AMHERST, Mass. - You order a sweater using a cordless or cellular phone, or by clicking through a catalog on the World Wide Web. You check your e-mail from a computer in a trendy cybercafe. You log onto a World Wide Web site that offers information on a sensitive health issue. Is your privacy protected? No, says University of Massachusetts computer science professor Susan Landau, who has just co-authored a book on the subject.

AMHERST, Mass. - The University of Massachusetts Alumni Association will present its annual Distinguished Alumni Awards Thurs. April 9 at noon in the Great Hall of the Massachusetts State House. Attendance at the ceremonies is by invitation only, but reporters are welcome.

AMHERST, Mass. - Astronomers at the University of Massachusetts have discovered a rare molecule in interstellar space, within the dense, gaseous clouds where new stars form. Professor William Irvine, graduate students James Dickens and Albert Nummelin, and colleagues in Sweden and Japan, reported finding ethylene oxide in three different interstellar clouds thousands of light-years away, in the Milky Way galaxy. The molecule is unusual in terms of both its structure and its chemistry.

AMHERST, Mass. - University of Massachusetts astronomer Matthew Senay is part of a research team reporting that Comet Hale-Bopp, which passed by the Earth last year, provides evidence that comet ices are created inside huge interstellar clouds of gas, dust, and ice. The findings, detailed in the current issue of Science, suggest that comet ices are not, as previously thought, created in the outer regions of the solar system, where comets themselves are formed. The study also offers new evidence which implies that the temperature of the interstellar cloud that formed our solar system could not have been colder than 30 degrees Kelvin; a temperature considerably higher than scientists previously believed. The research team includes astronomers from the University of Hawaii, the National Research Council of Canada, and the Observatoire de Paris-Meudon.