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Electronic Mail{{/B}} During the past few years, scientist the world over have suddenly found themselves productively engaged in task they once spent their lives avoiding-writing, any kind of writing but particularly letter writing. Encouraged by electronic mail's surprisingly high speed, convenience and economy, people who never before touched the stuff are regularly, skillfully, even cheerfully tapping out a great deal of correspondence. Electronic networks, woven into the fabric of scientific communication these days, are the route to colleagues in distant counties, shared data, bulletin boards and electronic journals. Anyone with a personal computer, a modem and the software to link computers over telephone lines can sign on. An estimated five million scientists have done so with more joining every day, most of them communicating through a bundle of interconnected domestic and foreign routes known collectively as the internet, or net. E-mail is staring to edge out the fax, the telephone, overnight mail, and of course, land mail. It shrinks time and distance between scientific collaborators, in par[ because it is conveniently asynchronous (writers can type while their colleagues across time zones sleep; their message will be waiting). If it is not yet speeding discoveries, it is certainly accelerating communication. Jeremy Bernstei, the physicist and science writer, once called E-mail the physicist's umbilical cord. Lately other people, too, have been discovering its connective virtues. Physicists are using it; college students are using it, everybody is using it, and as a sign that it has come of age, the New Yorker has accelerates its liberating presence with a cartoon--an appreciative dog seated at a keyboard, saying happily, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." |