* Stephen Hawking now theorizes that information can survive after falling into a black hole, admitting defeat in a bet he made with physicist John Preskill in 1997.

* After a laser accident and the loss of classified information, 19 employees at the Los Alamos National Laboratory are suspended pending the investigation of possible safety and security violations.

* Fetal stem cells can locate an area of brain damage in rats and form new neurons, report Stanford researchers—a first step toward a treatment for strokes.

* Archaeologists discover a 1,000-year-old full-scale brewery in Peru, where the Wari people made chicha, a beerlike beverage.

* China is looking for a few good women astronauts. The country is conducting a nationwide search for female candidates, who could be traveling into space by 2010.

* The littlest vertebrate: At a third of an inch long and 1/500,000 of a pound, the stout infant fish is the smallest animal with a backbone, two marine researchers report.

* NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft begins its journey to Mercury. The spacecraft will swing past the little-studied planet in 2008 and 2009 before settling into orbit in 2011.

* Three U.K. institutions plan to collect DNA from thousands of endangered species to preserve the creatures’ genetic information.

* Researchers develop a synthetic protein that can transmit disease in mice, bolstering the leading but still-controversial theory about how mad cow disease spreads.

 U.S. high school students at the Math Olympiad in Athens bring home five gold medals and one silver. The American team places second overall behind China.

* A whale carcass in Monterey Canyon, California, contains two newfound species of worms that feed only on whale bones, helping to recycle ocean nutrients. 

* Lake Vostok, a lake buried entirely beneath Antarctic ice, contains two separate basins that may have been cut off from the rest of the world for 20 million years.