May 17, 1994

At a time when communications and entertainment giants are eager to enter the electronic information business, the largest provider of on-line information services plans to drop out to concentrate on making paper. The Mead Corporation said yesterday that it would sell its Mead Data Central unit, which provides computer access to data bases that include Lexis, used by lawyers and legal scholars, and Nexis, which contains articles from a long list of newspapers, magazines and other periodicals.

Has the Bundesbank, the monetary lion that has had all Europe cowering before German tight-money policies, rolled over and started purring like a pussycat? After the German central bank lowered both its key interest rates by half a percentage point last week, some financial analysts here are beginning to think just that.

A decade ago, an executive with a California military supplier told the Central Intelligence Agency that he suspected a Chilean arms manufacturer had bought several tons of a potent explosive ingredient from his company for military purposes, not for mining as the Chileans contended. The explosive, called zirconium, was on a list of items that had to have Government approval if they were to be exported from the United States for military purposes. The C.I.A. was alarmed enough to distribute a secret report describing the warning to the top levels of the Government, including the White House, the Commerce and State Departments and the National Security Agency, according to a copy of the report, which remains classified.

In a decision that threatens an increasingly popular approach to waste disposal, the Supreme Court ruled today that local governments cannot require all trash within their borders to be sent to a designated plant for sorting, recycling or treatment. More than half the states have authorized their local governments to adopt this approach, in which a municipality prohibits the shipping of any solid waste that has not passed through the chosen plant.

WOMEN may not find this surprising, but one of the most persistent and frustrating problems in evolutionary biology is the male. Specifically, where did he come from, and why doesn't he just go away? After many years of rubbing their chins so hard they are practically scraping bone, scientists say they still cannot explain to their satisfaction why the great majority of species on earth reproduce sexually. It would be so much neater and more sensible if females were to do the whole reproductive business solo, either by making simple clonal copies of their eggs -- as do some lizards and fish, for example -- or by manufacturing in-house the sperm needed to fertilize the eggs, as do some worms and snails.