TEXT 1

In the 1920s, movie palaces rose up around the country like so many portals into a
glamorous world. After you bought a ticket, you might pass through gilded archways and
ascend a grand staircase lighted by a crystal chandelier to find your velvet seat. Eating was not
meant to be part of the experience, says Andrew F. Smith, author of “Popped Culture: A Social
History of Popcorn in America.” Theater owners feared that audiences would strew popcorn
and peanuts on those crimson carpets. They hung signs discouraging people from bringing in
food from vendors parked outside and didn’t sell it themselves.

A widow named Julia Braden in Kansas City, Mo., was one of the rare concessionaires
who managed to talk her way inside. She persuaded the Linwood Theater to let her set up a
stand in the lobby and eventually built a popcorn empire. By 1931, she owned stands in or near
four movie theaters and pulled in more than $14,400 a year — the equivalent of $336,000 in
today’s dollars. Her business grew even in the midst of the Depression, at the same time that
thousands of elegant theaters went bust.

According to Smith, it’s impossible to establish who sold the first box of movie
popcorn. For decades, vendors operated out of wagons parked near theaters, circuses and
ballparks, selling a variety of snacks. But Braden seems to have been among the first to set up
concessions linked to movie houses — and to pioneer a new business strategy: the money was
in popcorn, not ticket sales. (That’s still true today. Movie theaters reap as much as 85 percent
of their profits from concession sales.)

In the mid-1930s, a manager named R. J. McKenna, who ran a chain of theaters in the
West, caught on to this idea. An old man selling popcorn outside one of McKenna’s movie
houses amassed enough money to buy a house, a farm and a store. McKenna installed a popcorn
machine in the lobby and collected the proceeds — as much as $200,000 in 1938. With that
kind of money rolling in, who cared about the rugs? McKenna lowered the price of tickets just
to draw more people to his concession stand. By the 1940s, most theaters had followed suit,
and soon the smell of melted butter wafted through lobbies. One entrepreneur of the era offered
the following advice: “Find a good popcorn location and build a theater around it.”
 TEXT 2

An unusual method for producing antibiotics may help solve an urgent global problem: the rise
in infections that resist treatment with commonly used drugs, and the lack of new antibiotics to
replace ones that no longer work.

The method, which extracts drugs from bacteria that live in dirt, has yielded a powerful new
antibiotic, researchers reported in the journal Nature on Wednesday. The new drug,
teixobactin, was tested in mice and easily cured severe infections, with no side effects.

Better still, the researchers said, the drug works in a way that makes it very unlikely that
bacteria will become resistant to it. And the method developed to produce the drug has the
potential to unlock a trove of natural compounds to fight infections and cancer — molecules
that were previously beyond scientists’ reach because the microbes that produce them could
not be grown in the laboratory.

Teixobactin has not yet been tested in humans, so its safety and effectiveness are not known.
Studies in people will not begin for about two years, according to Kim Lewis, the senior author
of the article and director of the Antimicrobial Discovery Center at Northeastern University in
Boston. Those studies will take several years, so even if the drug passes all the required tests,
it still will not be available for five or six years, he said during a telephone news conference on
Tuesday. If it is approved, he said, it will probably have to be injected, not taken by mouth.

Experts not involved with the research said the technique for isolating the drug had great
potential. They also said teixobactin looked promising, but expressed caution because it has
not yet been tested in human.

Dr. William Schaffner, an infectious disease specialist at Vanderbilt University, called the
research “ingenious” and said, “We’re in desperate need of some good antibiotic news.”

Regarding teixobactin, he said: “It’s at the test-tube and the mouse level, and mice are not men
or women, and so moving beyond that is a large step, and many compounds have failed.” He
added, “Toxicity is often the Achilles’ heel of drugs.”

Dr. David A. Relman, a professor of medicine at Stanford, said by email, “It illustrates the
amazing wealth and diversity of as-yet-unrecognized, potent, biologically active compounds
made by the microbial world — some of which may have real clinical value.” He added,
“We’ve been blind to the vast majority of them because of the biased and insensitive methods
we use to discover drugs.”

