In 1994, a team of scientists led by David Mckay began studying the meteorite ALH84001, which had been discovered in Antarctica in 1984. Two years later, the McKay team announced that ALH84001, which scientists generally agree originated on Mars, contained compelling evidence that life once existed on Mars. This evidence includes the discovery of organic molecules in ALH84001,the first ever found in Martian rock. Organic molecules-complex, carbon based compounds-form the basis for terrestrial life. The organic molecules found in ALH84001 are polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAH's. When microbes die, their organic material often decays into PAH's.

    Skepticism about the McKay team's claim remains, however. For example,ALH84001 has been on earth for 13,000 years, suggesting to some scientists that its PAH's might have resulted from terrestrial contamination. However, McKay's team has demonstrated that the concentration of PAH's increases as one looks deeper into ALH84001, contrary to what one would expect from terrestrial contamination. The skeptic's strongest argument, however, is that processes unrelated to organic life can easily produce all the evidence found by McKay' steam, including PAH's. For example, star formation produces PAH's. Moreover, PAH's frequently appear in other meteorites, and no one attributes their presence to life processes. Yet McKay's team notes that the particular combination of PAH's in ALH84001 is more similar to the combinations produced by decaying organisms than to those originating form nonbiological processes.

(This passage was excerpted from materialpublished in 1993.)

    Like many other industries, the travel industry is under increasing pressure to expand globally in order to keep pace with its corporate customers, who have globalized their operations in response to market pressure, competitor actions, and changing supplier relations. But it is difficult for service organizations to globalize. Global expansion through acquisition is usually expensive, and expansion through internal growth is time-consuming and sometimes impossible in markets that are not actively growing. Some service industry companies, in fact, regard these traditional routes to global expansion as inappropriate for service industries because of their special need to preserve local responsiveness through local presence and expertise. One travel agency has eschewed the traditional route altogether. A survivor of the changes that swept the travel industry as a result of the deregulation of the airlines in 1978—changes that included dramatic growth in the corporate demand for travel services, as well as extensive restructuring and consolidation within the travel industry— this agency adopted a unique structure for globalization. Rather than expand by attempting to develop its own offices abroad, which would require the development of local travel management expertise sufficient to capture foreign markets, the company solved its globalization dilemma effectively by forging alliances with the best foreign partners it could find. The resulting cooperative alliance of independent agencies now comprises 32 partners spanning 37 countries.