Number 278 (Story #1), July 8, 1996 by Phillip F. Schewe and Ben Stein EXTREMELY HIGH ENERGY COSMIC RAYS show a slight preference as to their directionality. With no accelerators to boost particles above the trillion-electron-volt (TeV) range, scientists look to cosmic rays for supplying not only the highest particle energies but also hints about what must be a tremendous energy machine at work in our galaxy or beyond. This is especially true of cosmic rays with EeV (10**18 eV) energies. A new study of 36 cosmic-ray events recorded with the Akeno Giant Air Shower Array (AGASA) in Japan shows that mostly they are distributed uniformly across the sky. A notable departure from this general pattern consists of three pairs of events whose directions of arrival are quite close, less than 2.5 degrees. And of these, two pairs are located within 2 degrees of the supergalactic plane, defined roughly by the agglomeration of bright nearby galaxies in the northern hemisphere. The Akeno scientists (Motohiko Nagano, mnagano@icrr.u-tokyo.ac.jp) suggest that most likely some kind of celestial accelerator lies in the direction of the collimated pairs. (N. Hayashida et al., Physical Review Letters, 5 August 1996.)