University Of Pittsburgh

Driven to raise rate Used to be you could pull up close to the Inner Harbor, plunk quarters in a meter and leave the car for a spell. No longer. City officials, bugged that the Light Street lot was hogged by meter-feeding workers from area shops and restaurants, raised prices and put it under private control. Just before Labor Day, as it happened, rates at that lot shot up from $1 an hour to $5 for the first hour and $16 all day. "We don't want employees parking all day long," said Jeff Sparrow, who leads the Baltimore City Parking Authority.

Washington. FROM LABORATORY PAYOLA to faked data and plagiarism -- it's all there in a new congressionally compiled sampler of sleaze in science.Read it and despair about the white-coated realm of truth-seeking, where it can be perilous to tackle intellectual crooks and profitable to compromise scientific independence. The science establishment has responded to the congressional allegations with assurances that it has cleaned up the mess and no government intervention is required. But isn't that what Wall Street said in the early days of its assorted scandals?

Around Lewisburg, Pa., where they produce no-nonsense, tough-as-nails football players, they are still talking about a thunderous hit Bucknell senior fullback Jason Marrow put on a Towson linebacker earlier this month in a 51-10 Bison victory. Marrow, a former Calvert Hall standout, pancaked the linebacker en route to the end zone on a quick dive play. No one seemed to care that the touchdown was called back by a holding penalty. Marrow, 6 feet 3, 215 pounds, had shown that he could hand out punishment that would make any coal-mining Pennsylvanian or anybody else proud.

For more than a decade, Dr. Brack Hattler has labored on a tiny device with big potential - an artificial lung to breathe for people when their organs fail. The lung showed promise in cows. But Hattler was nervous about the risky next step - testing it in people. "We didn't want to be making corrections in a live patient," said the University of Pittsburgh transplant surgeon. So he turned to a group that scientists have mostly shied away from: the living dead. Hattler is one of a small but growing number of researchers conducting studies in people just declared brain-dead or who are "nearly dead" - terminally ill patients being kept alive only by machines.

Here and there a Marylander's identity derives from his or her area of expertness. What Tom is to quilts or Dick to fishing or Harry to race tracks, Barbara Wells Sarudy is to old gardens. During office hours, Sarudy happens to be executive director of the Maryland Humanities Council; her passion, however, is shallots and snapdragons, turfed falls and geometric parterres. She has previously published on the gardens of long ago, but now that her comprehensive book is out -- "Gardens and Gardening in the Chesapeake Country, 1700-1805" (Johns Hopkins University Press, 207 pages, $29.95)

Dr. Frederick L. Brancati, an internationally known expert on the epidemiology and prevention of type 2 diabetes who was director of the Division of General Internal Medicine at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, died Tuesday of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, at his Lutherville home. He was 53. "He was a delightful human being — smart, witty and fun to be around," said Dr. Michael J. Klag, dean of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, whom Dr. Brancati succeeded as division chief.

Times are good these days at the Linde Corp., where despite a sluggish economy nationally, the company is on a hiring binge. The construction company, based near Wilkes-Barre in northeastern Pennsylvania, has seen its workforce nearly triple over the past five years as it switched from helping to build big-box stores to laying miles of natural gas pipelines connecting hundreds of gas wells drilled in the rolling rural terrain here in Susquehanna County....

Dr. Bruce L. Rollman was single when he began studying divorce rates among physicians, but married by the time he concluded the research."So I was anxiously following this issue," says Rollman, lead author of "Medical Specialty and the Incidence of Divorce," published in today's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.He -- and his wife -- can be reassured by the findings: Internists such as Rollman have among the lowest rates of divorce in the profession. Almost as low (the difference is not statistically significant, Rollman quickly notes)

Vernissia Tam gulped down half a glass of champagne at noon Friday and prepared to scream. She was about to find out what kind of doctor she would become, and where she would train. "No peeking," a Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine official told the Class of 2013. "The diplomas aren't printed yet. " After a countdown from 10 that took all of three seconds, Tam and her classmates broke the seals on letters revealing their fates, jumping into one another's arms for an embrace and congratulations.

Supervisors at a Maryland hospital weren't surprised when drugs were missing from a treatment room where contract radiology technician David Kwiatkowski was assigned. A manager had spotted him going through needle-disposal containers and he was among three employees under suspicion for taking vials of the narcotic fentanyl from the cardiac catheter lab, a state investigation found. But when a staffing agency later contacted the hospital about Kwiatkowski, a manager gave him a satisfactory review, writing: "David is very professional and worked very hard.