BROOKINGS, Ore. April 6, 2001 (AP) - A volcano has been erupting on the ocean floor off the southern Oregon coast since Tuesday night, scientists say, but it poses no threat to ships or coastal communities.

The eruption 130 miles off the coast has generated more than 1,000 minor earthquakes that continued late Thursday. A few quakes have been powerful enough to be detected by land-based instruments, with the largest measuring 4.5 magnitude.

Scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have been using undersea instruments to track activity at the volcano, on an undersea ridge that runs off southern Oregon and northern California.

"We're mobilizing to get a research ship to check it out," said Robert W. Embley, a marine geologist with the administration's Vents Program.

Researchers would like the ship to arrive in time to find "megaplumes," gigantic bursts of hot, mineral-rich water that are spewed out of underwater eruptions.

Christopher Fox, a geophysicist with the Vents Program, said the seismic activity detected by the seafloor instruments is caused by the magma being injected into the ridge and cracking the rock.

Fox said the earthquake activity, which reached a peak of nearly 90 per hour Tuesday evening, had slowed to only a few per hour by Thursday afternoon.

Vents Homepage - http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/vents

The actor best known as Mr. Spock on Star Trek and his wife, Susan, have donated $1 million (all figures U.S.) to refurbish the 66-year-old Los Angeles landmark.

''I think it's of cosmic consequence,'' said Griffith Observatory Director Edwin Krupp. ''There's something really appealing about Leonard Nimoy's professional career and being able to bring it into this space.''

The donation is the first contribution by an individual to the renovation effort, which has acquired about two-thirds of the $63 million it needs from corporations, foundations and public money. The facelift is scheduled to begin next year and be completed by late 2004.

''By observing the sky and pondering our place in the universe, people gain a new perspective on their daily lives,'' Nimoy said in a statement. ''Griffith Observatory gives its visitors that opportunity. It is a Los Angeles icon, one which we need to ensure will be here for generations to come.''

About two million people visit the observatory each year to view the universe through its 30 centimetre Zeiss refractor telescope and planetarium. Millions more have seen its bronze art deco dome in a multitude of films, including the switchblade scene in James Dean's Rebel Without a Cause in 1955.

LONDON April 5, 2001 (AP) — There's gold in them thar colliding neutron stars.

A team of scientists said Thursday that the origins of most of the gold, platinum and other heavy elements on Earth can be traced to the massive explosions of colliding neutron stars, hundreds of millions of years before the birth of the Solar System.

"This is an incredible result,'' exclaimed senior team member Stephan Rosswog after the scientists' data were released. "It's exciting to think that the gold in wedding rings was formed far away by colliding stars.''

It has long been accepted that common elements, such as oxygen and carbon, are created when dying stars explode into supernovae, but researchers have been puzzled by data that suggests these stellar explosions do not produce enough heavy elements to account for their abundance on Earth.

The scientists — from the University of Leicester, in England, and the University of Basel, in Switzerland — believe rare pairs of neutron stars hold the answer.

The report was presented Thursday to the National Astronomy Meeting at Cambridge, England.

Neutron stars are the super-dense cores of large stars that survive supernovae. They contain about as much matter as our sun, but are only about the size of a large city. Sometimes two are found orbiting each other — leftovers of a binary star system. Four such pairs are known to exist in our galaxy.

The team used a supercomputer at the U.K. Astrophysical Fluids Facility in Leicester, 100 miles north of London, to model what might happen if the intense gravity created by these pairs slowly forced them to spiral closer and collide.

One such calculation takes the supercomputer several weeks to get through, but represents just the final few milliseconds in the lives of the two stars. It shows that as the neutron stars get closer, immense forces tear them apart, releasing enough energy to outshine the entire universe for a few milliseconds, the team said.

Team member Melvin Davis of Leicester said the explosion most likely creates a black hole — a light-sucking tear in space — and ejects ash so hot that nuclear reactions take place as it races outward, mashing newly created protons into the nuclei of lighter elements to create heavy elements.

The ejected material eventually mixes with the gas and dust between stars that, in turn, collapses down to form new generations of stars, slowly spreading heavy metals throughout the galaxy.

The proportion of matter created in these infrequent cataclysms over the 10-billion-year life of the universe closely matches the spectrum of elements found in our 5-billion-year-old Solar System, the team said, providing strong evidence that the theory is solid.

"The thing that is really quite compelling is that our models really do reproduce the relevant amounts of elements in the universe very, very accurately,'' Davis said after the release of their report. "It answers part of the question, `Where did all this stuff come from?'''

Stan Woosley, professor of astrophysics at the University of California-Santa Cruz, called the data compelling, but said it lacked a conclusive description of the so-called R-process — one of two ways that heavy elements can be formed.

