April 12, 1994

IN complex burrows under the bricklike soil of East African deserts there lives a mammal more peculiar perhaps than any other on earth. More peculiar, in fact, than the creatures that have emerged from the wild imaginings of Maurice Sendak or the conjurers of otherworldly visitors. They are known as naked mole rats -- though they are neither moles nor rats -- and they are challenging scientists to rethink the evolution of a highly structured, cooperative way of life called eusociality, once thought to be limited to group-living insects like bees and ants. The habits of these small, fetal-looking colonial rodents, one of nine species of mole rat, are more insectlike than any vertebrate yet discovered. They are, perhaps, the best living example of what biologists call convergent evolution: the development of nearly identical characteristics in completely unrelated species.

Bear, Stearns & Company, the Wall Street investment bank, said yesterday that it was appointing Wayne D. Angell, a former Federal Reserve governor and inflation hawk, as its chief economist. Mr. Angell, 63, resigned from the Fed in early February after completing an eight-year term that included the stock market crash of 1987 as well as the beginning of the bond market meltdown of 1994. A fourth-generation Kansas wheat farmer, former banker and longtime economics professor at Ottawa University, a Baptist college in Ottawa, Kan., Mr. Angell is well known on Wall Street and in financial circles around the world.

Companies To curb the rising cost of treating workers for mental illness and substance abuse, companies like Merck, Anheuser-Busch and Sterling Winthrop are using a new way to measure treatment. The method is reducing expenses, but it also seeks to apply a precision to psychotherapy that worries many therapists. [ Page A1. ]

The nation's teetering system of weather satellites, for years held together by luck and borrowed equipment, hopes to receive new vitality on Wednesday with the launching of the most advanced weather sentinel ever placed above Earth. The satellite, the first of a planned series of five that are to be the eyes of weather forecasters into the next century, is an ambitious attempt to create a new generation of instruments for predicting weather and averting natural disasters.

Frank P. Merlo, a college education professor, sent a list of 20 money-saving ideas to Gov. Jim Florio in 1991, and nothing happened. Three years later Mr. Merlo sent the same list to Gov. Christine Todd Whitman. The next thing he knew the Governor was taking one of his suggestions and abolishing the State Department of Higher Education. Her aides even called to ask if they could use his name in announcing the plan. "I thought that was a nice touch," Mr. Merlo said.