Geology major Michael Harkleroad took the bait hook, line and stinker . . . er, sinker. He’d
spend his summer break from college doing geological field tests on water and soil to make sure that hazardous chemicals weren’t escaping from
an old landfill. Real-world science research to trumpet on his rsum! What he wasn’t prepared for was just how bad the Bakersfield, California, landfill would smell in the 100�F heat of summer. Thousands of tons of decades-old garbage was breaking down and leaching a liquid

The cradle of civilization and agriculture. The first place humans built cities. The birthplace of writing. And—oh, yeah—currently the best place in the world to get yourself kidnapped or killed. For archaeologists, there’s no plum like Iraq. Saddam actually let them do their job, and he even protected his country’s heritage in museums. But now no archaeologist can work in Iraq until security improves. Meanwhile more than 8,500 treasures have been stolen, and those are just from museums, where artifacts are cataloged.

In our Internet-based summons for readers to top (bottom?) last year’s “Worst Jobs” list, nurses nominated themselves in droves: “Still a no-respect profession. Doctors treat you like slaves.” “The pay is substandard for all the training.” “Just look at the current shortage.” Indeed, the
government estimates that we’re short 110,000 nurses, and that by 2008 we’ll need half a million more.

Go to remote, densely overgrown forest. Take out giant white corduroy sheet. Drag it behind you as you sing loudly to ward off bears. After 20 meters, stop. Do not tarry to smack mosquitoes, for you must immediately tweezer
several hundred tiny, potentially Lyme diseasecarrying ticks that have covered both you and your white cloth, and drop them into a jar. Repeat 50 times a day.

One hundred twenty million. As the most telling number about beautiful St. John’s Harbor, Newfoundland, this surely must be the count of resident shorebirds. No? Hmm. Then it’s certainly the number of stars visible on a pristine summer night. Strike two? Oh, got it! The number of species living vibrantly in this aquatic paradise!

“I see about 15 butts a day, and a third of them have warts,” says nurse practitioner Naomi Jay of the University of California at San Francisco. Jay and
infectious-disease doc Joel Palefsky were the first to run extensive clinical studies on the sexually transmitted diseases that afflict the anus. “He’s the tushie king, and I’m the tushie queen,” Jay boasts. Each of us has about a 10 percent lifetime risk of contracting anal warts, the worst

“Asbestos, radiation, plutonium and other bad boys of the chemical realm” are PopSci reader Will Clark’s bread and butter. After reading last year’s
inaugural “Worst Jobs” countdown, Clark nominated his own work tearing down

Take a 20-pound bag of mulch, dump it on a table, and sort its contents by size, down to the half millimeter. This is the mind-numbing task of the root sorter. “We know lots about the ecosystem above the ground,” says Ruth Yanai, a professor

No, they don’t study noses, though they need skins thick as rhinos’ to endure the proboscis-related one-liners that get slung their way. Their jobs vary somewhat from state to state, but you can generally find them sitting in the lowest-salary cubicles at state health departments, tabulating mortality. Nosologists are the grunts who turn stiffs into stats. Hour after hour, day after day, they sift through death certificates, referring constantly to a 1,243-page manual whose heft and agate type might call to mind the arcana associated with that other inevitability in life.

Alfred Wegener withstood years of derision for his “preposterous” idea that continents drift. Judah Folkman was ridiculed for his theory that cancer tumors create their own blood-vessel networks. And we all remember what happened to Galileo. Today we celebrate these erstwhile crackpots, while their tormentors have faded into egg-faced obscurity.