The Cosmic Ray Observatory Project (CROP) is a statewide education and research experiment which involves Nebraska high school students, teachers, and college undergraduates in the study of extended cosmic-ray air showers. A network of high school teams construct, install, and operate school-based detectors in coordination with University of Nebraska physics professors and graduate students. The detector system at each school is an array of scintillation counters recycled from the Chicago Air Shower Array in weather-proof enclosures on the school roof, with a GPS receiver providing a time stamp for cosmic-ray events. The detectors are connected to triggering electronics and a data-acquisition PC inside the building. Students share data via the Internet to search for time coincidences with other sites. Funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, CROP enlisted its first 11 schools in the summers of 2000 and 2001 with the aim of expanding to the 314 high schools in the state over several years. The organization and scientific potential of the project will be discussed. Preliminary measurements from CROP's first schools and results from the assessment of CROP's educational impact will be presented. Similar school-based cosmic-ray efforts in the U.S. and Europe will also be described.

The double excitation of the Giant Dipole Resonance in a collision between two ions proceeds in two steps. In step one, the ordinary Giant Dipole resonance gets excited in one of the two colliding nuclei by the rapidly changing elctric field of the other. Prior to step two, this resonance (which is not an eigenstate of the nucleus) may mix with other states of the same spin and parity. In step two, this mixture gets excited once more. The process has been observed experimentally at GSI and other places. A statisticl theory will be presented which accounts for the complexity of the states admixed after step one. Godd agreement with experimental data is found.

The recent demonstrations of oscillations in the atmospheric and solar neutrino data convincingly indicate that neutrinos do have mass. Those data however, do not tell us the absolute mass scale but only the differences of the square of the neutrino masses. Even so, we now know that at least one neutrino has a mass of about 50 meV or larger. Studies of double beta decay rates offer hope for determining the absolute mass scale. In particular, zero-neutrino double beta decay (bb(0n)) can address the issues of lepton number conservation, the particle-antiparticle nature of the neutrino, and its mass. In fact, the next generation of bb(0n) experiments will be sensitive to neutrino masses in the exciting range below 50 meV. An overview of bb(0n) and its relation to neutrino mass will be discussed followed by a profile of the proposed Majorana experiment.

Milagro is a continuously sensitive, air shower telescope which surveys the overhead sky for transient signals from astrophysical sources such as GRBs and solar events, searches for emission from galactic and extra-galactic sources in TeV gamma rays, looks for TeV gamma emission from cosmic ray interactions in the galactic disc and studies the shadows of the moon and the sun in cosmic rays. The physics addressed in this research deals with acceleration of particles to high energies in solar events, models of production of high energy gamma rays from GRBs, AGNs and other sources, absorption of gamma rays by extra-galactic infra-red photons in their transit from AGNs to the earth, study of the moon shadow provides a direct energy calibration of Milagro telescope, the shape of the shadow may allow one to put limits on the TeV flux of anti-protons in cosmic rays and the study of the sun shadow can reveal the role of inter-planetary magnetic fields and may put limits on WIMP annihilations in the sun. I will describe the Milagro telescope and its operational characteristics and present some recent results.

The $\gamma n \rightarrow \pi^- p$ and $\gamma p \rightarrow \pi^+ n$ reactions are essential probes of the transition from meson-nucleon degrees of freedom to quark-gluon degrees of freedom in exclusive processes. The cross sections of these processes are also advantageous, for investigation of the oscillatory behavior around the quark counting prediction, since they decrease relatively slower with energy compared with other photon-induced processes. Moreover, these photoreactions in nuclei can probe the QCD nuclear filtering effects. In this talk, I discuss the preliminary results on the $\gamma n \rightarrow \pi^{-}p$ process at a center-of-mass angle of $90^\circ$ from Jefferson Lab experiment E94-104. I also discuss a new experiment in which singles $\gamma p \rightarrow \pi^+ n$ measurement from hydrogen, and coincidence $\gamma n \rightarrow \pi^{-} p$ measurements at the quasifree kinematics from deuterium and $^{12}$C for photon energies between 2.25 GeV to 5.8 GeV in fine steps and at a center-of-mass angle of $90^\circ$ are planned. The new experiment will allow the detailed investigation of the oscillatory scaling behavior in the photopion production differential cross-section and the study of the nuclear dependence of rather mysterious oscillations with energy that previous experiments have indicated. The various nuclear and perturbative QCD approaches, ranging from Glauber theory, to quark-counting, to Sudakov-corrected independent scattering, make dramatically different predictions for the experimental outcomes.

Until recently, the uncertainty in the astrophysical S-factor for the 7Be(p,gamma)8B reaction was the largest single uncertainty in Standard Solar Model calculations of the 8B solar neutrino production rate. In this talk I will describe a new determination of this S-factor to +-4% based on direct cross section measurements. At this level of precision, this uncertainty is no longer important in SSM calculations. Implications of our new result for solar neutrino physics will be discussed.

The development of new ground-based techniques in high energy astrophysics have given the first picture of the cosmos as seen through TeV gamma-ray eyes. Not surprisingly this universe is populated by some of the most explosive and exciting objects in the cosmic zoo: supernova remnants, pulsars, black holes and active galactic nuclei (quasars). The Smithsonian's Whipple Observatory 10 m aperture gamma-ray telescope has been used to detect the first galactic and extragalactic sources. The discovery of emission from the relativistic jets that are powered by the supermassive black holes, the powerhouses of active galactic nuclei, will be described. Spectral variations during flaring activity in jets may be used to elucidate the emission mechanisms. These objects may be the sources of the cosmic radiation outside the Galaxy. Future possibilities, including the construction of a new array of telescopes (VERITAS), will be outlined.