CLIMATE CALAMITY: While scientists grow more and more convinced that greenhouse gases are warming the earth’s atmosphere, the United States is falling behind other countries in its ability to predict long-term climate shifts, according to a recent article in The New York Times. The UW’s Ed Sarachik, a professor of atmospheric sciences, put the discrepancy between the U.S. effort and that of other nations in a less than flattering perspective. “Here in the United States, with a gross national product perhaps 10 times that of England, we’re spending less than they do on this sort of problem.” Sarachik was an author of a recent climate report that detailed the growing problem for the Bush administration.

TOO MUCH TEXTBOOK? Two UW professors who served on a national committee that reviewed 10 popular biology textbooks told the Houston Chronicle recently that students are getting a wealth of quality information - maybe even too much - from the instructional materials. Roger Olstad, a professor in the College of Education, told the Chronicle that publishers ought to consider more than the dissemination of information. “Students don’t come as blank slates. They come with knowledge and some misconceptions, and that needs to be addressed,” he said. Patricia Morse, a zoology professor, said the review was intended to provide information that could improve textbooks and make them more useful in the classroom. But, she said, while improvements are possible, a lot of textbooks are doing a lot of things well. “I am really tired of my colleagues in science saying there are no good textbooks when they haven’t looked at what is out there.”

YOU WIN SOME AND: Scientists now are confident that a meteor strike about 65 million years ago did in the dinosaurs. But a report by the UW’s Peter Ward, a professor of geological sciences, indicates that a similar meteor strike 200 million years ago may have wiped out the competition in no more than 50,000 years while sparing the dinosaurs. “For whatever reason the dinosaurs squeak through and the mammal-like reptiles don’t. It really opens the world to the age of dinosaurs as we know it,” Ward told The New York Times.

E-LOVE: In a story about online dating a reporter for Knight Ridder Newspapers asked the UW’s Pepper Schwartz, a sociology professor, to respond to critics’ barbs at the cyber-dating scene. “To anyone dumping on online dating I’d say, ‘Have they looked at the alternatives?’ ”

Newsmakers is a periodic column reporting on coverage of the University of Washington by national press services.