Planet

"Planet of the Apes" by Faye Flam does not appear this week.

One of the nice things about the Internet and Hollywood is that they make the holidays last so much longer. It's March, and we're still getting gifts ordered through dot-com companies about four months ago. We're also still getting Christmas movies, like "Reindeer Games," set during the holidays but released, rather suspiciously, as the daffodils bud. When a "Christmas" movie is released in March, it can can mean three things: There...

Both parties have selected leaders with little experience to run a nation, let alone deal with foreign affairs. One candidate stands at the top of the ticket, the other is at the bottom. So why the fuss? Let?s face it, the most important issues in the minds of the American people are oil and the war. If the Republicans win, there?s a chance that we?ll dig for oil and salvage what remains of a cancerous economy. If it?s the Democrats, we can expect troop withdrawals that will leave the Iraqi people fending for themselves.

Be kind to the environment. Clean up polluted air and water. Protect Earth's ozone layer. Nurture its ecological systems. Preserve its natural resources. And, acknowledge the beauty and diversity of humanity worldwide by respecting various cultures and traditions. That was the gist of the message Friday for the students at Wyncote's Ancillae-Assumpta Academy, which celebrated Catholic Schools Week by participating in a special program called "Our Planet In Every Classroom.

Kathleen Parker is a columnist for the Washington Post Writers Group Hey, did you hear the one about the woman who aborted her kid so she could save the planet? That's no joke, but Darwin must be chuckling somewhere. Toni Vernelli was one of two women recently featured in a London Daily Mail story about environmentalists who take their carbon footprint very, very seriously. So seriously, in fact, that Vernelli aborted a pregnancy and, by age 27, had herself sterilized.

THE TAGLINE for Tim Burton's upcoming ape movie is "Rule the Planet," but given the flood of products pegged to its release - action figures, baseball caps, binders, board games, comic books, fanny packs, key chains, lunchboxes, scooters, skateboards, stickers, trick-or-treat bags, temporary tattoos - "Rule the Playground" might be more appropriate. Judging from the previews, Fox ended up with a shadowy space-opera whose flash libretto was drawn up in crayon. It's a neat reversal of the pattern established by five previous Ape flicks: There, the production values were comically shoddy but the story lines strikingly mature.

Moonbird A Year on the Wind with the Great Survivor B95 By Phillip Hoose Farrar Straus Giroux. 160 pp. $21.99   It was Feb. 20, 1995. The bird-banding team had caught so many birds that they ran out of the usual colored bands. Someone found black plastic in one of the trucks, and they fitted strips of it around the legs of the final birds, including one very special bird - a small shorebird that probably has become one of the most iconic birds known.

Moorestown, which Money magazine named the top town in the United States last year, again lived up to its reputation for being on the cutting edge by hosting South Jersey's first Pachamama Symposium. The first what? Pachamama Symposium. Pachamama is a word from the Quechua language of South America often translated as "Mother Earth" or, more fully, "the sacred presence of the Earth, the universe and all time. " The symposium brought together about 30 caring citizens at Moorestown High School on March 25 for a daylong program based on the best information available regarding the question: What shape is our Earth in?

The animated sci-fi spoof "Planet 51" makes you wonder if things might be more interesting on Planet 52. The movie's reverse "E.T. " premise has a cocky astronaut (voice of Dwayne Johnson) landing on a planet where the little green men and women live in a near-facsimile of 1950s America - with tailfinned vehicles and a paranoid fear of being invaded by aliens. The movie has fun with its proud lack or originality, up to a point - after a while, you realize even its sci-fi riffs are re-riffted.

In an effort to avoid the complaints about racial stereotyping that greeted "Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace" last summer, series creator George Lucas is apparently planning to give the next film, which is scheduled to be released in 2002, a more ethnically diverse cast. Unfortunately, it doesn't sound like the concept of diversity's subtler points has quite been grasped up at Skywalker Ranch. According to the entertainment trade paper Variety, Lucasfilm's casting director, Robin Gurland, has asked several Hollywood agencies to look for actors who can fill such new, proposed roles as a spiritual American Indian and an Asian who might be good at martial arts.

