Dark Energy

WASHINGTON -- Some of the most ballyhooed missions on NASA's scientific agenda would be postponed indefinitely or perhaps canceled under the agency's new budget proposal, despite its administrator's vow to Congress six months ago that not "one thin dime" would be taken from space science to pay for President Bush's plan to send astronauts to the moon and Mars. The cuts come to $3 billion over the next five years, as NASA's total spending grows by 3.2 percent this year, to $16.8 billion.

My husband says my garden looks like it belongs to a woman with a lot of time on her hands. By that, I think he means that it looks neat and well-tended, which shows that the guy doesn't spend much time in gardens. But I will take the compliment. To my eye, the garden doesn't look well-tended. It looks over-much, like a woman too well-turned-out for a simple occasion. It extends almost all the way around the picket fence that surrounds our corner lot, except for a couple of open spots left for the sake of visual diversity, and it is full of every bulb, bush and perennial that I have ever thought I would like.

Everclear Songs from an American Movie, Vol. One: Learning How to Smile (Capitol 7243 4 97061) Autobiography can be treacherous turf for rock and roll. It's reasonable enough to use the personal to illustrate the universal, as songwriters from John Lennon to Alanis Morissette have shown. Delve too deeply into private problems, however, and that "Song of Myself" runs the risk of being incomprehensible to anyone but the singer and his (or her) shrink. Given the length and ambition of its title, it's reasonable to worry that Everclear's "Songs from an American Movie, Vol. One: Learning How to Smile" will fall into the latter category.

Formerly pessimistic experts are already bumping up estimates for holiday spending. The usual explanations are dragged out. Consumers are blowing the proceeds of loans secured by greatly appreciated McMansions and townhouses goes one answer. Lower energy prices freed up cash for the malls. Americans are just naturally profligate; go figure! But there is another, powerful force affecting what's going on, and it almost never gets discussed as a consumer-spending factor. The continuing wealth transfer from Depression-era savers to their baby boomer children may be supplying "dark energy" to the economy, an X-factor that helps explain short-term and long-term consumer resilience.

Tuesday's announcement that Hopkins astronomer Adam G. Riess will share this year's Nobel Prize in physics acknowledges his huge contribution to scientific knowledge. From the study of giant exploding stars millions of light-years from Earth, Mr. Riess and his colleagues, Saul Perlmutter of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and Brian P. Schmidt of the Australian National University in Australia, deduced the astonishing hypothesis that our universe is being violently blown apart by an immensely powerful, previously unsuspected force.

Five days of work on the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope should end Tuesday morning with the release of what one astronomer said is "in many ways ... a brand new telescope." "At this point, Hubble actually has the largest complement of functioning instruments it has ever had" since its launch in 1990, said Mario Livio, senior scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. "This is going to be an observatory that is just so much more powerful and more promising." The crew of the shuttle Atlantis was to release the telescope just before 9 a.m. Tuesday.

As fireworks burst over the Inner Harbor last night, pyrotechnics of a different sort were at play at PSI-Net Stadium, where a crowd of 60,000 watched Metallica top off a five-band, seven-hour heavy rock spectacular. The occasion was the Summer Sanitarium Tour, which in addition to Metallica included Korn, Kid Rock, Powerman 5000 and System of a Down. But even though the other bands shared the bill, the evening clearly belonged to Metallica. Not only did the quartet play twice as long as any of the other acts, but its hit-heavy set earned the evening's most enthusiastic response.

WASHINGTON - At NASA's request, scientists have given the space agency a detailed wish list of missions they hope to see conducted over the next 30 years. The proposals range from something as down to earth as a satellite to measure all our planet's rainfall to a far-out mission looking back to the dawn of time. That venture would send a spacecraft, the Big Bang Observer, to study the explosion that astronomers believe gave birth to the universe roughly 13.7 billion years ago. The goal of the latter mission is to "determine what powered the Big Bang and how the universe began and evolved," said Paul Hertz, a senior scientist in NASA's Office of Space Science.

What lies at the center of that giant ball of gas we call Jupiter? When you cut through the incredibly dense atmosphere of Venus, what's happening on the planet surface? These are the questions that dance in the mind of Johns Hopkins University student Jessica Noviello. For her, they are not the idle musings of a child but a calling, pulling her life's path into space. "To think of being part of a mission that might answer things people have been wondering about for decades, that's very alluring," says Noviello, a sophomore from Smithtown, N.Y. Hopkins professors say this curiosity makes Noviello the perfect trailblazer for the university's new minor in space science and engineering.

Keeping addicts alive is big step toward recovery I applaud Dr. Peter L. Beilenson, Baltimore's health commissioner, and Dr. Robert Schwartz of the Open Society Institute for their efforts at saving lives and obtaining funding and treatment on behalf of the many addicts in Baltimore ("City overdose deaths fell by 12% last year," March 28). As a substance abuse treatment provider and recovering addict-alcoholic, I know the bureaucratic hoops that one must jump through to get motivated addicts into treatment.