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 critics reacted like heartbroken suitors, but Pixar's Cars 2 got its motor running at about the same pace of the 2006 original. The G-rated sequel earned $68 million, according to early estimates, to win the weekend at the North American box office, while the R-rated Bad Teacher stormed into second place with $31 million. After 11 consecutive animated features that scored as both popular hits and reviewers' sweethearts, Pixar was bound at some point to produce ...

For a glimpse into the greatness of Tiger Woods, look past his runaway victory in the British Open at St. Andrews last month. Forget his triumph--also by a record margin--in the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach in June. And set aside his prospects for stomping the field in another major tournament, next week's PGA Championship at Valhalla. Consider, instead, what Woods did right after he dominated the 1997 Masters. He studied videotapes of his performance: blasting 300-yd. drives, hitting crisp ...

Re "Why they leave France" [April 16]: There is a typically French disease that prompts citizens to overcriticize the country. Those judgments are, most of the time, merciless and exaggerated. I've traveled a lot, and I can tell you that people in the rest of the world are able to be supportive of their own country without being stupidly patriotic. You can certainly find thousands of faults with France, but there are still a million reasons to stay here, one ...

In their elegant laboratories near La Jolla, Calif., General Dynamics scientists are doggedly attacking a difficult problem: how to extract controlled power from hydrogen fusion. The pay off for their work is hidden in the future, but the powerful magnetic fields they have built to hold reacting hydrogen gas at 100 million degrees has already yielded a valuable practical "fallout." Those same magnetic forces used on a smaller scale have proved remarkably versatile for shaping metal.Swift Action. At ...

You'd expect the headquarters of Telenor, Norway's biggest telecom company, to reflect at least some of its Scandinavian side. Sure enough, meeting rooms are furnished with wooden floors, sleek tables and angular armchairs; there's even a breathtaking view of the Oslo Fjord. But look closer. The small silver plates and golden sculpted boats in one such room are from Bangladesh; the green-and-gold tea set, with its five matching cups, from Thailand. And the black-and-gold rug hanging on a wall is ...

Somehow, it fell to the United States to censure an Israeli shipping company for doing business with Iran. Last month the State Department sanctioned the Ofer Brothers Group, a private company based in the tony beach city of Herzliya, for selling an $8.6 million tanker to Iran through a known Iranian front company based in Monaco. The May 24 order barred the Israeli firm, along with a subsidiary based in Singapore, from obtaining export licenses, private loans ...

NOT since the Bismarck has there been such a sea hunt. In the teeth of a gale that whipped the azure Mediterranean into an ash-gray cauldron of 20-foot waves, five Israeli-manned gunboats scooted to Haifa last week on a 3,000-mile dash from the northern French port of Cherbourg. At various points, they were tracked by French reconnaissance planes, an R.A.F. Canberra from Malta, Soviet tankers, the radar forests of the U.S. Sixth Fleet, television cameramen and even Italian fishermen. From ...

It may be hard for Americans to fathom a world in which corporations, instead of merely lamenting the shortage of skilled labor, volunteer to train vast numbers of the non-college-bound. Oh, yeah, and to pay them a bundle along the way. But under Germany's earn-while-you-learn system, companies are paying 1.6 million young adults to train for about 350 types of jobs, ranging from industrial mechanic to baker to fitness trainer. And the trainees' average annual salary of $19,913 helps explain ...

It may be a functional space, but that hasn't stopped designers and architects from turning the humble toilet into a room of surprises. With breathtaking vistas, wacky themes or lavish materials, there are rest rooms out there that'll make you feel like a million bucks each time you spend a penny. SAPPORO Take a comfort break on top of the city's highest building. Toilets at the JR Tower's observation room are 160 meters above street level and walled with glass. According ...