PEPPERELL The weeds around the vinyl-sided house are knee-high. A badly worn wooden swing-set stands in the back yard, surrounded by soda cans and other wind-blown trash.

At first glance, there are no obvious signs that toxic mold runs rampant inside the Davis family's deserted ranch home at 20 Shawnee Road. But Nancy Davis, armed with a battery of previous test results, assures that 15 species of mold live in the basement, attic and probably the walls.

ORLANDO, Fla. -- The Federal Emergency Management Agency is reporting a sharp increase in the number of mold cases in Central Florida in the last several days, according to Local 6 News.

The lack of power and recent thunderstorm flooding are preventing many properties from drying out, which is causing dangerous mold to grow indoors.

BROOKFIELD, WIS.--Sniffling, sneezing, coughing customers see salvation in the mysterious black box created by physicist Paul R. Goudy Jr. It's a mold- killing machine.

Inside what appears to be an oversize suitcase are a network of tubes, wires and metal hardware and a fan. This contraption is a cold plasma generator. It applies high-voltage electricity to ambient air, producing large volumes of ionized oxygen -- better known as ozone -- and ionized oxides of nitrogen.

Brenda Brown remembers when everything sparkled at the Ennis Francis Houses on W. 124th St. in Harlem. "It was real clean," said Brown, 43, who moved in with her children when the apartments opened nearly 20 years ago. "You could hear them vacuuming in the halls."

Now the hallways in the Section 8 affordable housing complex reek of sewage. There are no locks on the outside doors. Ceilings leak and mold mars apartment walls. The Con Edison bills for the rat-infested buildings have not been paid for months - yet the private landlord with out-of-control finances has an office phone that's used for calls to a psychic hotline, officials contend

PINE RIDGE - After living in their Pine Ridge Indian Reservation home for 12 years, Jerome High Horse's family moved out in 2002 because black mold made living conditions unbearable.

''It looked like somebody took black paint and started to paint in the corners of the walls and ran it down to the floor,'' said High Horse. ''To breathe in there was like trying to breathe with a trash bag over your head.''

The euphoria of having survived Hurricane Charley is starting to wear off. Actually, it is being eaten away by mold and mildew.

For people living with plastic tarps on roofs or no roofs at all, 2.5 inches of rain in two nights isn't a case of adding insult to injury. It's cruelty. We've got our leaks down to almost a manageable trickle. I don't know how some others in this town can cope.

Scientists have sequenced the genome of biology's most beloved mold, an orangey-pink fungus called Neurospora crassa. Neurospora has played a leading role in biological research for over sixty years. The mold came to fame in 1941, when scientists used the organism to discover that genes make proteins-a feat that earned George W. Beadle and Edward L. Tatum Nobel Prizes. Since then, the mighty mold has been used to study everything from biological clocks to gene silencing.

Now, the genome sequence represents a new milestone in the mold's scientific legacy. Scientists have mapped Neurospora's 10,000 genes, including genes never before seen in this well-studied creature. The project was led by researchers at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and included over seventy scientists from all over the world.

MARTINSVILLE, Ind. (AP) -- Judges are looking for new places to hold court because an unidentified stench has driven them out of the Morgan County Courthouse. County Commissioners closed the courthouse in the city about 25 miles south of Indianapolis for two days earlier this month so state health officials could test the air. Those tests did not reveal the source of the smell, however, and the commissioners reopened the building.

State tests have ruled out perchloroethylene, or PCE, a contaminant that has polluted groundwater south of the courthouse where a dry cleaner used to be. But there are still many theories circulating about the odor's source.

JEFFERSON COUNTY (WATE) -- Although none of the molds tested from Jefferson County High school appear to be deadly black mold, the superintendent says it produces health risks and it's got to go. "We do have mold and there's no doubt about it," says Superintendent Doug Moody. He also says it's gotten out of control.

Students agree. "It's kind of nasty, mold being on the ceiling when you're sitting there trying to do your test and it's above you," Kenton Kelly said.

Florida homeowners are having to shoulder a greater share of the repair and cleanup costs from Hurricane Charley than from any storm in state history because of policies crafted by the insurance industry and the state's politicians after the last big hurricane.

Charley, which tore across the state's midsection Aug. 13, is the first storm to bring large numbers of Floridians face to face with special hurricane deductibles designed to relieve insurance companies of thousands of dollars in losses on virtually every homeowner's claim.

I'm still working my way through Introductory Mycology, but I set it aside for this fascinating book, Medically Important Fungi - A Guide to Identification. One of the first things this book mentions is "Fungi often appear different in living hosts than they do in cultures," page 1.

In Tissue Reactions to Fungal Infection, this book has a simple and understandable explanation of how the body reacts to infection, "(i) inflammatory cells (white blood cells) migrate to the damaged area in order to remove dead tissue and the etiologic agent; (ii) damaged areas are initially repaired by the production of granulation tissue, which is composed of macrophages, figroblasts, collagen, and capillaries; and (iii) the granulation tissue is then replaced by fibrous tissue, commonly known as scar tissue."

After briefly mentioning these issues, the book gets right into identification of the various molds that can affect people. The book is divided into Part I - Direct Microscopic Examination of Clinical Specimens; Part II - Identification of Fungi in Culture; and Part III - Laboratory Technique.

Part I talks discusses identification of fungi from specimens - tissues - taken from an infected individual. There are detailed drawings showing how to identify various fungi, such as penicilliosis marneffei, and the infamous candidiasis (candidiasis, out of control, is known to women around the world familiarly as a "yeast infection.")

Part II talks about identification of fungi in a culture (for example, a petri dish). The first part talks about Filamentous Bacteria, which resembles fungi. The section includes drawings and descriptions of over 100 fungi including Candida albicans, once again the cause of candidiasis; Histoplasma capsulatum, the cause of histoplasmosis; and the really infamous Stachybotrys chartarum.

Part III is a very helpful section on laboratory procedures. It includes how to obtain tissue and blood samples and stain it for identification, and a very helpful section with over 20 different types of agar mediums.

The final section is Color Plates, and has 161 pictures of common fungi. The first 37 are of fungi taken from specimens (tissue or blood); the remainder are fungi identified from cultures.

This book is a very good reference, and easy for even a non-technical person (like me) to understand.

This is a tongue-in-cheek website with a very serious message: register to vote, and vote. The sight is named for Sarah Jessica Parker's character, Carrie, from Sex in the City. It has important information on voter registration deadlines for each state.

Refer a friend to the website, and you can be entered to win a pair of Manolo Blahnik shoes. (As much as I like Manolo Blahniks, this mention in my e- mail newsletter doesn't count as a referral, since I don't ever share the e-mail addresses of recipients of this e-mail.)