccine toprevent influenza this winter. As a result, American officials areurging healthy adults to delay getting the vaccine or not get one atall this flu season.

The officials say the limited supplies should go first to peoplemost at risk from influenza. High-risk groups include children agesix to twenty-three months and anyone sixty-five years of age andolder. They also include pregnant women and people with long-termmedical conditions. Officials say health workers and persons caringfor babies also need flu vaccine injections.

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There will be no flu vaccine this year from a company thatprovides half the supply used in the United States. The company,Chiron, makes its vaccine in Liverpool, England. Last week, Britishofficials suspended its production permit for three months. Americanhealth officials say the British action was unexpected.

Chiron had announced in September that some of its flu vaccinefailed company inspections for purity. But Chiron also said itexpected to be able to release its supplies by early October. Nowthe company says it will not be able to release any of its productthis flu season.

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Chicken eggs are used in the process to make flu vaccine. Chironis one of two companies that supply the vaccine used in flu shots inthe United States. There have been limited supplies before, butnothing like this. The head of the Centers for Disease Control andPrevention says a long-term solution is needed. Doctor JulieGerberding says this would end the situation of an undependablesupply from year to year.

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Health experts in the United States are criticizing the Food andDrug Administration after the worldwide withdrawal of a popularmedicine. The criticism comes five years after the F.D.A. approvedthe drug Vioxx for treating pain. The maker of Vioxx, Merck andCompany, announced last month that it has stopped selling the drug.Merck said a long-term study suggested that people who used Vioxxhad an increased risk of heart attacks and strokes.

The drug company paid for the study itself. Two thousand sixhundred people were observed for eighteen months. Merck organizedthe study to find out if Vioxx was helpful in preventing cancergrowths in the colon. But, the study discovered something else. Itfound that heart attacks were almost two times as common among Vioxxusers than among those who did not take the drug.

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The Food and Drug Administration approved Vioxx innineteen-ninety-nine. The following year, Merck gave the federalagency results of a study on the drug's safety. It found thatpatients taking Vioxx had an increased risk of health problems, suchas heart attacks and strokes. Two years ago, the F. D. A. orderedMerck to include warnings with the drug.

Vioxx is among a group of drugs called Cox-Two non-steroidalanti-inflammatories. They grew in popularity among pain sufferersbecause they are supposed to cause fewer stomach problems than othermedicines. Worldwide sales of Vioxx were worth two thousandfive-hundred million dollars last year.

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New studies show that glaciers ontwo sides of Antarctica are getting thinner and moving faster. Thechanges might mean that seawater levels could continually rise forhundreds of years. Three teams of investigators carried out separatestudies of the Antarctic glaciers. The teams used satellites andairplanes to observe the thick ice covering the continent.

One area studied is along the Antarctic Peninsula, just south ofthe Atlantic Ocean. The other area faces the Pacific Ocean. Itinvolves the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and the Amundsen Sea. In eachplace, floating ice formations called ice shelves were connected tothe coastline. Or, they were connected to the sea bottom. The iceshelves were in front of the glaciers.

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The studies examined what happened after these ice shelves brokeup. Scientists report that the shelves seemingly released largepieces of inland ice. The freed ice is now flowing faster toward thecoast. There it will melt and raise the sea level.

The scientists say warming conditions on Antarctica caused someof the changes. Yet not all areas of the continent are gettingwarmer. Some areas are cooling. Still, the studies show that enoughcoastal air and waters have warmed to produce the changedconditions.

Some of the scientists say the sea level will rise aboutsix-tenths of a meter by two thousand one hundred. That is withinestimates made by a worldwide committee studying the warming ofEarth's atmosphere. But, that amount already threatens the future ofareas below sea level.

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Theodore Scambos of the University of Colorado says he believesAntarctica reacts fast to climate warming. Temperatures there haverisen as much as two-point-five degrees Celsius in the past sixtyyears. That is said to be one of the fastest rates in the world.Mister Scambos was among the research scientists from Americanuniversities who studied the Antarctic glaciers. They say morewarming could cause additional ice to fall into the sea. Scientistsfrom the American space agency took part in the studies. So didresearchers from the Institute of Antarctica in Argentina and theCenter of Scientific Studies in Chile.

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The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced winners of theNobel Prizes for science last week. This year, three Americans willshare the Nobel Prize for Physics. David Gross, David Politzer andFrank Wilczak are being recognized for their studies of quarks, thesmallest building blocks of nature.

Three scientists will share theNobel Prize for Chemistry. They are Aaron Ciechanover and AvramHershko, both of Israel, and American Irwin Rose. The Royal SwedishAcademy says the three men provided important findings about thenormal process of protein destruction in cells.

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The Nobel Prize for Physiology orMedicine will be given to two Americans. Richard Axel and Linda Buckstudied the sense of smell. They were recognized for their discoveryof a large family of genes and receptors in the nose that are linkedto the genes.

The two Americans found that three percent of all human genes areresponsible for the sense of smell. Their work helped explained howanimals recognize and remember about ten thousand different smells.

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Supercomputers are extremely powerful. They are mostly forscientific and engineering work. If you ever decide to build asupercomputer, you can get some ideas from how it was done at theVirginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. Virginia Techstudents, teachers, and others linked together one thousand onehundred personal computers. They used the Macintosh G-five made byApple Computer.

This year, they rebuilt the machine with a new server computerfrom Apple, the Xserve G-five. This is expected to make thesupercomputer even stronger. It was already the most powerfulcomputer at any university, and the third most powerful in theworld.

In all, almost two hundred people worked to build thesupercomputer last year at the school in Blacksburg, Virginia. Teammembers worked seven days a week and up to twenty hours a day.

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The team designed and built the supercomputer in three months.They named it System X. It cost a little more than five milliondollars to build. Other top supercomputers had cost at least tentimes more.

The team members tested the computer each time they finished partof it. On September twenty-third, two thousand-three, they turned onthe complete system for the first time. They learned that their newcomputer could solve ten million million mathematical problems everysecond.

Physicists at Virginia Tech are using System X to design newelectronic systems controlled by single atoms. Chemists andbiologists use System X in studies of molecules.

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SCIENCE IN THE NEWS was written by Paul Thompson, Jeri Watson,Caty Weaver and Avi Arditti. Cynthia Kirk was our producer. This isBob Doughty.

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And this is Sarah Long. Join us again next week for more newsabout Science in Special English on VOA.