FISHING BY SATELLITE - Stanford scientists believe a new fish-tagging technology using satellite transmission can help shed light on the migration habits of ocean fish, including the commercially valuable but sharply declining Atlantic bluefin tuna. The new satellite pop-up tags were attached to 300- to 600-pound fish. The tags pop free at a preprogrammed time, float to the surface and beam their data, via the ARGOS satellite network, to scientists in the lab, revealing where the fish moved and what ocean temperatures it favored. One tagged Pacific blue marlin swam from Hawaii to west of the Galapagos Islands (2,800 miles) in 90 days. The new technology already has provided migration information that could help save the endangered bluefin tuna. The bluefin can fetch as much as $80,000 in the Tokyo seafood market, but breeding stocks in the Atlantic have declined by as much as 80 percent the past two decades. "This new technology allows us to track animals that have been untrackable until now,'' said Barbara A. Block of Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station, which is collaborating with the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the National Marine Fisheries Service on the research.

BOOST FOR BIOLOGY The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) awarded Stanford a $2-million grant to strengthen the university's undergraduate biology program. Stanford has been a recipient of the award twice previously ($1 million in 1989 and $1.8 million in 1994) and used the money to meet a growing demand for undergraduate research. As a result of the HHMI grant money, about half of Stanford's human biology majors are graduating with honors research projects, compared to 10 to 15 percent before the money was available, said Craig Heller, professor and chair of the Department of Biological Sciences. This year's grant will help fund "virtual labs'' to ease the undergraduate crunch for laboratory access. One project planned is a computer simulation of a kidney.

IT'S NOT FAIR - The more unhappy you are about your body weight and shape, the harder it is to lose weight, according to a School of Medicine study published in the Annals of Behavioral Medicine. In the study conducted at the Stanford Center for Research in Disease Prevention for one year with 177 mildly to moderately overweight men and women, the people who did not like the way they looked and who had lost weight and regained it again and again had the hardest time shedding pounds. The study, according to Dr. Michaela Kiernan of the center, was intended to provide a better understanding of people who have difficulty losing weight. The participants were quizzed about previous weight loss efforts and then were randomly assigned either to a diet program or a diet and exercise program. The more successful ones were the obvious: Those who ate less and exercised were twice as likely to lose weight. But there were less obvious results: Participants satisfied with their body were also twice as likely to succeed as were the ones who had no history of repeated weight loss.

SEEING THE LIGHT - Physicists at Stanford have developed a new optical detector so sensitive it can clock the arrival of a single particle of light and measure its energy with exceptional precision. The basic
sensor ­ called a superconducting transition edge sensor (TES) ­ was invented with Department of Energy support as part of an experiment on campus by more than 40 scientists from eight institutions. When applied to light coming from celestial objects, the device's ability to directly measure the location, arrival time, and energy of individual photons could have a revolutionary impact on optical astronomy, say its inventors, Stanford physics Professor Blas Cabrera and his research team.