Cover Story
Baseball is a family

We hear about his time with the Padres; about teammates Dave Winfield, Willie McCovey, and Tito Fuentes; how he'd faced Hank Aaron and Johnny Bench and Pete Rose and Joe Morgan; and how a tear of his rotator cuff had brought an end to his major league career.

Features

The tie that binds

No matter what you want to blame--predatory pricing, vertical integration, foreign competition, globalization, urban sprawl--the fact of the matter is, rural America is packing it in. At least the rural America of our memory or imagination.

Where water meets desert

Among locals, you ocassionally hear the word "wasteland" used to describe sagebrush-studded lands that biologists prefer to call native shrub steppe. It's impossible to take such a harsh view when Robert kent is your guide to the Columbia Basin Wildlife Areas.

New Zealand mud snails
A tiny gastropod is a major problem here--not there

They have already invaded the Snake River, Yellowstone National Park, and lots of other sites. They can reach population densities greater than 300,000 per square meter, carpeting stream beds and changing the way nutrients cycle through the ecosystem. It was a little difficult, though, to explain all of this to the gentleman who wanted to confiscate my snails.

Master Gardeners in Washington: Healing communities

For more than 30 years, volunteers and employees have spun their love of gardening into a web of services and programs reaching more than 100 Washington communities.

No blank slates: A psychologist examines the origins of temperament

A WSU researcher uncovers the ways parents can help babies develop emotionally.

Pumpkin physics

". . . two, one, drop!" the crowd roared. It was a smashing way to demonstrate Galileo's law of falling objects.

Tough microbes

They might not eat nails, exactly, but these tough little critters might hold the key to some heavy-duty environmental cleanup.

Panoramas

Tracking the Cougars