NEWS LITE : HOMELESS MAN OLD CLASSMATE OF PRINCE.

On a visit with the down-and-out, Prince Charles was taken aback Thursday as he encountered a homeless man who told him they once attended the same exclusive prep school.

``It just shows you, doesn't it?'' the prince mused after the encounter with Clive Harold at the offices of the Big Issue, a magazine sold by the homeless.

Charles was sitting with some vendors as part of a tour of the magazine's offices when Harold turned to him and asked: ``Do you realize we were at school together?''

``No!'' the prince replied in wonder. When told it was London's Hill House School 40 years ago, Charles leaned toward Harold and, smiling broadly, reminisced about the sweets the headmistress used to dole out.

``The prince did not remember me, of course, and I only remember him because we both had big ears and because he was obviously well-known there,'' said Harold. Both he and Charles were 8 at the time.

At one point, Harold was wearing a Santa hat, and he asked Charles to try it on. Charles politely refused.

Harold, 49, said his father had been a millionaire financier and that he himself went on to become a successful author and show business correspondent for several women's magazines. But then his second marriage fell apart 10 years ago and he turned to alcohol, he said.

``It was strange,'' Harold said later. ``But (Charles) was very encouraging. . . . He's been through his own pain, and you know his life has taken all sorts of twists and turns, as mine has, we sort of had . . . a meeting of minds.''

The headmaster of Hill House, Col. Stuart Townend, confirmed that Harold, who then used his original last name Stutter, had attended the school when Charles was there.

Before leaving, the prince signed a copy of the Big Issue for his old schoolmate and patted him on the back, saying, ``As long as you're all right, that's the main thing.''

The magazine's editor, John Bird, said later: ``You can never be sure what will happen in life, no matter what kind of start you have.''

Science creates dino call

The cry of a duck-billed dinosaur reverberated for the first time in more than 70 million years Friday - a low-pitched, trombone wail that listeners felt as much as they heard.

With a little literary license and a lot of computing power, a Sandia National Laboratories scientist and a paleontologist re-created the song of the parasaurolophus. It was played at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science.

``It sounds a little out of this world, like a giant clearing his throat,'' said Tom Williamson, the museum paleontologist who worked on the project. ``It's the kind of sound that would easily be heard by other animals through a thick rain forest.''

Williamson and computer scientist Carl Diegert worked for two years re-creating the sound by using a parasaurolophus skull unearthed in northwestern New Mexico in 1995 by Williamson and Robert Sullivan of the State Museum of Pennsylvania.

Scientists have long been puzzled by the shape of the dinosaur's skull, which has a 4-foot-long crest rising from the back of the head and a complex network of nasal passages running through it.

Williamson and Diegert scanned the skull and fed the data into Sandia computers to reconstruct the structure of the air chambers within the crest.

The computer model led to the reproduction of possible sounds bouncing through the air passages.

Because paleontologists don't know whether parasaurolophus had vocal cords, Williamson and Diegert simulated sounds that the dinosaur could have made both with or without a voice box.

Diegert and Williamson believe the dinosaurs' sounds would have been so distinctive that the animals could have identified each other.

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Photo

PHOTO Britain's Prince Charles, right, discovers old school chum Clive Harold, 49, at the office of a magazine sold by the homeless.

Associated Press