Shooting star standing still? Then look out

Q. A meteor is headed for Earth! Can you tell if it's coming your way?

A. On the night of Nov. 30, 1982, says astronomer Bob Berman in "Secrets of the Night Sky," an alarmed woman called his observatory to report a fiery ball slashing across the heavens, lighting up the countryside."Probably just a meteor, nothing unusual," he told her.

But 100 miles away, folks were watching the same bright light, and it wasn't moving. The only way a meteor can appear stationary in the sky is if it's coming right at you.

Most visible shooting stars are the size of apple seeds, and of the 100 million that enter our atmosphere each day at speeds 50 times greater than a rifle bullet, nearly all disintegrate into dust. Not so the particular one in question on this night. The grapefruit-size, six-pound meteor crashed through the roof of a house in Wethersfield, Conn., where the family was watching "M*A*S*H" in the next room. After bouncing a few times between carpet and ceiling, it came to rest harmlessly under the dining room table.

Ironically, the location of the previous house hit by a shooting star was again Wethersfield, 11 years earlier and barely a mile away.

Q. Do all Caucasians look alike? Do all Cabbage Patch dolls look alike?

A. There's a tendency to see people in other groups as being more alike than we feel members of our own group are, says David G. Myers in "Social Psychology." Many of us can recall being embarrassed by having confused two people of another racial group, prompting the person we've misnamed to surmise, "You think we all look alike."

What's interesting is that while studies confirm that whites have difficulty remembering black or Oriental faces, blacks and Orientals have equal difficulty remembering white faces. "This intriguing `own-race bias' appears to be a cognitive phenomenon that is automatic, for it is usually unrelated to the perceiver's racial attitudes."

People evidently develop schemas - mental representations - that are attuned to the types of faces they frequently encounter. "And that perhaps explains why to me all Cabbage Patch dolls look alike, though not to my (then) 9-year-old daughter and her friends."

Q. What famous experiment by a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist was dreamed up in a dream - twice?

A. In 1920, German-born Otto Loewi was working on an experiment to see whether nerves send messages chemically or electrically, says A. Alvarez in "Night." He was looking specifically at the vagus nerve from the brain to the heart.

But details of the experiment stumped him, until on Easter Sunday they came to him in a dream. "He woke, scribbled it down, then went back to sleep. But by morning the dream had vanished and he could not decipher his nocturnal scrawl."

No problem. The next night he dreamed the dream again, and not to make the same mistake twice, went straight to his laboratory at 3 a.m. He prepared two frogs and stimulated the vagus nerve of one, slowing its heart rate. Then he took blood from the first frog's heart and transferred it to the second's, and when its heart slowed too, Loewi had his answer: Nerves are not like tiny wires conducting electricity, they transmit their signals chemically.

The chief chemical, it later turned out, is acetylcholine, the neurotransmitter that triggers dreams.

"A dream, in short, had provided a clue to understanding the chemistry of dreams."