Billionaires

This is the first of my new Friday Five series, a roundup of this week’s news.  I’m a little of a news junkie. If you are too, and you’re curious to read more about those little nuggets you hear on the radio, you should know that NU affiliates can go beyond the news breaks and get the complete information through the Northeastern University Libraries! This week almost everything on my list has to do with either water or oil, the two things we seem to need to sustain modern life. 1. It’s the 5th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. NU’s freshman class is reading “Zeitoun” for the occasion in a “one-book one-community”-type reading program.  Naturally all our library copies are checked out! But there’s a lot of information about the book in this “webliography” about Zeitoun by Snell Reference librarian Jamie Dendy. 2. Where’s the oil? That big plume in the Gulf of Mexico is being eaten by bacteria, according to research at Massachusetts’ Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. Here’s the full report from the journal Science. 3. “Covert Operations: The billionaire brothers who are waging a war against Obama” by Jane Mayer in this week’s New Yorker is making the rounds of the pundit and political news blogs this week.  Never heard of the Koch Brothers?  Read about them online here temporarily, after which you’ll be able to find the article through one of our ejournal vendors such as Ebsco or Gale. 4. The world of stem cell research is reeling from this week’s Federal District Court preliminary injunction against the Obama Administration’s guidelines for research using embryonic stem cells. For more information about why, you can read the complete 15-page decision in Lexis-Nexis. 5. Good news for cheapskates who want to lose weight! Up front, let me say that I’m not a big water drinker.  I’ve never bought that 8 glasses of water a day thing–well, not until this week when, at the American Chemical Society meeting in Boston, research was presented updating a recent article showing that there is a link between drinking .5 liters (about a pint) of water before meals and…weight loss! I must now admit my grandmother was right with her big glass of H2O before every meal.  Much cheaper than acai berries, pills and Jenny Craig! Hope you enjoy the weekend, and have fun catching up on this week’s news!