Nature

On a recent Friday morning, a classroom of teenagers at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School broke up into small groups and spent an hour not answering questions about Albert Camus's "The Plague. " It wasn't that the students were shy, or bored, or that they hadn't done the reading. They were following instructions: Ask as many questions as they could, and answer none of them. The kids wrote in rapid fire on sheets of butcher paper. "Why is everyone acting normal when people are dropping dead?"

All day Monday, Republicans played offense and Democrats were on defense after Newark Mayor Cory Booker committed a political faux pas over the weekend. The Obama surrogate said his candidate's attack on Mitt Romney's Bain Capital record was as "nauseating" as reports of planned Republican attacks on President Obama's former pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. The public rebuke by a supposed presidential supporter undercut the message of an ad the Obama campaign ran last week about Bain's handling of a steel plant in Missouri.

As a child, Steve Thompson displayed outsized reactions to ordinary events and intense mood swings. By age 12, doctors diagnosed him with bipolar disorder. The idea that he had a chronic mental illness - one typically marked in adulthood by manic periods followed by depression - frightened him. "It's something you think you'll have your entire life," said Thompson, a 23-year-old student at Massasoit Community College in Brockton. But over the past year, with the help of his longtime psychiatrist, he has weaned himself off mood-altering medication.

Traffic on East Street in Westwood has been rerouted after the roof of an eco-friendly compressed natural gas MBTA bus was torn off while the vehicle was traveling under a low railroad bridge on East Street, causing a natural gas leak from one of the buses' tanks, authorities said. The leak came from the broken pipe of a natural gas tank located in the roof, said Westwood Fire Captain Steven Lund. There were no injuries and the driver was the only person on the bus, said MBTA spokeswoman Lydia Rivera.

In the final months of two mostly unmemorable terms in office, Rhode Island Governor Donald Carcieri boasted about his little state's big splash - stealing former Red Sox pitcher Curt Schilling and his nascent video game company from Massachusetts. "This is a risk worth taking," said Carcieri, a Republican, announcing the 2010 deal that lured Schilling's company, 38 Studios, to Providence, and put Rhode Island taxpayers on the hook for up to $75 million in guaranteed loans to an athlete who liked video games but had never developed one. "I think the governor...

MARATHON SWIMMER Diana Nyad's frustration over her latest failure reveals a disturbing but all to familiar sense of hubris ("Injured woman ends Cuba-Fla. swim," Page A2, Sept. 26). "I trained this hard for this big dream I had for so many years, and to think these stupid little Portuguese man-of-war take it down," she said. Perhaps it's time to appreciate that Herculean will cannot always trump the forces of nature, stupid or otherwise. Brad Braufman Somerville

The Conservation Commission is inviting the public to a nature walk it is leading at Burlington's Mill Pond Conservation Area on Saturday. The walk is geared for adults and children, and participants are welcome to bring their dogs. The group will meet at 10 a.m. at the parking lot of the town water treatment plant, 70 Winter St. The rain-or-shine walk will take about an hour and a half. Residents are asked to bring their own snacks and to dress appropriately for the weather. Those who bring their dogs are asked to keep them on leashes and to bring their own bags to clean up after them.

CABIN: Two Brothers, a Dream, and Five Acres in Maine By Lou Ureneck Viking, 243 pp., $25.95 Lou Ureneck has written two terrific memoirs that join his love of nature and family. In 2007's "Backcast," Ureneck, in the middle of a difficult divorce, brings his alienated, confused teenage son Adam on an Alaskan fishing trip. Ureneck's memoir serves as more than just a marvelous meditation on an angling adventure - it won the 2007 National Outdoor Book Award - as it quietly expands into a closely observed, lyrical portrait of a father and son struggling to...

Flowers burst out of the walls at LaMontagne Gallery, where sculptor Tory Fair appears to have taken a saw to the pristine borders of the space’s white cube. Fair’s “Portal’’ is a small porthole that swells with cast resin blooms, subtly sparkling with glitter as if sprinkled with fairy dust. And that’s just the beginning. Fair has cast her own body, nude, poised to peer into what might be holes in the walls and floor, and blossoms swarm out and engulf her. The installation is charming and creepy.

Once the dust had settled from his altercation with reliever Kevin Gregg in Friday night’s 10-3 victory over the Orioles at Fenway Park, David Ortiz found himself at Jerry Remy’s Sports Bar & Grill with his Red Sox teammates for a surprise birthday party for Daniel Bard. All around him, on the high-definition televisions that rimmed the restaurant, replays of the eighth-inning, bench-clearing brawl - sparked by Ortiz’s toe-to-toe swingfest with Gregg - kept playing on an incessant loop.

