July 30, 1996

After their 46-foot yacht sank in Long Island Sound two years ago and their waterfront home burned down in September, Dr. Arthur Graff, a prominent plastic surgeon, and his wife, Marnette, decided to build a new life in North Carolina. They returned to Long Island today, not for a reunion with friends at their yacht club but for arraignment in Suffolk County Criminal Court on charges of insurance fraud.

The Hudson-Bergen Light Rail Transit System, the state's largest mass transit project, is on its way to becoming a reality. A contractor has been selected for the first phase of the $1.1 billion trolley system, which will link trains, buses and ferries along the Hudson River waterfront, and work is expected to begin later this summer, officials said yesterday. Raytheon Infrastructure Services of Lexington, Mass., and Itochu/Kinkisharyo, a Japan-based partnership, will build 29 rail cars, 17 stations and 10 miles of track from Bayonne to the Hoboken Terminal, said Anthony L. Grazioso, a spokesman for New Jersey Transit. The first phase is expected to be completed in late 1999. Eventually, the system will extend 20.5 miles, with the second phase stretching from Hoboken to the Vince Lombardi service area of the New Jersey Turnpike in Ridgefield.

Both candidates to succeed Senator Bill Bradley are trotting out endorsements from members of the opposing party. Last week, Representative Robert G. Torricelli, Democrat of Englewood, announced that he had the support of several Republicans from Bergen County, including John F. Zisa, the Mayor of Hackensack; Larry McClure, a former county prosecutor, and John A. Steuert Jr., a former Mayor of Maywood. Yesterday, the Republican candidate, Representative Richard A. Zimmer of Delaware Township, discussed Democratic endorsements from Mayor Thomas G. Dunn of Elizabeth and John Connor, former executive director of the Democratic State Committee.

AROUND 250 million years ago, something so devastating occurred that about 90 percent of Earth's animal species were wiped out. While the cause of this greatest of all mass extinctions remains uncertain, a new study by biologists and geochemists suggests that a huge upwelling of carbonated water from the depths of the oceans may have played a lethal role. That mass extinction, at the end of the Permian period, reshuffled Earth's genetic deck, making way for the rise of dinosaurs in the subsequent Mesozoic era and widening the niches available for the mammal-like reptiles destined to become ancestors of the human race.

THE researchers who study Alzheimer's disease are a relentlessly upbeat bunch. They are on the verge, they say, of finding a way to diagnose the disease with a simple blood test. Quite soon, they say, they will turn up a way to delay its onset or slow its course. Any day now, they say, drugs will emerge that prevent the disease in people who would otherwise get it. More and more scientists are being recruited into the field. An international meeting last week in Osaka, Japan, drew 1,300 participants, nearly twice the number who attended a similar meeting last year.