My favorite article of the week is Nurturing Women Scientists for Science magazine. It's about institutional efforts to increase the numbers of women in science in both academia and industry. What used to be a pipeline problem (fewer women with science degrees) has become a hiring and retention problem. Women in science is a perennial feature for the magazine and I've read many of them over the years. I was pleased to have the opportunity to write it.

I profiled Sir Leszek Borysiewicz a couple weeks ago in Nature. He's the new head of the Medical Research Council in the United Kingdom (analogous to the US National Institutes of Health).

I covered a scientific conference on Inflammation in the Central Nervous System for the New York Academy of Sciences about the double-edge nature of the immune system. With very different examples, the three speakers described how therapies targeting immune function produce problematic effects, secondary consequences of tinkering with a very complex system. (Only the introductory page is accessible to nonmembers.)

I wrote two stories for my local newsweekly, the Spotlight. One piece was about online dating (but it's not available online!). It was part of a package on finding love; the reporter I partnered with, Jennifer Farnsworth, wrote about speed dating and other offline ways to meet people. A second piece profiled a military catholic boys school here in Albany: the Christian Brothers Academy. I spoke to Brother Aloysius who has work at the school for 50 years (talk about perspective).