NEW YORK - Jean Craighead George, a Newbery Award-winning writer for young people whose books brought the natural world from the Catskill Mountains to the Alaskan tundra to wild, luminous life, died Tuesday in Mount Kisco, N.Y. She was 92. The author of more than 100 fiction and nonfiction titles that have collectively sold millions of copies, Mrs. George was best known for two novels for older children, "My Side of the Mountain" (1959),...

Last month , the Food and Drug Administration warned 10 companies that they were inappropriately marketing dietary supplements containing a hazardous new ingredient: 1,3-dimethylamylamine, or DMAA. This might appear at first glance to be evidence of the FDA protecting the public from rogue elements in the supplement industry. In fact, this "new" ingredient has been heavily promoted since 2007 at major retail chains, including GNC and Vitamin Shoppe, as the FDA watched silently.

As a child, Steve Thompson displayed outsized reactions to ordinary events and intense mood swings. By age 12, doctors diagnosed him with bipolar disorder. The idea that he had a chronic mental illness - one typically marked in adulthood by manic periods followed by depression - frightened him. "It's something you think you'll have your entire life," said Thompson, a 23-year-old student at Massasoit Community College in Brockton. But over the past year, with the help of his longtime psychiatrist, he has weaned himself off mood-altering medication.

SALT LAKE CITY - Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced Tuesday the approval of a major natural gas drilling project in Utah that the Obama administration says will support more than 4,000 jobs during its development while safeguarding critical wildlife habitat and air quality. During an appearance outside Salt Lake City, Salazar said Anadarko Petroleum Corp. of Texas would be allowed to develop up to 3,675 new gas wells over the next decade in eastern Utah. "It will help power the American economy," Salazar said.

John Galluzzo is constantly on the go. He's a man who likes to set goals and achieve new personal bests. In 2009, he took a 30-minute nature walk every day, no matter what the weather, in a different place each day. Last year, he upped the ante. In 2011, Galluzzo logged a half-hour walk in a nature preserve or outdoor setting in every city and town in the state. It was 351 towns in 341 days, starting in Dighton on Jan. 1 and ending in Hardwick on Dec. 7. "I wanted to show that you can be anywhere in Massachusetts and be within 15 minutes of a nature walk," he said.

"In the course of a lifetime," Florence Williams writes, "breasts meet many friends and foes: lovers, babies, ill-fitting undergarments, persistent pollutants, maybe a nipple ring, a baggie of silicone, or a dose of therapeutic radiation. " In this engaging book, science journalist Williams sets out to provide what she calls "an environmental history of a body part" that is rarely, it seems, examined on its own merits. Even the evolutionary significance of breasts, she argues, has long been ignored by male scientists who saw...

WHO: Globe Living editor Steve Greenlee; his wife, Kelly; and their three children, ages 9-12 WHAT: A spring walk WHERE: Copicut Woods, Fall River Usually spring brings an end to cabin fever — you get outside and get some fresh air after another New England winter. Though this winter was exceedingly tame, it's not as though we were all frolicking among the daisies from December to March. There were still plenty of chilly, windy weekend days that dissuaded us from venturing out into the open.

WESTPORT, Conn. - Only an hour north of Manhattan, the town of Westport is home to sprawling mansions with manicured gardens, a lovely curve of beach, and a downtown shopping district where an ice bucket could easily set you back 300 bucks. This was the last place we expected to find a wildlife sanctuary and nature discovery center, but we were pleasantly surprised to find Earthplace at the end of a winding road in a residential neighborhood. About to celebrate its 50th anniversary, Earthplace maintains a 62-acre reserve and offers programs and exhibitions designed to...

Northwest Natural Gas Co.'s first-quarter net income dipped due to higher expenses. The utility company, which operates as NW Natural, reported Friday that it earned $40.6 million, or $1.51 per share, for the three months ended March 31. That compares with $40.8 million, or $1.53 per share, a year earlier. The performance matched the expectations of analysts surveyed by FactSet. Revenue increased 4 percent to $139.9 million from $134.5 million, below Wall Street's $207.2 million.

Upon meeting the vocal group Human Nature, Smokey Robinson felt like a prophecy was coming true. "When Berry Gordy started Motown, there were five of us in a room and he sat us down and said, ‘I'm going to start my own record label, and we're going to make quality music. Not just black music, but great music of the highest quality that will last,' " says Robinson recalling a conversation that took place ahead of Motown's 1960 launch. The record label (and sister imprint Tamla)