Scientists

THERE SEEMS TO BE no method to the madness of one backroom chemist who allegedly used his real name to check into a Center City hotel room this weekend where he set up a mobile meth lab, police said.   About 5:30 a.m. Saturday, the Fire Department was called to the Hampton Inn on Race Street near 13th after a fire alarm went off in Room 322 of the hotel, said Chief Inspector Joseph Sullivan. Upon arrival, fire officials found what they were concerned might be an explosives-manufacturing operation in the room, and they called the Police Department's homeland security unit and the bomb squad to the scene, Sullivan said.

POPLAR ISLAND, Md. - Eighteen years ago, Justin Callahan took a small boat into the Chesapeake Bay to study the last remaining bits of what had been a wildlife paradise. Bobbing above what once was a miles-long island that had eroded to a couple of tiny pieces of dirt, he had no way of knowing the scale of the plan that the Army Corps of Engineers was hatching. It was some plan, inviting comparisons to the Titanic in terms of engineering hubris and to Jurassic Park in terms of one-upping the natural world.

A heated, computer-controlled nozzle glided smoothly back and forth, then up and down, depositing a thin trail of sugar in the shape of a delicate, miniature cage. A scene from a high-tech pastry kitchen? A 21st-century reboot of Willy Wonka's candy factory? Far from it. The sugar cage was a first step toward manufacturing blood vessels for artificial organs, made with a custom-built 3-D "printer" in a bioengineering lab at the University of Pennsylvania. Once they harden, these crisscrossing lines of sugar can be surrounded with a gel that contains cells from the desired type of organ - say, a liver.

With tomato season nearly upon us, many a consumer soon will be scanning the shelves for specimens with that uniform hue of eye-catching red - a characteristic that shoppers have come to expect from modern agriculture. But in the quest for good looks, they likely are giving up something in the taste and nutrition department, according to new research published Friday in the journal Science. Tomatoes that have been bred to ripen with a uniform color contain up to 20 percent less sugar than their counterparts with green or yellow patches on the "shoulder" of the fruit, the researchers found after a genetic analysis.

By Charles Lane The Republican-dominated House has passed an amendment to cut off funding for political science research through the National Science Foundation, and you and I should be outraged. It's not the money, of course: Only $11 million of the NSF's $7 billion-plus budget goes to poli sci research. It's the principle of the thing. We can't let politicians like Jeff Flake, the Arizona Republican who sponsored the ban, decide what constitutes science worthy of federal support.

On a summer's day in 1943, a young scientist at Rutgers discovered an antibiotic that would change millions of lives. But Albert Schatz, who died in West Mount Airy in 2005, was denied credit. His name never appeared on the Nobel Prize given for that work.   That's the little-known story told in Peter Pringle's new book, Experiment Eleven: Dark Secrets Behind the Discovery of a Wonder Drug (Walker & Company, 269 pp., $26). And there's a widow who remembers, and a grandson conquering cerebral palsy to create a documentary film honoring his wronged grandfather's work.

The scientists were a little tired and burned out. For two weeks, they had been aboard a research ship in the Gulf of Mexico, trying to find and analyze deep-sea communities of coral on the dark bottom, nearly a mile below. A robot submersible was down there now. Charles Fisher, a Penn State biologist who specializes in corals, was doing other work as he kept an eye on the video feed. Suddenly, he stopped. They had found the reef they were searching for. And it didn't look good.

Quick: Name a raw material vital to national security and the American consumer lifestyle, prone to rising prices, and largely controlled by foreign interests thousands of miles away. Oil? Sure, but in a physics lab at the University of Delaware, another answer is the class of materials known as rare earths. Prized for their magnetic properties, rare earths are used to make almost any high-tech product you can name - computer screens, hard drives, cameras, smartphones, lasers.

Words matter. Take red tide, the popular term for blooms of harmful marine algae. It's a misnomer because the blooms are not always red, and their movement is largely unrelated to tides. Also, many species of algae that cause red discoloration are not harmful. I worry that we are using inaccurate terminology to describe serious environmental issues throughout the sciences. Though catchy names do grab public attention, they are likely to feed troublesome misconceptions among those unfamiliar with the complexity of the issues.

Sir Paul Callaghan, 64, a top New Zealand scientist who gained international recognition for his work in molecular physics, died Saturday after a long battle with cancer. "New Zealand has suffered a tremendous loss," Sir Peter Gluckman, Prime Minister John Key's chief science adviser, said in a statement. "Paul has been our most distinguished public scientist and in the world of molecular physics has been a giant. " Dr. Callaghan, who was diagnosed with bowel cancer in 2008, was best known for his work with magnetic resonance, a field that has practical applications in everything from health care to industrial production.