LEPTOQUARKS AT DESY? At the HERA collider at the DESY lab in Hamburg, Germany, 820-GeV protons smash into 27.5-GeV electrons or positrons. At these very high energies, a positron essentially scatters not from the proton as a whole but from individual quarks inside the proton. Two important parameters help to characterize such interactions: x, the fraction of the proton's momentum carried by the struck quark, and Q², the square of the momentum transferred between proton and positron. The two large collaborations at HERA, the H1 and Zeus groups, have searched their three-year data inventory for a class of events at high x and high Q². Both groups report an excess of very-high-Q² events compared to predictions based on the standard model of particle physics. For Q² events above a value of 15,000 GeV², the H1 group found 12 events, against an expected background of 4.7 events. Meanwhile, the Zeus group observed that their data agreed with theory for Q² up to 15,000. Above that, however, agreement worsens; above a Q² of 35,000, where only one-tenth of an event would be expected, 2 events were recorded; one of them represents the highest Q² (46,000) value ever observed for a lepton-proton interaction. These surplus events at high Q² (if confirmed by more data--- the groups expect to double their data sample in the coming year) could be a sign of some new phenomenon beyond the standard model. In one scenario, the electron and quark fuse into a "leptoquark," a particle (with a mass around 200 GeV²) that would, among other things, help to facilitate proton decay. (Information on DESY website;US contacts for the Zeus group include Malcolm Derrick, Argonne, 630-252-6272, mxd@hep.anl.gov; Frank Sciulli, Columbia, x707fjs@nevisn.nevis.columbia.edu)

THE HIPPARCOS STAR CATALOG offers new measurements of the distances to thousands of stars. Of special interest are the distances to Cepheid variable stars, whose luminosity behavior is used as a yardstick for deducing the distances to far-away galaxies. Launched in 1989, the Hipparcos satellite records the position on the sky of more than 100,000 stars with milli- arcsecond accuracy (a 100-fold improvement over present catalogs) and lesser positional accuracy for a million more stars (Science, 21 February 1997). This greater knowledge of star locations is quickly being put to use. For example, stellar age and distance revisions based on the Hipparcos results, announced on February 14 at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society in London, suggest that the globular cluster stars, thought to be the oldest stars in our galaxy, may be only 11 (not 15) billion years old and, furthermore, that the universe as a whole is perhaps 10% older than earlier studies implied. Thus the embarassing dilemma in which globular cluster stars appeared to be older than the universe itself may now be resolving itself. (Science News, 15 Feb.)

IRON AGE OF SUPERCONDUCTORS .When type-II superconductors are placed in a magnetic field, the flux lines organize themselves into small bundles. When the current flowing through high-temperature superconductors is high enough, these flux lines can move, causing an unwanted voltage drop, a major impediment to the industrial use of these materials. New images of the bundles, produced by Swiss scientists, show that the bundles can entwine into stable "vortex twisters," offering a possible way out of the flux problem. David Nelson of Harvard compares this to the advent of the Iron Age, when smiths strengthened iron by adding dislocation defects through bending. (Nature, 20 Feb.)