The methods are flawed, he said, because they miss microbes that will not grow in the lab, and
subject others to artificial conditions that may alter the array of potential drugs they produce.

Drug-resistant bacteria infect at least two million people a year in the United States and kill
23,000, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The World Health
Organization warned last year that such infections were occurring all over the world, and that
drug resistant strains of many diseases were emerging faster than new antibiotics could be made
to fight them. Compounding the problem is the fact that many drug companies backed away
from trying to develop new antibiotics in favor of other, more profitable, types of drugs.

The new research is based on the premise that everything on earth — plants, soil, people,
animals — is teeming with microbes that compete fiercely to survive. Trying to keep one
another in check, the microbes secrete biological weapons: antibiotics.

“The way bacteria multiply, if there weren’t natural mechanisms to limit their growth, they
would have covered the planet and eaten us all eons ago,” Dr. Schaffner said.

Scientists and drug companies have for decades exploited the microbes’ natural arsenal, often
by mining soil samples, and discovered lifesaving antibiotics like penicillin, streptomycin and
tetracycline, as well as some powerful chemotherapy drugs for cancer. But disease-causing
organisms have become resistant to many existing drugs, and there has been a major obstacle
to finding replacements, Dr. Lewis said: About 99 percent of the microbial species in the
environment are bacteria that do not grow under usual laboratory conditions.

Dr. Lewis and his colleagues found a way to grow them. The process involves diluting a soil
sample — the one that yielded teixobactin came from “a grassy field in Maine” — and placing
it on specialized equipment. Then, the secret to success is putting the equipment into a box
full of the same soil that the sample came from.

“Essentially, we’re tricking the bacteria,” Dr. Lewis said. Back in their native dirt, they divide
and grow into colonies. Once the colonies form, Dr. Lewis said, the bacteria are
“domesticated,” and researchers can scoop them up and start growing them in petri dishes in
the laboratory.

The research was paid for by the National Institutes of Health and the German government
(some co-authors work at the University of Bonn). Northeastern University holds a patent on
the method of producing drugs and licensed the patent to a private company, NovoBiotic
Pharmaceuticals, in Cambridge, Mass., which owns the rights to any compounds produced.
Dr. Lewis is a paid consultant to the company.

Teixobactin is the most promising candidate isolated from 10,000 strains of bacteria that the
researchers screened. In test tubes, it killed various types of staph and strep, as well
as anthrax and tuberculosis. Tested in mice, it cleared strep infections and staph, including a
strain that was drug-resistant. It works against bacteria in a group known as “Gram-positive,”
but not against microbes that are “Gram-negative,” which include some that are major causes
of drug resistant pneumonia, gonorrhea and infections of the bladder and bloodstream. Dr.
Lewis said researchers were trying to modify the drug to make it work against Gram-negative
infections.

Twenty-five other drug candidates were also identified, but most had drawbacks like toxicity
or insolubility, Dr. Lewis said, adding that one, though toxic, may work against cancer and
will be tested further.

Teixobactin attacks bacteria by blocking fatty molecules needed to build cell walls, which is
different from the way most antibiotics work. Those molecules are unlikely to change and
make the microbes resistant, the researchers said. But if resistance does occur, Dr. Lewis
predicted, it will take a long time to develop.

Dr. Relman said the argument against resistance was reasonable. But he cautioned that
“unsuspected mechanisms of resistance” sometimes develop, and that the only way to tell
would be to monitor carefully what happens as the drug is used more and more.

Dr. Lewis said he hoped the research would point the way to a new approach to searching for
novel antibiotics. Until now, he said, scientists have assumed that resistance would inevitably
develop, and that the only solution would require scrambling to develop new antibiotics in
hopes of keeping up.
“This gives us an alternative strategy,” he said. “Develop compounds to which resistance will
not develop.”
 TEXT 3

Thick algal mats that cover river bottoms are flourishing in our warmer world.
Commonly known as ''rock snot,'' or didymo, this invasive new species coats the
river bottom in a layer of thick brown algae. Scientists call it Didymosphenia
geminata.

But it's more widely known as "rock snot"—mats of algae carpeting the bottoms of
some rivers and lakes—and it's quickly spreading around the globe, possibly because of
climate change, a new study says.

