Frogs with teeth. A fish that grunts. Kangaroos in trees. And the world's biggest rat. Someday, a hundred- or two-thousand years from now, this headline could apply to a city like Houston. It is ringed by eight lanes of concrete that's certain death to anything that tries to crawl, walk or slither across the highway with non-stop, 24-hour traffic. I have never tried to get across that particular circle of death, but I have driven 'round and 'round it a fair number of times, and often thought of the new species that could be mutating there right before our eyes. Not including native Houstonians, of course.
     For now, the frogs with teeth and the world's biggest rat share a micro world separated from the rest of the earth by the rim of an extinct volcano in the remote jungles of Papua New Guinea. The volcano last erupted 200,000 years ago, and since then an astounding number of new species have evolved. It is a fascination for scientists, environmentalists and dreamers around the world.
     Robert Booth, a reporter for The Guardian newspaper in Great Britain, wrote a report about the research and the findings, and you can read it here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/07/discovery-species-papua-new-guinea


     "A smart man learns from his mistakes. A really smart man learns from others' mistakes". This is just one of the pithy sayings hung on the walls of Amos Fisher's farm market in Strasburg, Pa. The Fisher family's 23-acre farm-to-consumer operation evolved from conventional soybean operation into an examplar of diversification. They now grow, for one example, 90 varieties of apples. And many learning opportunities - disguised as mistakes - presented themselves along the way. Lancaster Farming staff writer Chris Torres visited the Fishers and wrote a report which appears in our current issue.


     Kitty has a fan. http://myspacetv.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=56840664