What to do with seldom-used phone booths? In New York, architect John Locke is turning them into micro-libraries. (photo above by the artist). Atlantic Cities brings the story.

Pretty much everything Alexis Madrigal writes is worth the trip, but this elegaic look at an outdated, massive satellite receiver from the Cold War days is especially rich and satisfying.  The Afterlife of Technology at the End of the World.

Download the Universe, where I’m one of the editor/reviewers, launched this week with posts by Deborah Blum on The Elements and John Timmer on the state of the e-book. Meanwhile, further uptown, the New York Review of Books — a long-time high-brow favorite of mine and Larry McMurtry’s — spends some ink on the virtues of e-books. And even stranger: Carl Zimmer tells how his two successful e-books, Brain Cuttings and Brain Cuttings II, got pulled from Amazon because of a dispute between Amazon and the e-book’s distributor.

This is not pretty: A major long-term U.S. study of children’s health, squeezed by budget cuts, is abandoning door-to-door recruitment for subjects.

The BBC launched a new science and technology news site, Future. It has great editors and his commissioning features and columns from top science journalists; keep an eye on this one.

Carl Zimmer has a wonderful Smithsonian piece on The Secret Life of Bees, and what bee their decision-making suggests about democracy.