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Did five people have to die because US biological weapon researchers wanted to receive more money for their work? Greenpeace magazine feels this dreadful assumption may be likely, based on statements from members of a U.S. government delegation.

During the UN bioweapons conference taking place at present in Geneva, the participants of the U.S. delegation said that a high-ranking U.S. biology weapons expert is behind the anthrax letters. Independent researchers also share this suspicion, Greenpeace magazine reported on Wednesday.
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It?s planting season in eastern Afghanistan, and farmers are busy plowing their fields for next year?s crop of poppies that will eventually be turned into heroin and shipped to the streets of the U.S. and Europe.

A few weeks ago, many farmers were planning to plant wheat. But now that the Taliban have gone, along with their ban on drugs, most of them have changed their mind, since poppies earn them 15 times more money.

?The Taliban told us not to cultivate poppies, so I stopped,? says a gray-bearded father of nine. ?Absolutely we were forced to stop, and we were sorry about this. I don?t especially like growing poppies, but I was worried about getting food for my stomach.?
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Researchers who are searching for evidence of water and organic compounds on Mars need to know how to recognize Martian life forms if Mars rocks are eventually brought back to Earth. Peter Buseck and Martha McCartney, of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, decided that clues can be found in bacteria here on Earth.

They were hired by NASA to develop reliable criteria for identifying traces of life, or ?biomarkers,? for use during future astrobiology missions. They decided that the study of organisms from Earth is the best way to start. Buseck says, ?If you find something in extraterrestrial samples that resembles life on Earth then it?s reasonable to think that you have found traces of life? on other planets.
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Toxins produced by the mines and smelters of thousands of years ago may be affecting the health of people living today in the Middle East. ?Even after 2000 years of dilution by environmental agencies such as wind, the heavy metals remain in high concentrations and continue to exert toxic effects on plants and animals including the humans who inhabit the area,? says F. Brian Pyatt of Nottingham Trent University in England.

Pyatt and his colleague J. P. Grattan researched ancient and current environmental pollution in an area called Wadi Faynan in southern Jordan. They measured current levels of copper and lead in the region where Babylonians, Assyrians, Romans and Byzantines worked large copper mines thousands of years ago.
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