World's Biggest Magnet? - If all goes well, early this summer engineers at the National High Magnetic Field Lab's headquarters at Innovation Park in Tallahassee will switch on the most powerful, continuous-running magnet in the world.

Edgy Pub House Finds a Home - You won't find a John Grisham here, but you may find a future Gertrude Stein. Fiction Collective Two (FC2), a nationally known, non-profit publishing house praised by literary critics for its non-mainstream appeal, has come to the creative writing program in the FSU English department. English professor R.M. Berry was named co-publisher of the press this spring.

Med School Quest Scores Giant Leap - Much of what Florida State missed in its failed bid to the 1999 Florida Legislature for funding to start a four-year medical school it recouped in an unprecedented, multimillion-dollar appropriation that not only sets the stage for such a program in the future but underwrites a major expansion of the university's science programs.

Reefs Reel in Big Bucks - Artificial reefs--manmade habitats for aquatic animals ranging from lobster to largemouth bass--constitute a multibillion-dollar enterprise funded by government and private entities around the globe. Florida is thought to be the leading coastal state in the numbers of artificial reefs in place off its shores. Each year, the state's Department of Environmental Protection helps fund public reef-building projects using funds generated by the sale of saltwater fishing licenses and from federal revenues generated by taxes on fishing tackle. Such reefs are prized targets of commercial and recreational fishermen, as well as scuba divers, from the Panhandle to Key West.

Nature, Not Humans Behind Desert Growth - For two decades, scientists worldwide have thought that farmers working the land and their grazing livestock were causing the Sahara Desert in northwest Africa to move south. As farmers would lose crops to droughts, they would move farther south toward more fertile land, leaving nothing but dust behind them. The land was destroyed, and though years had gone by, no vegetation had grown back, leading scientists to believe they needed to control what they call, "desertification," the permanent destruction of land by humans.