Donald G. McNeil finds for his section leader an arresting secondary angle for an engrossing profile of Bill Gates’s drive to eradicate polio. Some people are against it. How can anybody be against that? The answer is simple – it may be nigh on impossible, and to try will only soak up dollars better spent on other public health problems of even greater danger to humanity. This is international health reporting of very high caliber, with a narrative focus that makes it come alive. (Late Addition: As seen in comment below, USA Today this week – and a day before the NYT – also highlighted Gates’s campaign in a story by Steve Sternberg, but without noting the skepticism of some public health officials).

Below the fold in the print issue is one of those eye-catching artist’s impressions of a space ship of the kind that never fails to catch my eyes. Kenneth Chang follows up his piece of a short time ago on NASA’s nurturing of entrepreneurial space taxis, or capsules, with another in the same vein on small winged orbiters that could carry people and maneuver in the atmosphere as well. That would give them more flexibility in where they go up there while still being able to reach an intended landing area.

The picture is of something called the Dream Chaser, in early stages of design from a small Nevada Company. It is the story’s lead example of a small coteries of winged space craft – like shuttles but without the big cargo hatch – NASA has in competition for further development contract. Chang’s reporting offers welcome history. This one and at least one other are derivations of designs pursued for years in house by NASA at the Langley Research Center, and that were in turn inspired by a design that Soviet Russia actually tested, in scale form but all the way to orbit and back, 30 years ago. I went looking for a picture of that and, among many, found a wonderful animated GIF image of how to make one, at a site the Russian aerospace company Buran-Energia maintains. The pic there is a still. If this NASA-contracted version flies, maybe Buran-Energia files a patent dispute?

Other headlines to note:

• Abigail Zuger MD – Reputation of a Berry is Difficult to Confirm; Wonderful run down of the elusive power of cranberry juice to curb bladder infections. It seems to work. Scientists have tried their darnedest and can’t pin the reason down.
• Sindya N. Bhanoo: Add Gray Wolf to List of Canines in Africa ; A so-called subspecies of golden jackal in Ethiopia is actually a wolf, DNA says. This was covered several places last week, too, including (with better picture) in the Daily Mail.
• Natalie Angier : Nurturing Nests Lift These Birds to a Higher Perch ; Crows are clever, and the New Caledonian Crow seem to be the most so.  The question she explores, wittily and cannily, is why this one subspecies stands out among these stand outs.
• Carl Zimmer: A Truth of Butterfly Evolution That It Took a Novelist to Reveal ; OK, I relent. After passing on several other accounts of a British journal article, on confirmation of a Vadlimir Nabokov surmise on butterfly radiation, here’s the Times’s version. Good enough. But isn’t the hook to this as  news – Nabokov’s second career as a serious lepitopterist – a well-worn rut to plow again? Carl at least makes that old angle, discovered by literary critics about as soon as they discovered Lolita, part of his account.

As ever, plenty more. Whole Section ;

- Charlie Petit

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