It's hard to overstate the shock astronomers felt when the true nature of quasars began to dawn on them in the early 1960s. At first, these mysterious objects seemed like ordinary stars, tucked in the embrace of our familiar Milky Way. But a closer look revealed that they were billions of light-years away, far beyond the confines of our galaxy. To be visible at such vast distances, a quasar must, by itself, have been as bright as ...

Alone in a semidarkened room, a young woman relaxed in an armchair before a blank screen, three electrodes fixed to her scalp and one grounded to an earlobe. Suddenly a pale blue light flickered on the screen and then steadied; a voice said quietly: "That's alpha." The voice was that of Neurophysiologist Barbara Brown of the Veterans Administration Hospital in Sepulveda, Calif. She was demonstrating "biofeedback training," a new way of teaching human beings to control the kind of waves ...

The star known as Gliese 581 is utterly unremarkable in just about every way you can imagine. It's a red dwarf, the most common type of star in the Milky Way, weighing in at about a third of the mass of the sun. At 20 light years or so away, it's relatively nearby, but not close enough to set any records . You can't even see it without a telescope, so while it lies in the direction ...

THE WAR Wincing in the unaccustomed sun light, U.S. Marines of the 6,000-man Khe Sanh garrison tumbled out of their bunkers into the open air. Amid shell craters and the wreckage of destroyed Jeeps, helicopters and buildings, they washed grimy clothes and gamboled in makeshift showers. Three Marines dug out baseball gloves and began playing catch. Everywhere along the camp's perimeter, the roofs of bunkers blossomed with Marines, who were not, for a change, either running or ducking. In stead, ...

YOUTH One sociologist calls them "the Freudian proletariat." Another observer sees them as "expatriates living on our shores but beyond our society." Historian Arnold Toynbee describes them as "a red warning light for the American way of life." For California's Bishop James Pike, they evoke the early Christians: "There is something about the temper and quality of these people, a gentleness, a quietness, an interest—something good." To their deeply worried parents throughout the country, they seem more ...

Of all the jerkwater traffic traps set to catch and fleece U.S. motorists, the most wondrously efficient was a fast-flicking traffic light in southeast Georgia's tiny Ludowici.* The Ludowici light, which has brought the American Automobile Association more complaints than any other light in the U.S., hangs astride the intersection of two heavily traveled highways: State 38 to Savannah and a combined U.S. 25 and U.S. 301, which funnels thousands of vacationers from the East and Midwest toward Florida. For traffic on U.S. 25-301 , the light ...

A young man with tattoos covering one arm rolls hundreds of marijuana joints in the half-light of a shack, perched on a hillside in a Medellin slum. A 9mm pistol and a .38 revolver lie on his work bench. An old battery-powered radio blares out the salsa music classic, "Todo Tiene Su Final" or "Everything Comes To An End." "I'm getting calluses on my tongue rolling all these spliffs," he laughs, telling me has enough marijuana for about 1,000 joints. ...

On the last episode of reality ... Jon left Kate and his eight children and took up with the party girl Hailey. Audrina got a restraining order against an alleged stalker. NeNe got into an argument with Kim during a photo shoot. And Rachel was attacked -- yet again -- by one of the city tabloids. With plot points like this, who needs soap operas Certainly not most of America. In the past decade, the audience for soap operas has ...

Beneath seven flat-screen TVs and one large pulldown screen, members of the Racquet Club of the South gathered Monday to watch and celebrate one of their own. Melanie Oudin, 17, of Marietta, Georgia, has been taking the tennis world by storm at the U.S. Open. The 70th-ranked female has been handing out upsets to some of the sport's biggest female stars, including Russian aces Elena Dementieva (No. 4 seed) and Maria Sharapova (No. 29 seed, who has been ranked ...

Phillip Garrido was registered as a sex offender, required to meet with parole officers and fitted with an ankle bracelet to track his movements -- but nothing prevented him from being around children, according to a victim's advocacy group. Garrido, who is charged with kidnapping and raping Jaycee Lee Dugard -- a young woman police say lived with her two daughters in a huddle of tents and outbuildings hidden behind Garrido's home - was arrested last week along with his ...