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.

Two weeks into the semester, the principal of an underfunded high school in Arizona walked into English teacher Howard Ruffner’s classroom and told him he was now a science teacher. Ruffner, a flexible sort, said, “OK. Where’s the lab? What equipment do we have? What’s the budget for materials?” The answer: no budget, no equipment, no lab—and no textbooks either.

Selected from among the brightest young scientists in the
country, they travel
to Washington, like so many Drs. Smith, to serve their country
and illuminate Congress with the bright light of scientific truth. And then . . . no one listens to them.


Placed as official advisers to our congressional representatives, these fellows’ disillusionment is swift and merciless. “It’s an exercise in futility to get science across in Congress,” says Raphael Sagarin, a marine ecologist who just finished his year

If you’re interested
in researching vaginal infections, you can do scrapes or urine tests, or you can draw samples with a pipette. Or you can collect your specimens from tampons. As Australian microbiologist Suzanne Garland and her team at the Royal Women’s Hospital in Victoria discovered, tampons are best for epidemiological studies of sexually transmitted diseases in large populations, because women are more likely to cooperate with a test that is familar and self-inserted rather than one that must be administered by a doctor.

Don’t hate them because they’re inscrutable. These are people who love the subtle power and intricacies of computers, yet who must spend their days incarcerated in windowless rooms telephonically holding the hands of 16-bit blockheads. One computer tech in Delaware recently had an urban legend spring to life when a user called to complain, apparently in all sincerity, that his computer’s “coffee cup holder” (actually the CD drive) was broken. “We should all be issued sidearms so we can vent our frustration,” she says.

In March 2001 in the northeastern U.S., the modern prophets of an angry god were in full herald mode. Wrathful Winter would strike again! They prophesied that many dozens of inches of snow would bury the people, and foretold the locations and times. Oh, what great TV it made! The weathercasters were the darlings of their bosses, as their dire warnings kept the populace glued to the tube.


Until the storm never materialized.

“Ever wish you had a tool that could prove your suspicions were valid?” Bluewater Security Professionals asks on its Web site (bluewatersecurityprofessionals.com). "Next time you sense suspicious activity with your vehicle, make sure (the $435 PTS Tracking System) goes along for the ride. The site includes “hints” on where to put the GPS antenna—mostly in places where it wouldn't be seen. But forewarned is forearmed: Here are some of the spots where a GPS unit is likely to be stashed.

Everything I needed to stalk myself, I bought on the Internet for 65 bucks. I started with a Google search—instant background checks—and hit the first link it returned, people data.com. I entered my credit card info, and the next day