January 13, 1992

Two young men dressed in blue jeans and down jackets jog down the steps and head toward the turnstiles at the 135th Street subway station. No other passengers are on the uptown platform of the quiet station, a local stop on the B and C lines in Harlem. Without a glance back at the clerk in the token booth, the men open an exit gate and saunter into the subway. Over the next 15 minutes, nine other people enter the station -- seven of them also going through the gate to avoid paying the fare. Most are men, some young and some middle-aged. But there is also a trio of teen-agers, two of them girls, and a well-dressed woman in her 20's.

A brash and defiant album by the underground rock group Nirvana, which displaced Michael Jackson's "Dangerous" as No. 1 in the charts last week, has the music industry wondering whether it is a rare creative fluke or a repeatable marketing coup. Eddie Rosenblatt, the president of DGC Records, Nirvana's label, called the band's success pure serendipity. "We didn't do anything," he said. "It was just one of those 'get out of the way and duck' records. The band deserves all the credit."

Federal auditors have found that 14 research universities inappropriately billed the Government several million dollars for housing, personal expenses, travel, entertainment, fund raising and other activities unrelated to research. A report on the auditors' findings, for the Department of Health and Human Services, provides the first detailed indication of how widespread such overcharges are among universities conducting research for the Government. The audits, undertaken after last year's disclosures of overcharges at Stanford University, surveyed 14 research universities and found overcharges or questionable charges at all of them, though on a smaller scale than those reported at Stanford.

The Buffalo Bills had relied upon their high-powered, high-scoring no-huddle offense to light their path to victory most of the season, while the Denver Broncos were accustomed to depending upon the scrambling high jinks of quarterback John Elway for their triumphs. So when the Broncos' defense threw a blanket over Bills quarterback Jim Kelly and receivers James Lofton and Andre Reed and then shuttered running back Thurman Thomas this afternoon in the American Football Conference championship game here at Rich Stadium, Buffalo's offense was left stumbling in the dark. And when Elway, who eventually left the game with a thigh bruise, was corralled, the Broncos' offense floundered.

Scientists within the Dow Corning Corporation urged company officials for years to conduct critical safety studies of its silicone gel breast implants, but the tests were put off for more than a decade, a review of hundreds of company documents shows. The documents, made available to The New York Times from several sources, also suggest that the studies that had been done were inadequate. They describe insertion of implants into women before they had been tested in animals, and suggest that Dow Corning Wright breast implants may have been tested in animals but not in animal breast tissue.