FIN & FINIS are root words meaning END.  Find a list including finial, affinity, confine, define and financial at http://www.english-for-students.com/fin.html

June 9, 2015  Over the weekend, 24 teams from around the world converged in Pomona, California to compete for the DARPA Robotics Challenge, and PCMag was there.  After a difficult assault course, designed around a hazardous environment, which required robots to drill through a wall, release a mounted valve, climb stairs and drive an off-road utility vehicle, Team KAIST from Korea walked away with the $2 million first prize.  DARPA launched the competition in response to the 2011 Fukushima earthquake and tsunami when, if robots been among the first responder teams, human lives could have been saved.  

Sophia Stuart    Read article and see pictures at http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2485620,00.asp

World's longest marked trail proposed around Great Lakes by Keith Matheny  It's a big idea — a 10,900-mile-long one.  Melissa Scanlan, an associate professor, associate dean and director of the Environmental Law Center at Vermont Law School, seeks to establish a hikers version of Mt. Everes—the Great Lakes Trail on the shores of the Great Lakes.  All of the Great Lakes.  And all of their shoreline.  It would span at least eight states and two Canadian provinces, and would be the longest continuous marked trail in the world—f ive times larger than the 2,180-mile Appalachian Trail from Maine to Georgia, and more than four times bigger than the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail from the U.S. border with Canada to its border with Mexico.  It was while hiking a National Scenic Trail in Wisconsin—the Ice Age Trail—that Scanlan said the idea came to her.  "I was thinking of all the people who had to donate easements to allow that trail to happen across private property," she said.  "And I realized we already have this public trust easement along the shoreline of the Great Lakes."  As the Great Lakes states were admitted into the Union, the federal government granted them the lake beds and waters of the Great Lakes up to the ordinary high-water mark—from the point on the bank or shore where continuous wave action has made a distinct mark, to the water.  This was affirmed by a U.S. Supreme Court decision in 1894, in the Shively v. Bowlby case.  The justices found that lands below the high-water mark were "for the benefit of the whole people."  (This may come as news to owners of $750,000 lakefront homes whose deed tells them the shoreline is theirs.)   A 2005 Michigan state Supreme Court case, Glass v. Goeckel, found "the public trust doctrine does protect (the) right to walk along the shores of the Great Lakes," and that "the state lacks the power to diminish those rights when conveying (shoreline) property to private parties."  New York has ruled similarly on the issue.  It's this principle, Scanlan says, that makes the Great Lakes Trail a real possibility.  The North Country Trail is a National Scenic Trail running from eastern New York to central North Dakota.  Established in 1980, less than 60% of the trail was completed as of last year.  The Great Lakes Trail, to become a National Scenic Trail, would require an act of Congress enabling a likely years-long feasibility study by the National Park Service.  After that mapping and evaluation, Congress would take up the trail again and determine whether to create it.  Scanlan encourages those interested in the trail concept to contact their member of Congress and ask for a feasibility study for it.  Buy-in from local governments and organizations throughout the region also would be necessary.  And some could view the potential conflicts between hikers and Great Lakes shoreline homeowners as something they wish to avoid.  But Scanlan is undaunted.  "I think a lot of the conflicts arise from people not being clear on where the property boundary is," she said.  "The benefit of having a National Scenic Trail in this area is there would be a demarcation of where the ordinary high-water mark is.  I think it could settle some conflicts that could exist right now.  Another benefit, she said, is that a shoreline trail designation limits what activities can take place:  "It's for walking, not for camping, having bonfires or hanging out on the shorelines for the day."  "The Appalachian Trail has 2 million to 3 million hikers on it every year," she said.  "Other National Scenic Trails are somewhat remote, hard to get to.  But something that would go around the Great Lakes, go through so many industrial cities and small towns, would allow so many people to access it.  But the full benefit of the trail as a tourist attraction really doesn't happen until you have it designated as a whole."  http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2015/05/23/great-lakes-trail-michigan-coastline-hikers/27848439/

Red roses for young lovers.  French beans for longstanding relationships.  

Ruskin Bond's Book of Nature, 2004

Food idioms:  http://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-food-idioms.html

A Dutch team has developed a potato crop through traditional breeding methods that is tolerant to salt water.  Their project beat more than 500 competitors from 90 countries to win an award sponsored by the US Agency for International Development (USAID).  Inspired by sea kale, Dutch farmer Marc van Rijsselberghe set up Salt Farm Texel in the north of the Netherlands and collaborated with Dr Arjen de Vos from the Free University in Amsterdam to look at the possibility of cultivating crops using non-fresh water.  “The world’s water is 89% salinated, 50% of agricultural land is threatened by salt water, and there are millions of people living in salt-contaminated areas.  Up until now everyone has been concentrating on how to turn the salt water into fresh water; we are looking at what nature has already provided us with”, van Rijsselberghe told the Guardian.  The process of desalination is expensive and requires much energy.  The salt-tolerant potato plants, however, were watered with diluted sea water.  The variety is four times more salt tolerant than regular potato varieties.  The project used a trial and error approach and then screened different potato cultivars of which only two showed increased salt tolerance and were used for further development of the saline potato.  Some of the Texel seed potatoes are already on their way to Pakistan where 4.2 million hectares of land is salt affected and farmers are often forced to use brackish groundwater to water their crops, which reduces yields and the quality of the crops.  If the potatoes adapt to the Asian climate, they could transform the lives of farmers not only in Pakistan.  According to Dutch team, there is no risk of overdosing on salt when eating crops fed by sea water.  “What we find is that, if you tease a plant with salt, it compensates with more sugar,” said de Vos.  The salt is mostly retained in the leaves of the plant.  http://www.saveourseeds.org/en/news/international/news/en/29893.html

See also  http://tribune.com.pk/story/870626/agricultural-breakthrough-saline-land-yields-perfect-potatoes/

In the spring of 2014, representatives of the Alabama Center for the Book and the Alabama Writers’ Forum with a committee of readers, writers, and scholars met to decide how best to honor the rich legacy of native Alabamians who earned their reputations in the literary arts.  From these initial meetings, came the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame.

The inaugural class of twelve writers represents internationally celebrated Alabama authors whose work spans the nineteent,twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. These initial inductees include Johnson Jones Hooper (1815-1862), Augusta Jane Evans Wilson (1835-1909), Helen Keller (1880-1968), Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960), William March (1894-1954), Albert Murray (1916-2013), Helen Norris Bell (1916-2013), Andrew Glaze (b. 1920), Harper Lee (b. 1926), Sonia Sanchez (b. 1934), Sena Jeter Naslund (b. 1942), and Rick Bragg (b. 1959).  For further information about the Alabama Writers Hall of Fame, contact the Alabama Writers’ Forum at 334-265-7728 or writersforum@bellsouth.net.  http://www.writersforum.org/hall-of-fame/about.html  

NOTE that Harper Lee's second book, Go Set a Watchman, is being released July 14, 2015.  It was written before the Pulitzer Prize-winning To Kill a Mockingbird, but takes place 20 years later.

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1308  June 10, 2015  On this date in 1944, in baseball, 15-year old Joe Nuxhall of the Cincinnati Reds became the youngest player ever in a major-league game.  On this date in 1947, Saab produced its first automobile.