Weeds

It's like a World Series of weeds, a Hula Bowl of herbicides, with agriculture students from U.S. and Canadian universities competing to identify problems in farm fields. This year, Iowa State took top honors in the Collegiate Weed Science Contest, which tests students' abilities to identify weeds and the right chemical to kill them and diagnose herbicide failure. "They need to be able to recognize weeds when they are tiny," said James Worthington of Western Kentucky University, president of the North Central Weed Science Society. "When they get big enough that anybody can recognize them, it's too late to do anything about them."