July 14, 1992

A NEW and better way of making images of the brain as it works has been developed by several groups of scientists working independently of each other. Known as fast magnetic resonance imaging, or fast M.R.I., the technique can produce pictures less than a second apart. Other methods, like PET scanning, produce snapshots of the brain 5 to 10 minutes apart, hardly quick enough to catch a fleeting thought.

Brokers on Wall Street are calling them the stocks from hell. The bruised investors who own them are just calling them a mistake. They are a dozen or so stocks, including Filenet and Micrografx, that have fallen sharply since July 1. Some of them have plunged as much as 40 or 50 percent, in a period when the Dow Jones industrial average fell only 17 points.

A short five years ago, as America's semiconductor industry recoiled at the threat of Japanese domination, I.B.M. quietly helped create with the Federal Government an industry consortium to rebuild the nation's chip-making technology base. The result was Sematech, in which the Government has poured a half-billion dollars since 1987, and U.S. Memories Inc., a private effort to assure United States computer makers of a steady supply of advanced memory chips for computers.

Last year, a United Nations report warned that the damage done to Iraq by allied bombs and missiles, combined with the Security Council's punitive trade embargo, threatened to push the country back into what it termed a "pre-industrial" stage of development. That clearly has not happened in Baghdad, which now seems to be pulling itself up by its bootstraps. For a reporter returning to Baghdad after a year's absence, the most striking first impression is of the scale of Iraq's post-war reconstruction effort.

ATOP this 2,600-foot mountain, they call it harvesting the clouds. One moment, the air is clear, dry and sunny. Then the Pacific Ocean fog rolls in, thick, wet and cold. As it passes through huge sheets of plastic mesh set along the mountain ridge, a drop of water forms, then another and another.