Number 291, October 16, 1996 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein THE 1996 CHEMISTRY NOBEL PRIZE goes to Richard Smalley and Robert Curl of Rice University and Harold Kroto of the University of Sussex (UK) for their discovery in 1985 of fullerenes. Shaped like soccer balls, fullerenes are closed molecules consisting of 60, 70, and certain other higher numbers of carbon atoms. Because they resemble the geodesic domes pioneered by the architect Buckminster Fuller, the molecules are also called buckyballs. In the past half decade, Physics News Update has covered a variety of subjects related to this versatile new form of carbon. For example, buckyballs can be superconducting (Update 31); can be ordered by mail (Update 47); can contain metal atoms (Update 189); can occur in nature (Update 89); can be accelerated in beams (Update 95); can emit light (Update 110); and might have a liquid phase (Update 140). THE FIRST DIRECT MEASUREMENTS OF THE PROPER MOTION OF STARS at our galaxy's core provides new evidence for the existence there of a black hole. Deducing a star's radial velocity, its speed along our line of sight, is relatively easy to do; just measure the Doppler shift in the star's spectrum. By contrast, measuring a star's proper motion, its movement across our line of sight, is difficult, especially for stars as far away (25,000 light years) as the galactic center. And yet the proper motions of stars are what astronomers need to formulate a full traffic report for the vicinity of Sagittarius A*, the radio source at the very pivot of the Milky Way. Now Reinhard Genzel and Andreas Eckart of the Max Planck Institute in Garching, Germany have used the New Technology Telescope in Chile to make 5-year sightings of 39 stars near Sgr A*. The proper motions they find are as big as the radial velocities for these stars. This swirl of activity in turn suggests the presence of a 2.5-million-solar-mass dark object (perhaps many small or one large black hole) packed within a 0.1-light-year volume at the galaxy's nucleus. (Nature, 3 October 1996.) PHYSICS GRADUATE STUDENTS IN THE U.S. : A new AIP report puts their numbers (for the 1994/95 year) at 13,285. Of these, 43% were non-U.S. citizens, 16% were women, 2% were African-American, 3% were Hispanic-American, and 4% were East-Asian-American. Considering only the non-U.S. citizens, China (28%), the Former Soviet Bloc (16%), and Western Europe (14%) sent the highest fractions of students. 1461 PhDs were granted. The median time between the BS and PhD degrees for U.S. citizens was 6.5 years. The favorite subfields of study were condensed matter (23%) and particle physics (13%). (For more information, contact Patrick Mulvey at AIP, pmulvey@aip.acp.org) PHYSICS NEWS UPDATE is now six years old. For those of you who are new to Update, some basic facts bear repeating: Update appears roughly once a week and is prepared by the Public Information division of the American Institute of Physics. Offices are in College Park, Maryland. An archive of past issues can be found at the AIP homepage on the World Wide Web at this address: aip.org/pinet/listserver/PHYSNEWS.info.html A related website, which we call Physics News Graphics (www.aip.org/png/), displays figures associated with some of the topics covered in Update. To subscribe (or unsubscribe) to the Update email list, send a message to listserv@aip.org. Leaving the subject line blank, specify either "add physnews" or "delete physnews".