August 26, 1991

For a group of American money managers seeking investment opportunities in the Soviet Union last week, it was business as usual, despite the tanks. "Everyone, on all sides of the conflict, was demonstrating that the business arrangements they were making would continue, regardless of the coup," Dean LeBaron, the leader of the American group, said yesterday in a telephone interview from his summer home in New London, N.H. "The association between politics and economics is more in the eyes of Westerners than the Soviets."

Una Clarke started her day on Friday by standing at the corner of Parkside and Ocean Avenues in Brooklyn, imploring the commuters who rushed by her into the subway to think of her on Election Day. She was practicing traditional politics in the manner that candidates use to get elected in every City Council race in America.

Normally, it takes years or even decades to develop the first commercial products and apply for patents based on research breakthroughs. But "buckyballs," an unusual form of carbon first identified in 1985 and now thought to have huge commercial potential, may have been built into a lung-scanning device developed in Australia before anyone realized they existed. As a result, the inventor of the lung scanner and the Australian company making it are pressing broad patent claims covering the best-known method for making buckyballs and related molecules. Their claims, which have been greeted skeptically to date, pit them against the University of Arizona and the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Germany, whose researchers developed the machinery now used to make most of the buckyballs being sold to fellow researchers throughout the world. New Kind of Carbon Buckyballs are hollow spheres of 60 carbon atoms arranged in a series of hexagons and pentagons resembling the geodesic domes designed by R. Buckminster Fuller, the architect who died in 1983 -- hence their formal name, buckminsterfullerenes. Soon after their discovery, it became apparent that buckyballs are merely the mostly easily formed of a whole group of caged carbon structures, called fullerenes.

The rush to independence and more big changes A10 Yeltsin's daunting task A11 More coup revelations A12 Washington prepares for Baltic independence A13

Each year in the Riverside school district in New Jersey, the elderly converge on the schools for Senior Citizens Day. They sample food from the cafeterias, watch students sing and dance and learn about the academic programs being financed with their tax dollars. In Westchester County in New York, the Pelham schools have begun issuing gold cards that give the elderly there free entry to all sports events, while in nearby North Tarrytown members of the Board of Education visit groups of older people during the budget season to assure them that the fat is being trimmed from the budget.