San Jose Mercury News

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Thousands of people in Silicon Valley are unemployed and looking for work. But for tech workers with the right skills, work is looking for them.

They have what it takes for the booming fields of social media, mobile software and cloud computing and juggle multiple job offers -- some in the six figures -- as they benefit from a tech job market that hasn't been this overheated since the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s. Internet giants like Google are competing with startups for increasingly rare talent: senior software engineers, data analysts, Web designers and application developers.

STOCKTON, Calif. -- A leisurely afternoon with the Stockton Ports featured the wonderfully corny minor league promotions. There was a furry red mascot frolicking atop the dugout, an Asparagus Race featuring fans dressed as vegetables, and a beer batter -- $2 brews if the designated batter goes down on strikes.

As an added attraction Sunday, the Ports brought in King Kong.

Yes, that was Dave Kingman--the mighty and mercurial slugger--signing free autographs for nearly two hours as part of a Father's Day promotion. (He was dressed in a casual Hawaiian shirt and khaki slacks, unlike the poor sweltering mascot.)

This week, Tiger Woods will do something he has not done since 1994, the summer before his freshman year at Stanford. He will watch the first round of the U.S. Open on television.

I was thinking about that over the weekend. Mostly, I was thinking about what Woods might be thinking Thursday when, because of a troubling knee injury, golf's national championship begins without him.

Here's one thing I think Woods might be thinking as he fiddles with the remote control: Maybe I shouldn't have played in the 2008 U.S. Open after all.

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The catastrophe that struck Japan in March was triggered by a sequence of unusual geologic events, according to new research by a team of Stanford University and University of Tokyo scientists.

The fault that generated the Tohoku-Oki earthquake did not fracture in the usual way, they report in the latest issue of the journal Science Express. Instead, it ruptured in a "flip-flop" fashion -- first breaking westward, then eastward.

As a jittery and insecure rookie, Willie Mays went 0 for 12 before finally breaking through with a home run off the great Warren Spahn.

"I'll never forgive myself," Spahn later joked. "We might have gotten rid of Willie forever if I'd only struck him out."

Nice try. Mays is still going strong as the Giants gear up for his 80th birthday celebration Friday night at AT&T Park. That's right, eightieth. That symbol of boyish enthusiasm, that ebullient icon of baseball's most glorious summers, is now the Say Hey Octogenarian.

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Next time you take a picture of a redwood tree, you might be doing more than snapping a vacation memory. You might be taking part in a massive science project to help redwoods survive into the next century and beyond.

A team of scientists and environmentalists Friday is set to announce a sweeping new citizen-science effort that aims to enlist thousands of members of the public -- armed with cell phones and digital cameras -- to build a vast new catalog of the world's redwoods.

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Missing for months, colorful flocks of flycatchers, warblers, orioles and black-headed grosbeaks are once again abundant in the Bay Area. And they've navigated with such precision -- despite lengthy journeys with no maps -- that they return to the same park, the same yard or even the same tree.

Did they hear their way home?

That's the idea behind a new theory by U.S. Geological Survey geophysicist Jon Hagstrum, whose research suggests that birds navigate by using Earth's low-frequency sound waves to identify the "address" of home.