February 7, 1995

RUNNING his fingers across a shell, whether the rocky spire of a 400-million-year-old fossil or the glassy dome of a modern-day cowrie, Dr. Geerat Vermeij is quietly reading tales from the history of life. Examining the shells' punctured armor, he sees every detail of their encounters with predators and their close scrapes with death or final agony. Yet at the same time Dr. Vermeij sees nothing at all, because he is blind. Born with glaucoma and never able to make out more than fuzzy shapes, Dr. Vermeij (pronounced Ver-MAY), a paleontologist whose colleagues call him Gary, has been completely blind since the age of 3 and has never really seen a single creature, living or fossil. Yet by using his fingers to feel both the damage on shells as well as the girth and power of the claws and jaws that attack them, this professor at the University of California at Davis has found evidence of an ancient arms race. According to the histories recorded on these broken and mended fortresses, mollusks appear to have evolved ever more rugged armor to protect their delicate flesh just as their predators developed more vicious weaponry.

BOMB PLOT DEFENDANT ENTERS GUILTY PLEA The defense suffered a major blow in the terrorism trial of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 other men when one of the primary defendants, Siddig Ibrahim Siddig Ali, changed his plea to guilty and told the court that he and the others had worked together to plan a campaign of bombings and assassinations. A1.

A Manhattan jury absolved New York Hospital in the 1984 death of Libby Zion yesterday, saying that its system of training and supervision for young doctors was not to blame. The jury found that the young woman herself was partly at fault because she did not tell doctors that she had taken cocaine and a host of prescription drugs. And it found that three of her four doctors contributed to her death by giving her the wrong drug, and so must pay a total of $375,000 to Ms. Zion's family for her pain and suffering.

On Jonathan D. Bick's first day as a salesman for I.B.M. 17 years ago, he wore what he remembers as a gray suit, a button-down white shirt, a "sincere tie" and Gucci loafers. His boss looked him over and thanked him for wearing a suit but pointedly said: "Why did you wear your bedroom slippers to work?" The boss, he remembers, told him to take the rest of the day off and shop for a pair of wingtips.

Just two days after being slapped with punitive tariffs against more than $1 billion in goods, China today asked United States negotiators to return to Beijing next week to resume talks on the piracy of American-made music, movies and software. Administration officials welcomed the move, and said it might indicate that China's leadership was reconsidering the wisdom of a confrontation -- and perhaps a trade war -- over violations of American copyrights on items from compact disks to popular personal computer programs.