Antibodies in blood can now be barcoded. So can DNA. Chemists Michael Natan, Christine Keating, and some 20 Penn State inventors have come up with a way to attach microscopic gold- and silver-striped rods to biological molecules. When viewed under blue light, the gold and silver stripes create barcode-like light-and-dark patterns, since silver is much more reflective than gold. Other metals can also be used.

DNA is an elegant molecule. Purified, it strings like spider silk. Glassy clear, it hides reams of secrets: though we know its code—ATGC, the letters of its alphabet—we can't yet read it like a book. We may know what it says, but not what it means.

Yet a book is what the genome, the entire set of DNA in an organism, is often called: "life's instruction book," as the title of this year's Penn State Lectures on the Frontiers of Science put it.

"A traditional farmer could never cross a fish with a strawberry, wrote Mark Dion, an artist included in the exhibit "Paradise Now" at the Exit Art gallery in New York last year.

Einstein's 1916 theory of general relativity predicted that some objects in space produce such intense gravitational fields that nothing —not even light—can escape them. Ergo, the black hole. But while the Hubble Space Telescope and Chandra X-ray Observatory have helped identify more than 30 possible black holes, scientists have yet to provide direct proof of their existence.

Processes on the Earth's surface range from microbial to global and from seconds to eons, writes organic geochemist Kate Freeman.

"It's kind of poetic isn't it," Freeman, a Penn State associate professor of geosciences says now. "I think that's what drew me to the geosciences. The range of scale across space and time. The way things are interconnected."

Editor's Note: As the discoverer of the first planets outside of our solar system, Alexander Wolszczan was asked by the Polish-born French artist Wojtek Siudmak to contribute an essay to his Millennium Exhibition, which opened June 8 in the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Siudmak, who describes his art as "hyper-realistic," asked Wolszczan to write something loosely related to his paintings."What I wrote", says Wolszczan, "is about liberation from physics and the constraints under which we live ó which is also what Siudmak's paintings are about.

Once it was asked in whispers, or with winks. The timid among us, though undeniably curious, feared raised eyebrows. Jokes about little green men. Who could take such a question seriously, yank it from the misty realms of science fiction and drop it under the searchlight of science? Well, our national space agency, for one. What's more, NASA seems pretty confident these days about the answer: Astrobiology, as defined on an official agency Web site, is "the study of the living universe."

It's unseasonably warm for a February afternoon: The bees are sure to be flying. I gaze at the semi-circle of 14 crates, each like a stack of extra large shoe-boxes, as Jamie Fisher disappears into a tiny wooden shed, its red paint cracked and peeling. A moment later, she reemerges, her face hidden beneath a wide-brimmed hat covered with yellow netting. She hands me my own headgear, and I pull the mesh protection tight. A lone bee circles the hive, and my eyes dart anxiously, tracking his every move.