Gamma Rays

THE STAGE at Oklahoma Road Middle School was christened Friday evening by members of the drama clubs at Sykesville and Oklahoma Road middle schools.Under the direction and guidance of teachers from both schools, 24 actors performed scenes from the theater about teens and starring teens. The scenes were staged with very few props -- a cot here, a school desk or music stand there -- so the performers were the focus of attention.A few of the youngsters came to the stage with performing experience.

An Oakland Mills High School senior was named a semifinalist this month in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, the second straight year a Howard County student has earned recognition in what is widely considered to be the nation's most prestigious high school science contest.Aaron Bodoh-Creed, 17, was one of the 15 students from Maryland among the contest's 300 semifinalists. This year's competition attracted 1,652 entries from across the country."I'm really excited and honored to be picked as a semifinalist," said the teen-ager, whose project was "The Effects of Cosmological Time Dilation on Gamma Ray Bursts."

PITTSBURGH -- Almost every day, a huge explosion somewhere in outer space sends bursts of high-energy gamma rays sweeping by Earth.Scientists are fascinated by them, and they have lots of theories about what the bursts are and where they come from. But they have almost no answers."We really as yet have no clue to what they are," said Dr. Geoffrey Pendleton of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.Although they are invisible to humans, the bursts are among the most impressive celestial phenomena detectable from Earth.

WASHINGTON -- A group of astronomers reported yesterday that bursts of energy that have been seen by an orbiting telescope may be, for the few seconds they last, the brightest objects in the universe.The bursts may also provide the first confirmation of a peculiar effect, predicted by Einstein's theory of relativity, called "time dilation."The short-lived events are known as gamma-ray bursts -- brief, unpredictable eruptions of the highest-energy form of electromagnetic radiation that last from fractions of a second to a few minutes.

WASHINGTON -- Scientists have found fresh clues but no convincing explanations to one of the most baffling mysteries in astronomy, the source of bursts of gamma rays that flash briefly in the sky and then disappear.Brenda Dingus of NASA said yesterday that on Super Bowl Sunday, Jan. 31, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory satellite spotted a 50-second burst 10 times more powerful than any studied in the 25 years since they were discovered.The unexpected strength of the "Super Bowl burst" and other recent satellite data, she said, suggest that these rays are created by matter moving at tremendous velocity, almost 99 percent of the speed of light.

Kensington -- By the early part of the next century, geneticists should have worked out a complete mapping of the human genetic code. Many doors will then be opened, not all of which will be biomedical. There exists the possibility, within the next century, of speed-of-light, deep-space travel based on the broadcasting of genetic information.A question that is often raised about life in other parts of the Milky Way is that if it is Out There, and if it is on the move, then why hasn't its presence become evident to us?

|TC GREENBELT -- The space shuttle Atlantis streaked into orbit yesterday morning on a five-day mission to deploy the heaviest U.S. astronomy satellite ever and conduct the first spacewalk by astronauts since 1985.Four months after the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's manned space program was stalled by cracks found in the shuttle fleet's fuel-door hinges, launch director Bob Sieck declared the nearly flawless countdown and liftoff "one of the best, if not the best," in the 39 launches since flights began in 1981.

The startling assertion by two chemists that they had achieved nuclear fusion in a test tube was based on invented data whose publication involved a serious breach of ethics and a violation of scientific protocol, prominent scientists have concluded.One of the two researchers dismisses the charge, saying that their work on low-temperature, or cold, fusion was ethically sound and beyond reproach.The cold-fusion debate erupted two years ago when the chemists, Dr. B. Stanley Pons and Dr. Martin Fleischmann, announced at the University of Utah that they had captured the secret of the sun's energy in a test tube at room temperature.