The Agenda

Courtesy of GE

ON YOUR MARK, GET SET, GE! >> The Summer Olympics, in Beijing will feature world-class athletes and the subject of our profile GE. The company has partnered with the games to be the official supplier of healthcare equipment to treat athletes, as well as provide water filtration systems and other technologies. For more on the company's role in the Olympics, see http://www.ge.com/olympics/.

GET MORE GPCRS >> If the feature on uniting orphan G protein-coupled receptors with their natural ligands sparks your interest in the field, you can attend the Gordon Research Conference on Growth Factors and Signaling, held August 3-8 at Magdalen College in Oxford, UK. For more, see http://tinyurl.com/5829tt.

GET A TISSUE >> For all those softies who need beach reading, there's Wesley the Owl, in which Stacey O'Brien describes meeting a four-day-old barn owl while working at the owl laboratory at Caltech. Wesley had a damaged wing, and therefore could not survive in the wild, so O'Brien spent the next two decades chronicling his behavior, and feeding him nearly 30,000 mice. To learn more about the book, published by Simon and Schuster, visit: http://tinyurl.com/5f5szb.

GET AN UMBRELLA >> If you prefer learning about the beach while you're on it, check out An Ocean of Air, by PhD chemist Gabrielle Walker, contributing editor for New Scientist. In the book, published this month by Harcourt, Walker walks you through some mysteries of the atmosphere and the people who solved them, including a Renaissance Italian who weighed air for the first time.