Word: beachings
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When public-health authorities close a beach, Michael Sadowsky heads for the shore. It isn't that the microbiologist likes to dip his toes in dirty water. But for Sadowsky, 51, a few drops of contaminated H2O are worth their weight in gold...
Sadowsky, a professor at the University of Minnesota's department of soil, water and climate, is one of the world's foremost experts on tracking the sources of E. coli, the bacterium most commonly responsible for beach closures. E. coli is found in abundance in human fecal matter and represents a significant health threat, which is why the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency requires that E. coli levels in public waters be closely monitored. E. coli also grows in the guts of geese, cows and other animals, but the disease risk from nonhuman fecal bacteria is considerably lower...
...already started to pay off. Sadowsky is using a robotic system that can sample about 40,000 bacterial colonies at once. Using markers for geese that he pinpointed, he successfully identified geese as the source of contamination at a Lake Superior beach last year--allowing a beach to remain open that otherwise would have been closed. Identifying DNA markers for human fecal bacteria is next on his list...
Literature is not a democracy. In the book world, being popular does not necessarily make you great. But if it were, and if it did, then the man sitting across the table from me in a canary-yellow mansion in Palm Beach, Fla., would be president-for-life of the literary universe, and Philip Roth would be a comptroller in North Dakota...
When the apocalypse arrives, at least he'll be comfortable. Patterson spends most of the year in Palm Beach, three blocks from a world-class golf course. His backyard is the Intracoastal Waterway. Sitting in his airy, wood-paneled office, surrounded by about a dozen neat stacks of paper representing works in progress, he's amiable, chatty and deeply unpretentious--he refers to his writing as "scribbling." But it's at least a bit of a con--he's read practically everything, and he gets a sly kick out of reminding you of that. He references both Ibsen and Crichton...