THEY led some of the scrappiest high school football and basketball teams that the little Arizona copper town of Morenci had ever known and cheered. They enjoyed roaring beer busts. In quieter moments, they rode horses along the Coronado Trail, stalked deer in the Apache National Forest. And in the patriotic camaraderie typical of Morenci's mining families, the nine graduates of Morenci High enlisted as a group in the Marine Corps. Their service began on Independence Day, 1966. When ...

Astronomers have used all sorts of tricks over the years to try to convey the mind-boggling scale of the universe to us ordinary folks. If you could drive your car from here to the nearest star at 60 m.p.h., they've told us, it would take 11 million years. If the Sun were a beach ball sitting on a football field's goal line, the Earth would be a pea on the 50-yard line. And so on. Things got a ...

The band played, floats lined the streets, a mob jammed the station and cheered. South Bend, Ind. was out in force to greet the NBC Opera Company as if it were a conquering football team. When the curtain opened on Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro in the new $2,500,000 arts center of St. Mary's College, the house was packed; when it closed, the audience was happily enthusiastic. It was a rousing send-off for a costly experiment by NBC —to send its opera company barnstorming across the country ...

While devastating for severely afflicted children and their families, autism has long been assumed to be relatively uncommon, appearing in perhaps 1% of all kids. But that figure was a rough estimate at best, based largely on the population of children who have already received a diagnosis of the disorder. Discovering the true prevalence of autism would require a large-scale study of an entire population--not just those who showed up at a doctor's office. That's exactly what a team of ...

As big as a football field and nearly as empty, Barack Obama's re-election headquarters looks like a start-up gone wrong. Wires sprout like weeds from the carpeting, legions of bookshelves stand empty, and the swing-state maps hastily pinned to the wall are freebies from the AAA auto club down the street. In one room that could fit hundreds of people, just a few dozen sit at long desks. Most don't look old enough to buy a beer. ...

As the residents of Moneygall ready themselves to play host to Barack Obama on May 23, many hope the visit will bring the Irish village exactly what the President's great-great-great-grandfather sought when he left there 150 years ago: prosperity. It takes less than a minute to drive through Obama's ancestral hometown, a sleepy and typical rural village whose main attractions are a single pub, a corner shop, a post office and a football field. But days before the President's arrival, the quiet that ...

On April 20, Major League Baseball took control of the Los Angeles Dodgers, a team whose overleveraged owner is going through a humiliating public divorce and steering the franchise towards bankruptcy. The Dodgers' financial situation had been so dire that last week Frank McCourt, who is fighting for ownership of the team with his estranged wife, Jamie, needed a $30 million loan from Fox, the team's television partner, to make payroll. That's right, the Dodgers, one of ...

Too many kids are returning to the playing field too soon after a concussion. How many? According to an alarming new study, from 2005 to 2008, 41% of concussed athletes in 100 high schools across the U.S. returned to play too soon, under guidelines set out by the American Academy of Neurology. The 11-year-old guidelines say, for example, that if an athlete's concussion symptoms, such as dizziness or nausea, last longer than 15 minutes, he should be benched until he's ...

When he was 17, Genarlow Wilson had been his high school's homecoming king, a football star and the recipient of an academic scholarship. But after being arrested for allowing a 15-year old girl to perform oral sex on him, he was convicted and sentenced to 10 years in prison, plus lifetime registration as a sex offender. Now he is at the center of a heated legislative battle in the Georgia state senate to rewrite the law ...

Eben MacBurney Byers, 51, popular Pittsburgh sportsman and ironmaster, fell out of an upper berth five years ago returning from a Yale-Harvard football game. He hurt his arm. His Pittsburgh physiotherapist, Dr. Charles Clinton Moyar, prescribed a patented drink called ''Radithor." It was distilled water containing traces of radium and mesothorium . The dope eased the arm pain, braced Byers up. He enthusiastically recommended it to friends, sent them cases of it, even gave some to one of his horses. ...