An international team of researchers using UCLA's ion microprobe -- which can analyze materials 10 times smaller than the width of a human hair -- announced that they have discovered evidence that life on Earth began at least 3.85 billion years ago, 400 million years earlier than previously believed. The scientists from UCLA, UC San Diego, the Australian National University and England's Oxford Brookes University found evidence of an early "signature for life" in the form of a specific carbon isotope in rocks from Greenland.

A second annual report on network television violence, released by the UCLA Center for Communication Policy, found that TV violence in the 1995-'96 season declined from the previous year. In the five main areas of study -- TV series, made-for-TV movies, theatrical films on TV, on-air promos and children's programming -- there were signs of improvement, according to the new report authored by Jeffrey Cole, director of the center.

Two UCLA researchers, one a plant physiologist and one a biochemist, have combined to produce intriguing insights into the aging process. Jane Shen-Miller was able to germinate a lotus seed recovered from an ancient lake bed in China and believed to be nearly 1,300 years old. Steve Clarke, who more than a decade ago discovered that the enzyme L-isoaspartyl methyltransferase (MT) repairs proteins routinely damaged as part of the aging process in plants, mammals and bacteria, proceeded to find the MT enzyme in seeds similar to that germinated by Shen-Miller. MT is the first enzyme shown to repair damaged proteins.

Approximately 2 million American children rely on costly hospital emergency rooms for routine medical care when they are sick, according to a national study conducted by UCLA researchers on the patterns of emergency room use among children. The authors, led by Dr. Neal Halfon, associate professor of public health and pediatrics, found that the type of health insurance -- or whether a child had coverage at all -- were not major factors in predicting whether children relied on hospital emergency rooms for sick care. Being poor and living in an area with few primary care physicians were more important predictors, according to the study.

Scientists at UCLA's atmospheric-research facility in Fairbanks, AL, have begun operating a high-powered liquid mirror telescope (LMT) that produces images of a quality rivaling those transmitted by the orbiting Hubble Space Telescope -- and at a tiny fraction of the cost. UCLA's LMT, one of only five in the world, operates by spinning liquid mercury on a rotating plate, spreading the highly reflective metal across the plate to a thickness of about 1/8 inch. The LMT is being used to study the aurora borealis and the ionosphere, the region of the upper atmosphere where the "Northern Lights" occur.

Amid the debate over immigration laws, two UCLA researchers released a study finding that Asian immigrants, the fastest-growing ethnic group in the United States, contribute billions of dollars to the economy each year, have high rates of naturalization, and vote at a higher rate than natives. The report, coauthored by Don Nakanishi, director of the Asian American Studies Center, and urban planning chair Paul Ong, argues that Asian immigrants do far more good than harm to the nation's economy.

A member of UCLA's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics reported on the first evidence of a moon producing a magnetic field. Margaret Kivelson, a physicist with the institute, made the discovery from experiments she designed for the spacecraft Galileo. The finding that Ganymede, Jupiter's largest moon, can exert a magnetic field despite its appearance as an icy, geologically inactive mass raises new questions about the conditions under which magnetic fields can occur and, more broadly, how the solar system formed and has evolved.

HIV-infected gay men who keep their homosexuality hidden from society become sick with AIDS and die significantly sooner than men who do not hide their sexual orientation, researchers from the Norman Cousins Program in Psychoneuroimmunology at UCLA and the UCLA AIDS Institute found. The researchers suggested that their findings may reflect the possibility that many closeted gay men share an inhibited personality type that has been associated with a heightened risk of illness in other studies.

An archaeology team headed by UCLA's Giorgio Buccellati and his wife, Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati, found the long-lost site of a once-important 4,000-year-old city. Urkesh, assumed to have been the political and religious hub of earliest Hurrian civilization, was uncovered in an excavation that began in 1984. After years of analyzing more than 600 seal impressions left on clay and mud and found scattered on the floor of a room in a royal storehouse buried just under modern Tell Mozan, Buccellati announced that the team had indeed found the first Hurrian city ever to be identified.

After spending five years working inside four major California manufacturing plants, a UCLA education professor has concluded that a new and cooperative employment compact between managers and workers is required if American industry is to thrive in the competitive global economy. But, as Wellford W. Wilms chronicles in his book Restoring Prosperity: How Workers and Managers Are Forging a New Culture of Cooperation (Times Books), a century's worth of bitter antagonism, exacerbated by the recent wave of downsizing, has left major obstacles to be crossed before the necessary trust is achieved.

When another research team linked a mutation in the enzyme superoxide dismutase (SOD1) to an inherited form of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), better known as Lou Gehrig's disease, UCLA chemist Joan Selverstone Valentine was in a position to capitalize on the finding. Valentine, who had already gained insight into the enzyme -- which converts many different toxic molecules into harmless oxygen and hydrogen peroxide -- shifted the focus of her lab to studying SOD1 mutations, of which there are now believed to be more than 30, all related to ALS. Valentine found that the mutated enzyme maintains its detoxifying function, but also appears to take on another function, converting some substances into highly toxic products. The understanding has brought researchers in Valentine's lab and elsewhere closer to finding a possible treatment for inherited ALS.

Two immunologists in the UCLA AIDS Institute found that parts of the human chromosome, known as telemores, cause immune cells to age prematurely in HIV-infected patients, leaving those cells unable to fight the virus. HIV researcher Janis V. Giorgi and a researcher on aging, Rita B. Effros, collaborated on a study indicating that increased rounds of immune-cell division occur during chronic HIV disease, suggesting that the virus, which remains active for years, stimulates an aggressive immune response that eventually exhausts the immune system.