Whither the ice? Glaciologists are scrambling to sort out which of the world’s ice houses may be about to empty themselves under the onslaught of greenhouse warming. Mountain glaciers are clearly receding, and high-mountain tropical glaciers could soon disappear. But the behavior of the great ice stores of Greenland, Antarctica, and West Antarctica is proving more subtle. Satellite-borne radar and other new geophysical tools will be monitoring the comings and goings of ice in these constantly shifting sheets, providing a better understanding of what our warmer future holds.

A sun-climate connection. As more and more wiggles matching the waxing and waning of the sun show up in records of past climate, researchers are grudgingly taking the sun seriously as a factor in climate change. They have included solar variability in their simulations of the past century’s warming. And the sun seems to have played a pivotal role in triggering droughts and cold snaps. To gain complete respectability, sun-climate researchers are working to identify the physical link between relatively feeble solar fluctuations and climate. A leading candidate: solar-modulated cosmic rays and their effects on clouds.

Budget bust. Will 2002 be remembered as the year the good times ended? That's likely to be a little too dire, but it’s a growing worry among scientists in developed nations, as a slumping world economy could dramatically slow the growth of government and private spending on basic science. In the United States, cratering stock prices have shrunk university and foundation endowments by one-third or more. The White House has already signaled that it won't support continued double-digit increases for biomedical research spending. And war with Iraq could quash growing hopes of doubling taxpayer outlays on the physical sciences. But there is a bright side: Low interest rates are allowing stretched institutions to keep many lab construction projects on track. It just may take longer to staff the benches.

R-evolutionary genomics. With genome sequences for most of the major microbial groups in hand and ever more DNA of complex organisms being deciphered, researchers expect to be able to make better sense of life's many evolutionary relationships. Meanwhile, studies of human genetic variation will continue to shed light on our deep past, and the chimp genome project may begin to reveal what makes us human.

A different light. Several satellites tuned to wavelengths outside the glamorous optical band should shine in 2003. The European Space Agency's Integral mission, launched in October, will soon observe gamma rays from black holes, supernovas, and other scenes of violence, and NASA's Swift explorer will start tracking gamma ray bursts by December. The Space Infrared Telescope Facility, slated for launch in April, will examine the heat from distant galaxies and dusty clouds where stars and planets form. And astronomers will get their best map of microwave ripples in the sky--a chilly imprint of the big bang--when results from the Microwave Anisotropy Probe are released early in the year.

Important matter. In 2002, two rival teams at the CERN laboratory near Geneva produced cold, slow-moving antihydrogen atoms--antielectrons orbiting antiprotons--for the first time. Antihydrogen will be a powerful tool for studying the difference between matter and antimatter, but scientists have to trap significant amounts of it first before they can zap it with a laser and measure its properties. It might not happen in the coming year or even in the next, but there's no question that the game is afoot. Antihydrogen futures are brighter than ever.

--THE NEWS AND EDITORIAL STAFFS