There's a great deal of concern on the planet about plastic in the ocean. But it's not bags or wrappers that are the greatest concerns, at least on the beach. It's cigarette butts. Even though the percentage of the population consuming cigarettes had dropped in the United States, beach cleanup operations in recent years keep finding that cigarette filters make up a lot of the trash load. And they are dropped and pitched in many other places as well. The Cigarette Butt Pollution Project tracks

Maybe we're not seeing a trend in people getting fed up with football in the United States. But there is a growth industry in books airing complaints about the game. Diane Roberts put a book on that shelf a few years ago with Tribal: College Football and the Secret Heart of America . She starts with her own ambivalence, being occasionally repelled by the sport but still attending every home game at Florida State, and broadens the focus to the country at large. Some of the concerns about football

If you believe our future is about capturing carbon and returning it to the ground, it makes sense to care about what covers that ground. California's Healthy Soils Program is set up to make sure soil can help in the carbon sequestration process, while providing nutrients for crops to grow. The numbers on what healthy soil can produce are impressive.

Massive coverage of a new Supreme Court justice, a possible presidential candidate taking a DNA test, and a Saudi journalist missing and presumed murdered. That's just one sentence of recent happening in the media landscape, a landscape we survey once a month in our Signals & Noise segment. Our regulars return: Precious Yamaguchi and Andrew Gay, communication teachers at Southern Oregon University .

Facebook is not having a good year. It has been in the news constantly for being a repository for fake news, and for its issues with handling of user information. Researchers at the University at Buffalo in New York are adding to the distress. The researchers found that Facebook can make people feel excluded socially. And in turn, that makes them more susceptible to the persuasions of advertisers. Jessica Covert is the lead author of the study.

Everyone who goes to the symphony notices the violins and the cellos. But do the violas get any respect? They will this weekend (October 19-21), when the Rogue Valley Symphony presents one of its "Masterworks" concerts, this one featuring a brand-new viola concerto by Malek Jandali . We hear more about the work, from the composer.

Critics of American education have many areas of concern, and grading is just one of them. Teachers are human, and humans have beliefs and biases that can show up in the process of assigning grades to students. Longtime educator Joe Feldman proposes a way to get things right, in his book Grading for Equity: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How It Can Transform Schools and Classrooms .

Somehow, the things that we fear in our society are just a little less fearful when we get the story from puppets. That's right, puppets, fuzzy puppets. Those are the medium of performance for the Rogue Valley-based theatre troupe Puppeteers for Fears . The group's latest work, about artificial intelligence creeping further into human domains, is called "Robopocalypse: The Musical!" So fuzzy puppets AND songs. Josh Gross, the coordinator of our "Rogue Sounds" segment, is the work's playwright.

Oregon has a vibrant technology sector, so it's not like people in the state don't know their way around computers. But the state government got low marks for the utility of its websites in the recent "Benchmarking State Government Websites" report. The report's authors checked out state sites across the country, and found some pretty good ones. Just not in Oregon, which got dinged for access, security, and transparency issues. Open Oregon is a group pushing for greater state transparency.

Latin America was not a major battleground in the second World War, but it was pivotal in other ways. The region's riches in natural resources made it important for support of the war effort, and both Allied and Axis powers stayed busy in the region. As Mary Jo McConahay reports in her new book, the efforts paralled each other so closely, it was like a tango. So McConahay calls her book The Tango War: The Struggle for the Hearts, Minds and Riches of Latin America During World War II . Resources