SUN’S DEATH: The Hubble Space Telescope’s pictures of dying stars are giving scientists a preview of what the death of the sun might look like. A widely disseminated AP story quoted Astronomy Professor Bruce Balick: “The sky will be filled with colors, sparkling like bubbles, bangles and beads,” Balick said. “Probably, though, not even our descendants will be alive to see it.”

CIVIL RIGHTS CASES: Civil rights cases, once coordinated by lawyers from the NAACP’s Legal Defense Fund, are now being handled by a wide variety of attorneys, resulting in cases being lost that should not have been pursued, an article in the New York Times says. In the old days, few white lawyers would handle such cases, and there weren’t many black lawyers, the article says, so the Legal Defense Fund had a lot of power to decide which cases were pursued and which were not. The paper quoted Law Professor Eric Schnapper on the change that has taken place: “If you take, for example, the Oncale case, which is a sex discrimination case that’s on the Supreme Court docket, the lawyer is a general practitioner. He does ‘slip and fall’—workman’s comp. Now he has a sex discrimination case in the Supreme Court!”

REINCARNATED ST. PAUL? When a Lake Oswego, Ore., man claimed to be the reincarnation of the apostle Paul, Portland’s Willamette Week contacted Sociology Professor Rodney Stark for a comment. Stark said the man’s “believe what you want” philosophy would get in the way of a long-lasting cult. “When you don’t make any demands, and people are free to believe anything, you can’t have much of an organization. That’s why an awful lot of New Age groups don’t amount to more than a vague, short-lived discussion group.”

SAVING WILDLIFE: Habitat conservation plans negotiated between private corporations and the federal government are built on a dearth of scientific data, a review reported widely by AP has found. Zoology Professor Peter Kareiva participated in the review and was quoted in the article: “For a large portion of these plans, maybe half of them, they lack the data to do anything even remotely scientific. If you don’t know this basic biology, it’s sort of a delusion to think you’re doing anything to help these species.”

TOOLS FOR TESTS: The state is prohibiting students from using computers to take achievement tests on the grounds that it is not equitable; having the computer would be an advantage. Asked to comment in a widely distributed AP story, Education Dean Allen Glenn said “It (the computer) does reshape how kids write. Probably at the fourth grade it’s a problem, but not a critical problem. But I would argue very hard that they must be using computers by 10^th grade.” ¶