The other — the S-process — is better understood: Heavy elements are created as a star burns its hydrogen into helium, but the variety and amounts produced are limited.

Some astrophysicist believe the R-process also occurs in a supernova, but scientists' understanding of supernovae is limited and computer models that could prove the theory don't exist.

Supporters of the supernova theory argue that collapses of binary neutron stars happen too infrequently. If large amounts of heavy elements are created in the more common supernovae, it would explain this uniformity.

"It's a nice development and a nice calculation,'' said Woosley, who was in Cambridge for the meeting, "but not everyone is going to accept that this is how the R-process is made.''

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On the Net:

Royal Astronomical Society, http://www.ras.org.uk 

Video images, http://www.ukaff.ac.uk/movies/nsmerger

She said if the kangaroo meat industry in Australia were to boom, it could eat itself out of existence.

"To produce the (equivalent of) 1,700,000 tons of cattle meat annually, the industry would have to kill the entire kangaroo population of Australia about 566 times a year,'' Thompson said.

She also said that in 1996, veterinarians in Victoria state deemed the killing of kangaroos for human consumption unhygienic.

Tony Kelly, development officer with the Australian Kangaroo Association, denied it, saying the meat was subject to the same strict checks as mutton and beef.

Kangaroos are not raised commercially in Australia. Processing companies kill about 3 million of the animals each year for their meat.

Thompson called on Tourism Minister Jackie Kelly to stop the promotion of kangaroo for consumption and instead highlight the distinctive marsupial as a tourist attraction.

"They need to be promoting kangaroos as a wildlife experience,'' she said.

On the web:

Kangaroo Products - http://www.kangaroo-industry.asn.au  (Warning: not for the squeamish!)

Astronomers saw the supernova in 1997 but did not know until recently that it was the furthest and therefore the oldest of its kind ever observed, scientists said on Monday in a briefing at NASA headquarters.

The notion that the universe is expanding faster and faster, instead of slowing down, runs counter to what scientists have long believed, one analyst told reporters.

"This is absolutely extraordinary," Michael Turner, an astronomer from the University of Chicago, said. "For 70 years astronomers believed that the universe would be slowing down and tried to measure it. When they finally succeeded in doing it, the darn thing was speeding up."

The ancient supernova was detected by two separate teams of scientists, one at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore and another at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California.

The old stellar explosion is one of those used by astronomers to track cosmic development.

When the light first left this supernova, known as 1997ff, it looked brighter than younger, closer supernovae would because the universe was expanding more slowly than it did later, the galaxies were a bit closer together and objects in them looked brighter, said telescope institute researcher Adam Riess.

Back in the early days of the universe, when 1997ff blew up, the mutual gravitational pull on cosmic objects slowed down expansion of the universe.

Sometime between 4 billion and 8 billion years ago, the universe started to speed up in its expansion and both Riess and Peter Nugent, of the Berkeley lab, believe this expansion may be due to the presence of a mysterious "dark energy" which pushes things away from each other, the opposite of what gravity does.

The exact definition of "dark energy" remains elusive, but it behaves more like energy than matter: it cannot be brought to rest. It is unseen, and therefore dark, and has repulsive gravity, Turner said. Beyond that, it is something of a mystery.

Whatever it is, there appears to be a lot of it, the scientists said: possibly 65 percent of the universe could be composed of dark energy.

With only one supernova to bolster their theory, both Riess and Nugent said more space-based telescope observations are needed to track more supernovae on the trail of the universe's movements.

By finding out about dark energy, Turner said, "I think we will be able to answer questions about the destiny of the universe and how all of nature's particles and forces fit together. That's how important and fundamental this dark energy is."

More information is available online at http://oposite.stsci.edu/pubinfo/pr/2001/09

Working out of his sunny office on the campus of George Washington University in Washington, James Starrs is an expert in cold cases, really cold cases -- in one case 200 years cold.

He believes modern forensic science can be applied to solve historic whodunits, answering questions technology was not advanced enough to answer at the time a death occurred. In most cases all he needs is a body -- so he digs them up.

That is what he is working with in the Strangler case. With the approval of the family of Mary Sullivan, Starrs has exhumed the body of the 19-year-old woman believed to be the last victim of the killer who terrorized Boston from 1962 to 1964.

Now Starrs is trying to determine if Sullivan was killed by Albert DeSalvo, the man who confessed to being the Boston Strangler. Sullivan's family does not believe he did it.

Casey Sherman, Sullivan's nephew, said the Massachusetts Attorney General's Office told him last spring the case was "not a priority and they couldn't help." That night he saw a television program about Starrs' exhumation of Jesse James, the notorious outlaw who died in 1882.

"My wife said, 'Why don't you give him a call and see if he's interested?' I called the next day," Sherman said.

