Sometimes good, if adventurous, ideas sound just like loony-bin ravings. And sometimes one cannot tell the difference in advance of a test. The Times's William J. Broad finds (with an assist from Andrew C. Revkin) some big-name scientists whose outsized ideas for curbing global warming seem at first glance entirely too big and maybe nuts. Maybe we'll need to try some of them anyway. After all, more and more experts are approaching despair over prospects for avoiding, via fossil fuel self-restraint, a climatic and ecological mess over the next century.

Some say we're ending the comfy Holocene geological epoch and ushering in the tumultuous and dangerous Anthropocene. Broad's laundry list of posited geoengineering solutions is timely. The ideas have been covered before, for the most part, although one from a Nobelist to inject a bunch of sulfur in the...

Not many leaders of international health efforts have the moxie tell execs at some of the world's more respected big pharma companies that they have the sales tactics of heroin dealers. The Times's Donald G. McNeil tells readers of the Science Times section about one in Arata Kochi. He is the new head of the World Health Organization's campaign to stamp out malaria, finally. The intriguing portrait provides drive and urgency to a superb rundown on the history of the fight against malaria, on an anti-TB program that the tough-minded and occasionally abrasive Kochi ran, and the reasons malaria ought to be beatable. Kochi even endorses wide, if indoor, use of DDT. That mosquito-killing chemical has in recent decades been verboten for favorable discussion in most polite company due to the environmental havoc in can wreak if it suffuses widely into waterways....

A Canadian study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provides new evidence that homosexuality, in men at least, is often inborn. The more older brothers that a boy has, the more likely he is to be gay, says a researcher at Brock University, leader of the study. This pattern has been noted before, including by the PNAS study's authors. But the new paper says the effect holds only if the brothers are of the same mother, not step brothers, paternal half brothers, or adopted brothers. That seems to rule out a social effect, such as some subtle tendency of families to raise little brothers differently. More likely, it seems, is that the hormonal or immunological environment in the womb tends to change with each additional pregnancy that produces a boy. Immunology seems to be the leading candidate. But overall, the effect remains small. No number of older brothers, one presumes, is able to push being gay to higher prenatal odds than being straight. Newsday's ...

In the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team of nine climate researchers report not only that Earth's climate has undergone abrupt shifts before, it has been undergoing another one for the last half century or so. The first part is not news, but the idea we are in an abrupt shift now may be somewhat more contentious, if only for the terminology. "Global Warming" just sounds gradual even if it's not. The lead author, from Ohio State University, tells the Post's Doug Struck that the system has thresholds, we seem to have passed one, and "there is the risk of changing the world as we know it to some form in which a lot of people on the planet will be put at risk." A prime bit of evidence is the rapid, recent, and well-documented retreat of glaciers, it says here. The last such shift, the reports says, was 5000 years ago. That one may have spawned the rise of civilizations.

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Washington Post...

Here's a story on an unexpected topic: the environmental and agricultural difficulties of one of the more common forage grasses on the market, something called Kentucky 31 tall fescue. It covers millions of acres in the US. Homeowners know tall fescue as a hardy and drought tolerant turf. And some enviros have for generations abhorred such exotic grasses, almost all of Old World origin and brought here for pastures, that have displaced native bunch grasses. But this tale from the Star's Bill Graham zeroes in on this one variety and gets a story well off the beaten path. The grass, it says here, grows so thickly it crowds out wildflowers and other native flora. Ground birds such as quail and prairie chicken, as well as meadowlark, can hardly live in it. Not only that, a secret to its competitive success is...

The AP's Brian Witte reported Saturday that a vital camera on the Hubble Space Telescope inexplicably went off line a week ago, and engineers have been trying ever since to figure out why. The Tracker is unsure who broke the story, but space.com's Robert Roy Britt also had it Friday. The Hubble has other ways to make images, but the Advanced Camera for Surveys (pic shows some of its work) has been one of its workhorses since its installation by a shuttle crew in 2002. The problem is a further woe for Hubble's operators, who fear that if one of the three remaining space shuttles does not get a NASA green light to visit it again fairly soon and replace gyros and other gear, the Hubble soon will deteriorate into uselessness. It is widely regarded as not only the best known telescope to the public, but the most revolutionary instrument in the...

It is the time of year the West Nile Virus infections begin to show up in people, the result of being bitten by mosquitos that have also fed on birds in which the virus is endemic. One pattern, reports writer Cheryl Lyn Dybas in the Post, is an upsurge of human cases in late summer after robins fly south. Mosquitos that carry the virus like to feed on robins. Without robins as diversions, people become more likely targets for meals. That, and other tidbits, highlight this nicely reported look at the science behind efforts to predict and control hotspots and outbreaks.

Read it;

Other West Nile news: AP...