Cosmos

GENEVA -- In a 17-mile circular tunnel curving beneath the Swiss-French border, scientists are poised to re-create the universe's first trillionth of a second. The aim of the audacious undertaking -- whose centerpiece is the Large Hadron Collider, the largest, most powerful particle accelerator ever constructed -- is to solve one of the most perturbing puzzles of physics: How did matter attain mass and form the cosmos? Even Einstein couldn't nail that one. The collider and its multibillion-dollar array of ancillary instruments are designed to re-create and identify the most infinitesimal of subatomic substances -- the material that built the galaxies -- as they blaze into existence with fantastic energy and disappear with such rapidity as to make the blink of an eye seem an eternity.

Here it's only February and we've already got a good candidate for Worst Movie of the Year. This is Steven Seagal's witless, leaden, crackpot "On Deadly Ground," which is a kind of "Billy Jack Goes to Alaska."They may have to write a new book of Ecclesiastes to account for this one: the old "Vanity of Vanities, All is Vanity" just doesn't go far enough. Seagal, who directs this mess himself, modestly portrays himself as the savior of the "natives," as this politically correct he-man styles the Inuit, while at the same time he grossly condescends to characterize them as helpless children without resources who can only prevail with his majestic help.

Recent reports that the universe may be significantly younger than previously thought have sent scientists back to the drawing boards and challenged some of their most settled notions about the size and structure of the cosmos.Last month a team of researchers working with the Hubble Space Telescope reported that calculations derived from a new measurement of the distance to the spiral galaxy M100 -- some 56 million light years from the Sun -- suggests the universe may be no more than 8 billion to 12 billion years old, rather than previous estimates of 15 billion to 20 billion years.

Two rundown shopping centers on Liberty Road a few blocks inside the Baltimore Beltway will be renovated in a $1 million joint venture in which Baltimore County and the centers' owner will split the cost.Work on the Woodmoor and Liberty Crest shopping centers will begin in about six months, said Adam Wasserman, deputy director of the county's Department of Economic Development."We're delighted to be able to move ahead with this project," said Joel Winegarden, vice president of Honolulu Ltd., which owns the shopping centers.

Michelle Yurchak has been at her new job for only two weeks, but yesterday she took a day off, pulled her son Stephan, 13, out of school and drove three hours from Gibbstown, N.J., to Baltimore.Only an appearance by Pele could cause such interruptions."Somebody at work gave me a pamphlet that he was going to be in Baltimore," said Yurchak. "Stephan has all his movies and videos. He does all his school reports on Pele. This is big, a once-in-a-lifetime thing. We had to be here."Pele, regarded as the greatest player in soccer history, was at the Inner Harbor yesterday, signing autographs, posing for pictures with babies and promoting World Cup '94, which will be played in the United States this summer.

Scientists have long suspected that there is more to the universe than meets the eye. Now astronomers have found the most convincing evidence yet that large amounts of previously undiscovered matter are floating around the cosmos -- even though they still can't see it.The evidence comes from the X-ray part of the spectrum studied by a satellite which found a huge cloud of hot gas with more mass than 500 billion suns amid a trio of obscure galaxies known...

The nightmares wouldn't stop -- the sudden, bizarre, unsettling nightmares. They were always the same; they seemed almost real:Lea was sitting in a booth in a small, empty room with gray walls. A monotonic voice behind her said: "Don't move, or you might be hurt."She felt paralyzed. She heard clicking noises, like an X-ray machine. Suddenly she was lying on a table. A bright light shone in her eyes. She sensed people moving around, examining her.Then she was sitting up, facing a short creature so hideous she could not look at its face.

The Maryland Institute, College of Art may be the nation's first art school to market itself in CD form: Last month, it mailed almost 11,000 compact-disc cases containing information about the college to high school art students around the country.Each year the college -- rated this year by U.S. News and World Report as one of the nation's top four art schools -- sends material to a selection of high school students who've indicated an interest in pursuing fine arts on their PSAT tests.The new promotional package, "Music 4 The Eyes," contains a packet with examples of student art and students' thoughts about their work ("Art is the hands and the sense that connects them," "Art is a perfect form of focus")

When Werner Roth came to this country and began making his way through the soccer ranks, he never expected to wind up in a movie with Sylvester Stallone.Thanks to soccer, he did. He and soccer's main legend, Pele, teamed with Stallone and Michael Caine in "Victory," a film in which Allied prisoners of war agreed to a soccer match against Hitler's Germans as an opportunity to escape."Pele, Caine and Stallone played for the Allies," Roth said. "I was the main bad guy for Germany."Roth, 45, former captain of the New York Cosmos, is one of the headliners of Soccer Blast USA, a soccer festival that will he staged tomorrow from noon to 6 p.m. at the Convention Center.

WEEPING CHURCH statues and portraits? Priests suffering from stigmata? Esoteric messages from saints and the supernatural? Granted, this makes great copy, but media attention to such phenomena only serves to bestow undeserved legitimacy on so-called "supernatural occurances" and feed irrational beliefs.The fact is, all the reported phenomena can be explained entirely in physical or natural terms -- if the observers are objective, rational and analytical. For example, paint solvents are known to leach out of surfaces under certain conditions of humidity and temperature.

