In mid-October, Zack Exley wrote a compelling article on the Obama campaign's extremely effective "ground game" in Ohio. Comments on the piece---as well as people's experience elsewhere --- ---confirmed that Obama's highly disciplined Ohio field operation is used in other states, which helps explain the candidate's success in the polls. But Obama's voter outreach model is not a new invention.

The northern leopard frogs that inhabit the boreal U.S. have never recovered from some catastrophic population declines in the 1970s. Some blame it on the acidifying lakes and streams caused by coal-burning, others point to the ongoing loss of wetlands to development, and now new evidence shows that the herbicide atrazine--widely sprayed on crop fields throughout the region--is killing the frogs by helping parasitic worms that feast on them. [More]