Taboo

MOSCOW -- Every Wednesday afternoon, Petya Nikitenko invites into his office some of the men and women Russia usually tries to ignore. Some have spent time in jail or have sold sex. All have abused drugs. Now that they have come for help, Nikitenko counsels them on the dangers of using intravenous drugs. One of the risks is that, by sharing needles, they will become infected with HIV. What he does not do - and what HIV-prevention programs in Russia often cannot do without bringing unwelcome attention from the government - is distribute clean needles that could help prevent the spread of the virus.

By the time Victelia Guillen walked into a clinic last summer, the pain that had begun a year earlier flared through her body. Within days, she received grim news. Doctors at the Caridad Clinic, a facility west of Boynton Beach that serves low-income Hispanics, diagnosed Guillen, 52, with advanced cervical cancer. Uninsured and wary of doctors, the Guatemalan mother of 10 had never before had a Pap smear -- a screening test that has drastically reduced cervical cancer rates in the United States over the past 50 years.

HOLLYWOOD -- Backstage at the El Capitan Theatre, comedian Sarah Silverman is kneeling on the floor of her boyfriend's crowded office, looking rapturously at his image on a flat-screen monitor. She is wearing low-slung jeans, a worn navy crew-neck sweater over a baseball T-shirt, and sneakers. Her silky black hair is pulled into a ponytail. She is very pretty, looking more like a fresh-scrubbed college kid than the 34-year-old showbiz vet that she is. On the TV monitor, her boyfriend, Jimmy Kimmel, whose late-night talk show is taped at the El Capitan, is interviewing Val Kilmer.

SIX DECADES after a nuclear bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, there is a question that remains unanswered and perhaps unanswerable: Should those of us who were not under that mushroom cloud thank these weapons for bringing us an era of unprecedented peace and prosperity? The bomb has been widely disparaged as the most destructive device ever invented, one that brought not only devastation to Japan, but also fear and uncertainty to generations that lived under its shadow of doom. Look at Europe.

Seth Ciferri has counseled many zealous teenagers against permanently marking their bodies with tattoos. "How will it affect your career?" asks the Baltimore tattoo parlor owner. Ciferri is especially cautious when fielding requests for large or highly visible pieces such as a dragon on the back of a hand or a boyfriend's name on a neck. "I try to reserve that kind of work for people who are in the tattoo business, are already covered or are independently wealthy and don't need a job," Ciferri said.

CHICAGO - Tickling rats to make them chirp with joy may seem frivolous as a scientific pursuit, yet understanding laughter in animals may lead to revolutionary treatments for emotional illness, researchers suggest. Joy and laughter, they say, are proving not to be uniquely human traits. Roughhousing chimpanzees emit characteristic pants of excitement, their version of "ha-ha-ha" limited only by their anatomy and lack of breath control, researchers contend. Dogs have their specific sound that spurs other dogs to play, and recordings of the sound can drastically reduce stress levels in shelters and kennels, according to the scientist who discovered it. Even laboratory rats have been shown to chirp delightedly above the range of human hearing when wrestling with each other or being tickled by a keeper - the same vocalizations they make before receiving morphine or having sex. Studying such sounds of joy may help us understand the evolution of human emotions and the brain chemistry underlying such emotional problems as autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorders, said Jaak Panksepp, a pioneering neuroscientist who discovered rat laughter.

Parenting, apparently, does not have to mean buying a minivan and moving to the 'burbs. Moms can be trendy. They can have nipple rings, tattoos and keep up with their favorite punk garage bands. Or at least that's what writer Ariel Gore says. Gore, who edits the popular 'zine Hip Mama, will be at Atomic Books on Saturday to read from her new anthology of Hip Mama articles and discuss alternative parenting. "It's not the whole my-way-is-best idea of parenting," Gore explained. The 'zine is a "place where people can tell the truth about their experiences parenting."

SALT ROCK, South Africa - Nelson Mandela, who has devoted much of his life since leaving South Africa's presidency to a campaign against AIDS, said yesterday that his 54-year son, Makgatho, had died of the disease in a Johannesburg clinic. Makgatho L. Mandela had been seriously ill for more than a month, but the nature of his ailment was not made public before his death yesterday. At a news conference a few hours later in Johannesburg, the elder Mandela, 86, said he was revealing the cause of his son's death to focus more public attention on AIDS, still a taboo topic among many South Africans.

The vamp is back. Thanks to the modern feminist movement, the exhibitionist behavior of reality show contestants and the frank sexual exploration of Sex and the City, female taboos on TV have been shattered. These days, prime time is the place for a girl to get in touch with her sexuality. Nicolette Sheridan's Desperate Housewives divorcee Edie Britt wears her carnal heart on her sleeve. Eva Longoria's Gabrielle Solis is unhappily married to a rich cad. So what does she do? Have an affair with the 17-year-old gardener, of course.

Don't hate 'em. Although their latest album features the platinum-selling, "b-boy" style-appropriating Justin Timberlake, the Black Eyed Peas have not sold out with their third CD, Elephunk. The group simply wanted to expand its sound and its reach. In other words, the critically loved underground hip-hop trio with two commercially overlooked albums under its belt wants to sell records. And there's nothing wrong with that, says group member Taboo. The musical freshness fans have come to expect from BEP still pulsates through Elephunk.