BACK ON TRACK: It's been a while since trains were at the forefront of America's economy, back in the days of railroad tycoons like Cornelius Vanderbilt and Andrew Carnegie. But on Tuesday, U.S. super-investor Warren Buffett placed a huge bet that trains are rumbling into relevance again, throwing down $26 billion to buy the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Corporation, a 131-year-old railroad. It's the biggest acquisition in the history of his investment company, Berkshire Hathaway, and marks a major vote of confidence from a man widely seen as the country's pre-eminent financial genius. Trains fell out of favor last century as interstate highways and freight trucks took their place, but Buffett seems to believe that railroads' greater efficiency and lower emissions will make them more useful as climate change and dwindling oil supplies reveal the flaws of truck shipping. Of course, not everything Burlington Northern ships is green — coal, for example — but it's less committed to those environmental vices than trucks are to oil, and the widest effect of Buffett's move may be to simply boost the popularity of trains in general: While the NY Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin reports that a flurry of similar deals is unlikely, railroad stocks still rose across the board on Tuesday. (Source: New York Times)

 

JAWS AND ORDER: Long seen as rogue hunters who wander randomly through the open ocean, a new study reveals that great white sharks are more methodical — and hang out closer to land — than we ever knew. A team of scientists has spent the past decade tagging and tracking 179 great whites across the Pacific Ocean, using satellites, acoustics and DNA sampling to follow their movements. Among many discoveries, they found that the ancient predators spend several months each summer hunting near the U.S. West Coast, then migrate several thousand miles to winter in Hawaii. The group of Pacific sharks is so insular that it's even become genetically distinct from all other great whites on Earth. "White sharks are a large, highly mobile species," says the study's lead author, Salvador Jorgensen of Stanford University. "They can go just about anywhere they want in the ocean, so it's really surprising that their migratory behaviors lead to the formation of isolated populations." One location along their route becomes so clogged with feeding sharks each year that the researchers dubbed it "white shark cafe," and Jorgensen points out that the absence of increased shark attacks in the area "shows us the sharks are really minding their own business. The number of interactions with people is very small, considering." (Sources: Washington Post, e! Science News)

 

GOOD OL' BOYCOTT: German Chancellor Angela Merkel visited Capitol Hill Tuesday, urging U.S. senators to take action against climate change, but her visit was upstaged by a Republican boycott of a committee meeting to debate the Senate's climate bill. Sen. Barbara Boxer (pictured, right), chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, waited at the head of an empty table Tuesday for GOP senators who never showed up. While Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., has made a bipartisan splash by supporting the Senate's attempt to rein in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, many other Republicans remain opposed, demanding more economic analyses and delays. Only Sen. George Voinovich (left), R-Ohio, came to Tuesday's meeting, but even he just read a statement explaining the boycott and then left. "Madam Chairman, Ohio can't afford to lose any more jobs," Voinovich said. "So for the sake of workers in my state and elsewhere whose jobs are hanging in the balance, slow down, take a deep breath, let EPA do what it needs to do, and let's come back in four to five weeks and have a markup." Boxer responded that more analyses are unnecessary. "EPA has made it clear they stand behind the economic analysis," she countered, "and that it is more analysis than is typically provided before a markup." Last month, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported that the climate bill will have little effect on overall employment, but could hit certain industries hard, such as those that rely heavily on coal. (Sources: Associated Press, Los Angeles Times, Christian Science Monitor, the Hill)

 

BEAM ME UP: Future astronauts may simply ride an elevator into space rather than troubling themselves with a space shuttle, a technology foreshadowed this week during the Space Elevator Games in the Mojave Desert. In the $2 million competition, robots powered by laser beams will try to climb a cable suspended from a helicopter hovering half a mile in the sky, testing their ability to eventually climb much longer cables all the way into orbit. Three teams have qualified to compete in the sci-fi showdown, which runs from today through Friday, although no one has won the competition in the past three years. In addition to climbing six-tenths of a mile high, the robots must ascend at 16.4 feet per second, receiving their electricity from laser beams on the ground. Ultimately, real space elevators would take such robots all the way up to stationary satellites that hold still in a single spot above Earth's surface. (Source: AP)

 

NO PAIN, NO GAIN: If you're lucky enough to get an H1N1 vaccine, or even just the regular seasonal flu vaccine, bite the bullet and don't take a pain pill. That's the advice of researchers from the University of Rochester, who have found that taking common pain relievers like Advil, Tylenol and aspirin can actually make such vaccines less effective. "[I]t's probably not a good idea to take common, over-the-counter pain relievers for minor discomfort associated with vaccination," one of the study's authors says. "We have studied this question using virus particles, live virus, and different kinds of pain relievers, in human blood samples and in mice — and all of our research shows that pain relievers interfere with the effect of the vaccine." The study supports previous research, such as a study last year that found acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol, weakens infants' immune response to vaccines. (Source: e! Science News)

 

— Russell McLendon