I am thrilled that the Walters Art Museum collaborated with the Space Telescope Science Institute to bring to the public stunning images of deep space captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. I was recently at the Walters and caught the mesmerizing exhibit Mapping the Cosmos: Images from the Hubble Space Telescope. I later read the essay "Seeing stars" (Opinion Commentary, Feb. 10) by Gary Vikan, the director of the Walters Art Museum. In his column, Mr. Vikan says that art and science have been following divergent paths for centuries and that Mapping the Cosmos is the museum's small way of helping bridge this divide.

Many people were surprised that the Walters Art Museum would partner with the Space Telescope Science Institute (along with the Johns Hopkins University's Program in Museums and Society) to bring photo enlargements from the Hubble Space Telescope to our exhibition galleries. After all, most of us believe that art and science have been following divergent paths for centuries - since long before physicist and novelist C. P. Snow made that seeming split explicit in his famous Rede Lecture of May 1959, "The Two Cultures," wherein he characterized the two as mutually incomprehensible.

ALEXANDRA BOULAT, 45 Photojournalist French photojournalist Alexandra Boulat, whose photographs from Iraq, Afghanistan and the former Yugoslavia gave the world an intimate look at life in conflict zones, died Friday in a Paris hospital, her photo agency said. Ms. Boulat, the daughter of celebrated Life magazine photographer Pierre Boulat, suffered an aneurysm in late June and had been in a coma since then, according to her mother, Annie Boulat, the founder of the France-based Cosmos photo agency.

GENEVA -- In a 17-mile circular tunnel curving beneath the Swiss-French border, scientists are poised to re-create the universe's first trillionth of a second. The aim of the audacious undertaking -- whose centerpiece is the Large Hadron Collider, the largest, most powerful particle accelerator ever constructed -- is to solve one of the most perturbing puzzles of physics: How did matter attain mass and form the cosmos? Even Einstein couldn't nail that one. The collider and its multibillion-dollar array of ancillary instruments are designed to re-create and identify the most infinitesimal of subatomic substances -- the material that built the galaxies -- as they blaze into existence with fantastic energy and disappear with such rapidity as to make the blink of an eye seem an eternity.

Wow. You get caught up in other projects, get a little busy, and suddenly you wake up and they changed the blog name on you. Just kidding. This has been in the works for a while. The online powers-that-be suggested a few months ago that it was time for this blog to have a distinct name and a distinct identity, something a little more creative than just my name slapped on top of it. Everyone else's blog does, and always has, from Roch Around the Clock to Medium Well to O, by the Way. I agreed.

My pin oak has little nutlike growths on its leaves. What should I do? Galls are very common on oaks and maples. These growths are abnormal swellings of plant tissue, usually leaves and twigs, caused by insects, mites, bacteria, fungi or nematodes. Most insect and mite galls result from chemicals introduced by egg laying and feeding. The chemicals cause the affected tree cells to swell. Though galls appear in many strange forms, they rarely do any harm. They do not affect the health of the tree and are more of a cosmetic issue.

MOSCOW - An experimental satellite designed to test spacecraft propulsion by solar power crashed into the ocean shortly after takeoff when the launch rocket shut down prematurely, Russian space officials said yesterday. But the Planetary Society, the Pasadena, Calif., organization that sponsored the flight, held out a slim hope that the craft, called Cosmos 1, made it into orbit, albeit one very different from the orbit that had been planned. A news release issued by the Russian space agency early yesterday said that the converted intercontinental ballistic missile that launched Cosmos 1 from a submarine in the Barents Sea suffered an engine failure in its first stage 83 seconds after ignition - well short of the estimated six minutes the ICBM's three stages were to fire.

The Planetary Society's attempt to launch a satellite containing a solar sail experiment appeared to have failed yesterday, as ground controllers in Russia lost contact with the craft about the same time that the launch rocket stopped firing. The Cosmos 1 spacecraft - powered only by light reflected off a bank of 49-foot sails - was to be boosted into its final orbit by a small rocket scheduled to fire after the main booster expended its fuel. But controllers received no data indicating that the second rocket had fired, and ground-based tracking stations saw no evidence that the craft was in its predicted orbit.

I planted my vegetable seeds in early May, but many of them never grew. This has never happened before. What would keep them from growing? Several gardeners have told me they had the same problem this spring. My guess is that your seeds rotted in the soil when the weather was exceptionally rainy and the soil remained wet for a number of weeks this spring. Evenly moist soil favors healthy seed germination, however extremely wet conditions favor soil diseases that can kill seeds either prior to or during germination.

Dear Cheryl, Over the years, I have lost my taste for neat vodka martinis. I can still drink them, but they're just not as fun as they used to be. As much as I would love to switch to the pleasantly mild-tasting cosmopolitan, the pink color makes it instantly recognizable as a girl drink that has been diluted by something that tastes good (or, at least, that's what my merciless drinking buddies will say every time I order one). Can you recommend a good drink that doesn't have any telltale pastel shading but also doesn't make me want to cough every time I take a sip?