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.)