Today's Globe: MacArthurs, Jordan Hospital's bills, air quality, empathy, breast cancer radiation, anti-smoking images, John Snow

Rachel Wilson, a Harvard Medical School neurobiologist who regularly does surgery on fruit fly brains smaller than a poppy seed, and John Ochsendorf, an MIT structural engineer who searches for modern design principles in Gothic churches, are among the 25 winners of the $500,000 MacArthur "genius" grants announced today. They join two other "geniuses" from New England: Marin Soljacic, a theoretical physicist from MIT who demonstrated a way to transmit electricity without wires; and Stephen Houston, an anthropologist from Brown University who studies Mayan artifacts and writings to better understand the ancient society's culture.

Jordan Hospital faces daunting debt after a $57.5m expansion was followed by drop-off in admissions, forcing its CEO to cut to bone.

The US Environmental Protection Agency says people in New England breathed easier this summer, with fewer "unhealthy ozone" days than in 2007 (fourth item).

US researchers who assessed interactions between a small group of people with lung cancer and their doctors found physicians provided little emotional support even when patients seemed to be searching for it.

Shorter, more intense courses of radiation treatment work just as well as more drawn-out therapy for early-stage breast cancer patients, researchers reported yesterday (third item).

Before New Yorkers light up, the city health department wants them to have a look at the ravaged lungs, rotting gums, and large tumors smoking can cause (second item).

Dr. John Snow, who was chief of anesthesiology for 26 years at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and later a professor of anesthesiology at Boston University School of Medicine, died of heart failure Sept. 8 at his Newton home. He was 92.