Gambling on a Martian Landing Site A small roving robot on mars, giving planetary scientists first close up look at Martian surface in 20 years. Unlike viking of 70's, pathfinder is arriving alone on a bulletlike trajectory. Leaving one chance to get the choicest scientific data about the planet's surface - and one change to lose the entire mission if the lander falls on a steep slope or on a large rock. /*---------------------------------------------------------------------*/ Spatiotemporal Chaos in Electroconvection Spatiotemporal chaos (STC) nearthe onset of electroconvection in a nematic liquid crystal is reaported. In samples with conductivities greater than 1x10^-8 / ohm / meter STC was found to evolve by means of a supercritical Hopf bifurcation from the uniform conduction state. Because this example of STC resulted from nonlinear interactions betweeen only four modes, it provides a realistic opportunity to understand the observed phenomena in terms of a weakly nonlinear theory in the form of fource coupled complex Ginzburg-Landau equations derived from the full equations of motion of the system. For smaller conductivities, the pattern immediately above onset consisted of localized pulses of convection that coexisted with the conduction state. The pulses had a unique width in the direction perpendicular to the director and has much larger and varying lengths parallel to the director. /*---------------------------------------------------------------------*/ Does Macroscopic Quantum Coherence Occur in Ferritin? S. Gider studied classical and quantum magnetic phenomena in natural and artificial ferritin proteins. If the magnetic moment of the ferritin molecules is blocked below 5K then in the observe dresonance at 24.3mK , cannot be attributed to quantum oscillations of the magnetic moment between two equilibrium orientations, To clarify this point one should consider the time-dependent magnetism of a single domain particle. In the absence of a magnetic field, the energy of a single domain particle is minimized when its magnetic moment aligns with the anisotropy axis of the particle with the two opposite orientations being equivalent. These two orientations are separated by an energy barrier, U , where U=KV, where V is the volume of the particle and K the magnetic anisotropy constant characteristic of the material. The overbarrier transition at temperature T is Gamma(T) = w exp (-U/KT)