ERIC HAGERMAN

The warm autumn sun has burned a hole in the morning haze and opened up the sky above the South Foreland Lighthouse, a historic beacon along the White Cliffs of Dover, England. It marks the narrowest point of the English Channel. You can't quite make out where the sea meets the coast of France, a tantalizing 22 miles distant, but a little surface gauze won't interfere with what's coming across the Channel today.

August 15, 2008— The first time Army Specialist Frederick Hussey “got blown up in Iraq,” as he says, was on Easter Sunday, April 16, 2006. Hussey was five months into his yearlong deployment as an infantry medic when a cluster of anti-tank explosives jolted his Humvee off the road some 50 miles south of Baghdad. The blast filled the cabin with acrid black smoke, but Hussey was able to jerk the wheel back and steer the truck to safety. “Everybody ended up being OK with that one,” Hussey says. “You know—shook up and all, but there was no loss of life.

Plenty of medications help people deal with fear, but the most effective one may be a humble antibiotic. Scientists testing a new treatment for veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) say the key to faster recovery might be a 50-year-old tuberculosis drug called
D-cycloserine, or DCS.

Just when we were coming back around to the idea of drinking good old fashioned tap water, the Associated Press today announced that it has found traces of dozens of pharmaceuticals in the drinking water of an estimated 41 million Americans.

Check out our inaugural episode of Cocktail Party Science, in which host Chuck Cage, senior editor Nicole Dyer and Web editor Megan Miller talk to Eric Hagerman, author of Your Sewer on Drugs. Youll get a behind-the-scenes account of what it was really like to dive into the manholes of San Diego in the name of science.

Jörg Rieckermann snaps on a pair of purple rubber gloves, picks up a crowbar, and levers a manhole cover out of the way. Heres my access to the underworld, Rieckermann, who speaks with a faint German accent, says as he hoists up a barrel-shaped robot suspended above a stream of raw sewage.

Most tents are designed to fend off the wind, but The North Face´s Spectrum 23 invites it in through the front door-and ushers it right out the back. Built with a conspicuous awning that funnels wind through vents in the dome, the Spectrum ($260; thenorthface.com) can withstand 130mph winds, making it the strongest in the industry (100 mph is the previous best rating).