ELF THAN GHOUL

Starrs looks more elf than ghoul. In fact, he looks a little like Santa Claus. But amid the books and piles of paper one would expect in a law professor's office are reminders of his other life as a forensic specialist: skeletons, skulls, an eyeball, diagrams of skulls.

Starrs was not trained as a forensic scientist. Indeed, his exclusion from the "inner circle" of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences at a meeting in Colorado in the late 1980s spawned his second career as a gravedigger, he said.

"I was excluded and I left in a blue funk. I figured I was in Colorado so I thought I'd look into the deaths of five prospector companions of Alfred Packer, which had been a thorn in my academic side for years," he said.

Packer was the only member of a group of six to survive a winter storm in Colorado's San Juan mountains in 1874. The other five were eaten.

Starrs wanted to know if, as Packer claimed, they died one by one and were eaten by the survivors to stave off starvation or if Packer killed them and ate them all by himself. So he got permission to exhume the bodies, put together a team of experts to help him and looked for answers among the remains.

"It was quite clear from what we found that Alfred Packer was the guilty man in the death of all of them," Starrs said, adding, "it was very professionally satisfying." So satisfying that he started digging around for new cases.

Since then he has investigated the James case, the 1935 assassination of legendary Louisiana politician Huey Long and the case of Dr. Frank Olson, who unknowingly took LSD as part of a CIA experiment in 1953 and a week later plunged to his death from a New York hotel.

Starrs and his team exhumed Olson's body and determined a blow to the left side of his head occurred prior to his death. "With a massive hematoma of that kind, he couldn't go out the window on his own," he said.

In 1999, Starrs led a search of unmarked graves at a West Virginia estate for the body of the "uncle of our country," Samuel Washington -- the brother of "father of our country" George Washington. He said the Washington family thought that would be a way of marking the 200th anniversary of the death of the first U.S. president, but he could not find the remains.

Starrs also takes on less high-profile cases. One such came at the request of a Jackson, Ohio, woman whose daughter committed suicide, according to the official ruling. The woman believed her daughter was murdered.

"It was a case I took because the mother seemed to have a very strong argument, she seemed in need and there was no one else around to assist her," Starrs said.

Michigan State University professor Todd Fenton, who began working with Starrs on the Packer case, said he believes Starrs is motivated by scientific curiosity and a sense of justice.

"In the '60s he did a lot of civil rights work. He has this ferocious sense of what's right. He also has a voracious appetite for mysteries. You mix that in with the fact that he is a tireless worker -- what a combination," Fenton said.

STARRS ASSEMBLES NATIONAL TEAM

When Starrs decides to take a case, he puts out a call to experts around the country: forensic pathologists, anthropologists, geophysicists, radiologists, toxicologists and criminalists. All work free of charge.

Dr. Michael Baden, chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police, is a regular on Starrs' team and is now working on the Boston Stranger investigation. "Nobody can do it all, there are no more Sherlock Holmes," Baden said.

"The kinds of teams Starrs assembles in these expeditions is what's happening throughout the country, but in a less dramatic form, because his investigations are much more high-profile," he added.

In considering a case, Starrs said he asks himself is it historically significant, will today's science be able to answer questions past experts were not able to, and is there anything to be gained scientifically? He also asks whether an exhumation, if it is required, is moral.

Mary Fran Ernst, president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, said Starrs is "probably one of the most ethical and dedicated" investigators working today.

But he has his critics, including documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and historian Stephen Ambrose, who have publicly criticized him for wanting to exhume the body of explorer Meriwether Lewis to determine if he committed suicide. Both say there is no question that is how Lewis died.

And Starrs has had trouble with local law enforcement, who might not appreciate his unearthing old cases that raise questions about the original investigation. That happened in Louisiana in the Long investigation, he said, and his team is not having an easy time with authorities in Boston, either.

Citing a gag order, the state attorney general's office refused to comment on the case, but Sherman said officials who previously were not interested in his aunt's death have launched their own investigation in the wake of Starrs' probe.

He said they were testing evidence they originally denied having but which has since "miraculously" surfaced.

Yet Starrs continues to plug away on his investigation using DNA from DeSalvo's brother Richard, Mary Sullivan's remains and public records to see if Albert DeSalvo, who never stood trial for the murders and who died in a prison attack while serving time on an unrelated crime, was her murderer. He was set to release preliminary findings in February before the gag order was imposed.

Already Starrs has "been able to poke holes in Albert DeSalvo's confession, the only thing that connects him to the crime," Sherman said.

"He claimed to strangle my aunt with his bare hands but there is no sign of manual strangulation. DeSalvo also said he knocked her out with a blow to the skull, but Starrs found there was no trauma to the skull. I believe we have enough evidence to prove he didn't do it."

Official David Bowie Website - http://www.davidbowie.com