So far, scientists say its effects on the environment are unknown, though they are
concerned specifically about the impact on salmon.

The mats can cover up to 75 percent of a river bottom in some places. (See a striking
picture of didymo coating a river bottom.)

As the algae spread worldwide in recent decades, including to New Zealand, South
America, and the United States, scientists theorized that it was an invasive organism
whose cells were hitchhiking with people as they enjoyed the outdoors.

Not so, found Joshua Kurek, a biologist at Queen's University in Ontario, Canada, and
his colleagues.

Their investigations of lake sediments and historical research papers revealed that
didymo has been in rivers—at least in eastern Canada—for nearly 200 years. (Also see
"'Sea Snot' Explosion Caused by Gulf Oil Spill?")

Instead, Kurek's research suggested that the algae's spread is intensifying because
"climate warming is pushing these river systems into conditions that didymo prefers,"
including less ice cover and fewer nutrients.

Scientists first recorded a bloom of didymo in 2006 in Quebec's Matapédia River,

whose bottom was covered in sections by thick clumps that resemble a "filthy shag
carpet," according to Kurek, a co-author of the new study, published February 26 in
the Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences.

"Prior to 2006, no one had officially reported a bloom to a management authority or

government agency in eastern Canada," he said, although the species has been
described since the early 20th century. "What we're seeing now is exceptional."

For the study, Kurek and colleagues analyzed sediments dating to 1970 that were taken
from two lakes near where rock snot was first discovered.

The results "were really telling—out of the 20 samples that we analyzed, 19 of them
had evidence of didymo," said Kurek.

The team also found evidence that didymo had exploded in one lake by 5,000 percent
between 1970 and modern times. Local air temperatures rose and ice cover on lakes and
rivers shrank over the same time period.

Because didymo doesn't grow well in water that's disturbed by constantly changing ice,
these conditions allowed it to bloom, Kurek said.

Hans Paerl, an algae expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, said he
agreed with the team's conclusions that rock snot is not invasive and is instead taking
advantage of our changing world. (See a map of global warming's effects.)

"Climate change has opened up the habitats that diatoms as well as other algae can now
thrive in," said Paerl, referring to the term for a widespread group of marine algae.
(Read more about freshwater threats.)

In addition, less ice means that more sunlight reaches the diatoms, which allows the
photosynthetic organisms to grow even more. Kurek and Paerl—who was not involved
in the study—agreed that rock snot will likely continue to spread as long as the world
warms, potentially causing problems for fish and other wildlife.
In Canada, the algae occurs in pristine rivers frequented by wild Atlantic salmon, a fish
precious to eastern Canada both recreationally and culturally. (See National
Geographic's river pictures.)

Kurek and colleagues are concerned that the algae will impact juvenile salmon, which
eat tiny animals that live on the normally smooth rock bottom of rivers—many of which
are now carpeted by algae and are home to different types of prey.

But no one knows yet if that's bad for the young fish, he cautioned: "We don't have a
good handle on direct impacts to the salmon in rivers."
 TEXT 4

STARTING in the mid-1990s, education advocates began making a simple argument:

National education standards will level the playing field, assuring that all high school
graduates are prepared for first-year college classes or rigorous career training.

While there are reasons to doubt that claim — it’s hard to see how Utah, which spends less
than one-third as much per student as New York, can offer a comparable education — the
movement took off in 2008, when the nation’s governors and education commissioners drove
a huge effort to devise “world-class standards,” now known as the Common Core.

Although the Obama administration didn’t craft the standards, it weighed in heavily, using
some of the $4.35 billion from the Race to the Top program to encourage states to adopt not
only the Common Core (in itself, a good thing) but also frequent, high-stakes testing (which
is deeply unpopular). The mishandled rollout turned a conversation about pedagogy into an
ideological and partisan debate over high-stakes testing. The misconception that standards
and testing are identical has become widespread.

At least four states that adopted the Common Core have opted out. Republican governors
who initially backed the standards condemn them as “shameless government overreach.”

Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a Republican and a onetime supporter of the Common Core,
sued his own state and the United States Department of Education to block the standards
from taking effect. When Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, recently announced his
decision to “actively explore” a 2016 run for the White House, he ran into a buzz saw of
opposition because of his embrace of the Common Core.

Rebellions have also sprouted in Democratic-leaning states. Last spring, between 55,000 and
65,000 New York State students opted out of taking tests linked to the Common Core.
Criticizing these tests as “unproven,” the Chicago schools chief, Barbara Byrd-Bennett,
declared that she didn’t want her students to take them.

In a Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll conducted last spring, 57 percent of public school parents
opposed “having teachers in your community use the Common Core State Standards to guide
what they teach,” nearly double the proportion of those who supported the goals. With the
standards, the sheer volume of high-stakes standardized testing has ballooned. “The numbers
and consequences of these tests have driven public opinion over the edge,” notes Robert A.
Schaeffer of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, known as FairTest.

Students are terrified by these tests because the results can jeopardize their prospects for
advancement and graduation. In New York, the number of students who scored “proficient”
plummeted by about 30 percentage points in 2013, the first year of testing. Some 70 percent
scored below the cutoff level in math and English; the 2014 results in math were modestly
better, but the English language scores didn’t budge.
Many teachers like the standards, because they invite creativity in the classroom — instead of
memorization, the Common Core emphasizes critical thinking and problem-solving. But they
complain that test prep and test-taking eat away weeks of class time that would be better
focused on learning.

A Gallup poll found that while 76 percent of teachers favored nationwide academic
standards for reading, writing and math, only 27 percent supported using tests to
gauge students’ performance, and 9 percent favored making test scores a basis for
evaluating teachers. Such antagonism is well founded — researchers have shown that
measurements of the “value” teachers add, as determined by comparing test scores at
the beginning and end of the year, are unreliable and biased against those who teach
both low- and high-achieving students.

The Obama administration has only itself to blame. Most Democrats expected that equity
would be the top education priority, with more money going to the poorest states, better
teacher recruitment, more useful training and closer attention to the needs of the surging
population of immigrant kids. Instead, the administration has emphasized high-stakes
“accountability” and market-driven reforms. The Education Department has invested more
than $370 million to develop the new standards and exams in math, reading and writing.

Questioning those priorities can bring reprisals. During the search earlier this year for a New
York City schools chancellor, Education Secretary Arne Duncan lobbied against Joshua P.
Starr, the superintendent of schools in Montgomery County, Md., in part because he had
proposed a three-year hiatus on high-stakes standardized testing.

Last year, Mr. Duncan said that opposition to the Common Core standards had come from
“white suburban moms who realize — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they
thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.”

He has only recently changed his cavalier tune, acknowledging, “Too much testing can rob
school buildings of joy and cause unnecessary stress.”

It’s no simple task to figure out what schools ought to teach and how best to teach it — how
to link talented teachers with engaged students and a challenging curriculum. Turning around
the great gray battleship of American public education is even harder. It requires creating
new course materials, devising and field-testing new exams and, because these tests are
designed to be taken online, closing the digital divide. It means retraining teachers,
reorienting classrooms and explaining to anxious parents why these changes are worthwhile.

Had the public schools been given breathing room, with a moratorium on high-stakes testing
that prominent educators urged, resistance to the Common Core would most likely have been
less fierce. But in states where the opposition is passionate and powerful, it will take a
herculean effort to get the standards back on track
 TEXT 5

To Donald E. Canfield, there’s something astonishing in every breath we

take. “People take oxygen for granted because it’s just there and we breathe
it all the time,” said Dr. Canfield, a geochemist at the University of Southern
Denmark. “But we have the only planet we know of anywhere that has
oxygen on it.”

What’s even more astonishing is that the earth started out with an oxygen-
free atmosphere. It took billions of years before there was enough of it to
keep animals like us alive.

Although scientists have been struggling for decades to reconstruct the rise
of oxygen, they’re still making fundamental discoveries. In just the past two
weeks, for example, Dr. Canfield and his colleagues have published a pair of
studies that provide significant clues about some of the most important
chapters in oxygen’s history. They’re finding that our weirdly oxygen-rich
atmosphere is the result of a complicated dance of geology and biology.

