WHY I READ THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Some people would think it strange that a person who has no stocks or bonds (or hardly any money in the bank) would read the Wall Street Journal. But I love the Journal and could hardly get along without it. I read it in part because it has great front-page articles (mostly non-financial), interesting editorials (did I mention I am a political junkie?) and great book reviews. I am always reading some book I would never have heard of without it.

But one big reason is because of the intriguing little articles and columns scattered through the inside pages. You can pick up all sorts of unusual information from reading them.

For example, Sharon Begley has a column called "Science Journal" that is always interesting. Last week she had one explaining how the police get innocent people to confess. No, I'm not talking the rubber hose treatment here. She explains that a lot of suspects are poorly educated, easily manipulated doofuses who will confess to anything if the cop is sympathetic ("I don't think you really intended to do it, I can understand how you might have just lost it") and convinces him they have so much evidence (ha!) that his best bet is to confess and hope for leniency. For instance, cops lied to one guy that his hair had been found in the dead girl's room, that her blood was in his bedroom, and that he had failed his polygraph. He got confused and thought he must have had a split personality who did it, and he confessed--only to be sprung loose later when they accidentally caught the real killer. According to this article, you shouldn't place much faith in confessions.

This week Begley has a column about water fleas. Interesting, huh? Well, actually it is. She describes these fleas that have little helmets that make it hard for fish to eat them, while other fleas with the same DNA don't. Some scientists divided up these helmeted fleas and put them in two different aquariums. They put fish scent in one aquarium and didn't in the other. The helmeted fleas in the one that had fish scent had offspring with helmets; the helmeted fleas in the one that didn't have fish scent produced offspring without helmets. According to the article, this shows that "a given genotype can develop in any of several ways depending on what environment it's in." Traits that we think are genetic may actually be "an artifact of how few environments people with that gene have been exposed to." Another example: Oak tree caterpillars that hatch in the spring eat oak blossoms and grow up to look like flowers; the same caterpillars that hatch in the summer eat leaves and grow up to look like leaves. She goes on to discuss similar studies in human beings, where different people can carry the same gene but will have totally different outcomes depending on their experiences. "The whole subject of what counts as innate has just exploded," she quotes one scientist as saying.

And, oh, I almost forgot: An article in the Journal last week ("Burning Rubber Gets Expensive") warned that a lot of new Hyundai's come equipped with high performance tires that wear out fast and cost $800 a set to replace. Anybody we know?