UO E-clips, Aug. 12

Grand tomato plan (Register-Guard): It's "too big to miss," yet everyone missed it. Everyone, that is, but four members of the local media, and a few passers-by behind Autzen Stadium on Monday morning. To promote this year's Oregon State Fair, which runs Aug. 22 to Sept. 1 in Salem, and its 2008 theme, "Too big to miss," cattleman Matt Richards of Independence is traveling all over the state this month in his 1946 International pickup truck with the 20-foot tomato on the back. ... He said Autzen was chosen because "everybody knows Autzen Stadium. There's not much more you can say." Except University of Oregon sports information director Dave Williford said "no."

Microbes, by latitudes and altitudes, shed new light on life's diversity (Science Daily): Microbial biologists, including the University of Oregon's Jessica L. Green, may not have Jimmy Buffett's music from 1977 in mind, but they are changing attitudes about evolutionary diversity on Earth, from oceanic latitudes to mountainous altitudes. In two recent National Science Foundation-funded papers in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Green and colleagues show that temperature, not productivity, primarily drives the richness of bacterial diversity in the oceans, and that life, both plant and microbial, by altitude in the Rocky Mountains may be close, but not exactly, to what biologists have theorized for years. (The story also is scheduled to be run on Medical News Today and Medilexicon.com on Wednesday)