WASHINGTON - NASA's planet-hunting telescope has discovered two planets that seem like ideal places for some sort of life to flourish. And they are just the right size and in just the right place. One is toasty, the other nippy. The distant duo are the best candidates for habitable planets that astronomers have found so far, said William Borucki, the chief scientist for NASA's Kepler telescope. And they have astronomers thinking that similar planets that are just about right for life - "Goldilocks planets" - might be common in the universe.

A Novel By Ken Kalfus Bloomsbury. 224 pp. $24. Reviewed by Glenn C. Altschuler The equilateral triangle combines the virtues of uniformity and variety, Sanford Thayer, the main character in Ken Kalfus' new novel, proclaims. The component of all regular pyramidal solids and the basis of all human art, it is "the most visually satisfying geometrical figure of them all. " Drawing on his cigar, Wilson Ballard, Thayer's chief engineer, shoots back: "Bloody difficult to dig, though.

By Derrick H. Pitts Considering the recent close calls our planet has had with various asteroids, meteors, and comets, it's time to develop an early-warning system - a cosmic "heads up" - to detect the wanderers zooming through the solar system. The major concern, of course, is whether any of these space travelers is on a collision course with Earth. Our geologic record clearly indicates that not only have we been hit before, but in one instance, the object was large enough to significantly change the planet's environment, triggering the demise of the dinosaurs about 65 million years ago. If they couldn't survive an impact, what chance would mere humans have to survive?

WASHINGTON - In less than five years, a married couple could be on their way toward Mars in an audacious, bare-bones private mission that would slingshot them around the planet, under a plan announced Wednesday by a financial tycoon and his team. The voyage to Mars and back would be a cosmic no-frills flight that would take the husband-and-wife astronauts as close as 100 miles to the planet, but it would also mean being cooped up for 16 months in a cramped space capsule half the size of an RV. The private, nonprofit project will get initial money from the multimillionaire investment consultant Dennis Tito, the first space tourist.

By Michael Lemonick Over the past few weeks, astronomers have announced not one but two extraordinary discoveries in the search for planets orbiting stars beyond the sun. The first was a world about the size of Neptune, 5,000 light-years away, whirling around in a solar system with four stars. It's something like Luke Skywalker's home world of Tatooine in the Star Wars movies, except that fictional planet sported only two suns. The second was an Earth-size planet right next door in the Alpha Centauri system, three stars that orbit one another not thousands or hundreds but a mere four light-years from our solar system.

While it may be that some Americans doubt we're related to chimps and other primates, viruses recognize the similarities in our cells. The more closely two species are related, the more easily infections jump between them, said biologist Edward Holmes, who just moved from Penn State to the University of Sydney. For us humans, that means we're particularly vulnerable to catching diseases from other primates. HIV, for example, in various strains has jumped from primates to humans in at least 12 separate incidents.

One of the more difficult aspects of evolution for some people to swallow is the notion that random copying errors in DNA can add up to anything useful. In two recently published projects, however, scientists show how typos can indeed lead to improvements. In numerous species of insects, they document the DNA errors that led to changes that are not only beneficial but also brilliant. Various species of beetles, aphids, butterflies, and moths have independently acquired genetic errors that allow them to eat highly toxic plants and then use the toxins to defend themselves against predators.

Once DNA evidence made clear that all humanity came from Africa, researchers have been scouring that vast continent in search of a fuller story of our origins. Where in Africa was the cradle of humanity? And how are modern people related to the common ancestor that all humanity shares? Two groups have recently added surprising new details to the picture by using DNA collected from modern hunter-gatherers - the Pygmies of Cameroon, the Sandawe and Hadza of Tanzania, and the Khoe-San of southern Africa.

Scientists have been hard-pressed to explain why menopause happens so early in humans - there's no obvious evolutionary advantage to having your reproductive system shut down decades before the rest of your body. Most other long-lived animals keep reproducing until the end. Female turtles can lay fertile eggs at 100. Our primate relatives, too, keep bearing young until they are near death. Now, scientists are finding clues to our unusual life pattern in killer whales - one of the few other species in which females get decades of so-called postreproductive life.

Last week, in response to a media blitz promoting a $288 million DNA project called ENCODE, headlines announced that most of our DNA formerly known as "junk" was actually useful. A number of scientists both inside the study and out took issue with this claim - which centered on the 98 percent of our DNA that isn't officially part of any gene. Sorting the workers from the freeloaders in our DNA is crucial to understanding how our genetic code works, how it drives human evolution and influences our traits and health.