Stern-minded Soviets made the city a hothouse of science and learning, but that's now fast on the ebb. Its academies have withered, its scientists gone begging. The place is returning to the ether of old. Mediums and psychics and holy crazies abound, just as they did in the tumultuous finale to the Romanov age. It has a Ufology Society to chronicle alien sightings and a Scientific Research Institute of Karma to soothe a person's aura.
Classified sections bulge with every service for the soul and psyche under the moon.
NASA's Lunar Prospector spacecraft that is now orbiting the moon contains an ounce of the cremated remains of renowned planetary scientist Gene Shoemaker. According to Navajo belief, the moon regulates life cycles and human remains would desecrate it. NASA has apologized and promised to be more sensitive in the future. Scientists at UCSD's Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the University of Arizona in Tucson report in two separate papers in the Jan. 16 issue of Science that the potato-sized rock was contaminated by the surrounding Antarctic ice in which it was found.