popular science

Next week literally thousands of Tennesseans will line up at bookstores (and a Sam's Club) to get autographed copies of "The Bone Thief." If Dr. Bill Bass stayed up that late, the Knoxville stores could probably draw big crowds to midnight book release parties like they used to for Harry Potter. The Bone Zones team has set a goal of reaching The New York Times bestseller list with the newest Body Farm novel.

Susan Seals from Bone Zones informed me that Dr. Bass will be attending most but not all of the signings. Jon Jefferson will do some of them solo. If your heart is set on meeting the famed anthropologist, double check Susan's schedule against the HarperCollins schedule before standing in line. Susan is working on a special on-air opportunity for me to give to a few lucky fans who will be going to the Books-A-Million event in Oak Ridge on Thursday, March 25.

The folks at HarperCollins sent me some bullet points related to the story and a link to a short video that Jefferson & Bass had to go shoot the same day they recorded a radio interview with me. The video has lots of bones and a corpse or two.

• Currently more than 100,000 people in the United Stares are on waiting lists for organ transplants
• More than 100 of them die every week while waiting
• Selling human organs and tissues on the black market to desperate buyers can be highly lucrative
• Hand transplantation reflects a grim reality of war: these days, most U.S. hand amputees are soldiers, injured by improvised explosives in Iraq
• Sadly, hand trauma’s other victims include thousands of children, maimed by land mines in war zones around the world