To study the ancient atmosphere, geochemists examine the chemical

fingerprints left behind on rocks. Some rocks contain molecules that could
have formed only in the presence of oxygen. The more of those molecules
geochemists find in a rock, the more oxygen must have been in the
atmosphere at the time.

When they look at the oldest rocks on earth, they find no trace of oxygen in
the atmosphere. Instead, their research indicates that earth’s primordial air
was made up mostly of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrogen. The sun’s
rays created some free oxygen by splitting it off from carbon dioxide and
other molecules. But the oxygen disappeared almost as soon as it was
formed.

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That’s because oxygen is an enormously friendly element, forming bonds
with a wide range of molecules. It attached to the iron in rocks, for example,
creating rust. It joined with hydrogen spewed out from volcanoes to form
hydrogen peroxide and other compounds. Our planet, in other words, was a
giant oxygen vacuum in its early years.

That changed about three billion years ago. In the Sept. 26 issue of Nature,
Dr. Canfield and his colleagues reported the fingerprints of oxygen in rocks
from that time period. They estimate that the atmosphere three billion years
ago had only 0.03 percent of today’s oxygen levels. That may not sound like
much, but it marked a huge shift in the earth’s chemistry.

Sunlight alone couldn’t have put that much oxygen in the atmosphere. Only
life could.
By three billion years ago, some microbes had evolved the ability to carry out
photosynthesis. Floating at the surface of the ocean, they used energy from
sunlight to grow on carbon dioxide and water. They gave off oxygen as
waste.

Much of the oxygen released by these photosynthetic microbes was sucked

out of the atmosphere by the earth’s vacuum. When microbes died, oxygen
reacted with their carbon.

But a tiny amount of oxygen remained behind because some of the organic
matter from the dead microbes sank from the surface of the ocean to the sea
floor, where oxygen couldn’t react with it. The oxygen remained in the air.

Oxygen remained fairly scarce for the next few hundred million years. But
during that time, the earth’s vacuum was getting weak. The planet was
cooling, and so its volcanoes spewed less hydrogen into the atmosphere to
suck up oxygen.

In his forthcoming book, “Oxygen: A Four Billion Year History,” Dr. Canfield
suggests that this weak vacuum drove a sudden climb in oxygen that
geochemists see in rocks from about 2.3 billion years ago. “Now we get to the
point where the earth has calmed down enough that the balance has tipped
in the favor of oxygen,” he said.

This oxygen boom may have added fuel to life’s fire. The extra oxygen in the
atmosphere attacked rocks exposed on land, freeing up phosphorus and iron
to flow into the ocean to act as fertilizer. The microbes bloomed even more,
sending up even more oxygen.

Reporting last week in The Proceedings of the National Academies of

Sciences, Dr. Canfield and his colleagues report that there was so much
oxygen in the atmosphere that it penetrated down a thousand feet into the
ocean. Dr. Canfield speculates that oxygen may have become as abundant as
it is today, at least for a while.

But this boom created its own bust. Microbes rained down onto the sea
floor, creating carbon-rich rocks. Later, the rocks were lifted up to form dry
land, where they could react with the oxygen, pulling it out of the
atmosphere.

Life itself, in other words, turned earth’s vacuum back up again. By 2 billion
years ago, oxygen levels were down to about 0.01 percent of current levels.

Life and earth have continued to twiddle the oxygen knob over the past two
billion years. When plants evolved, for example, they began storing huge
amounts of carbon in wood and other tough tissues, leaving less to react
with oxygen and pull it out of the atmosphere. By 300 million years ago,
oxygen had risen to levels as high as 50 percent higher than today.

But as continents moved across the globe, the planet’s geography came to
favor deserts. Forests shrank, bringing down the oxygen levels.
As Dr. Canfield gets better acquainted with the tumultuous history, he gets
less certain about its future. Will the earth hold on to its remarkable supply
of oxygen, or will it run low again? “I’m not sure we have a good prediction,”
Dr. Canfield said. “That depends a lot on the vagaries of geography.”