President Barack Obama will be paying a visit to Albany on Tuesday to get a look at upstate New York's flourishing high-tech manufacturing sector.

But the Times-Union's Jimmy Vielkind talked to some insiders who say Obama is in the Capital to see the governor, not just a bunch of nanotubes:

Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic political consultant, said Gov. Andrew Cuomo's lofty political standing — and whispers that he could be a presidential candidate in 2016 — are an unspoken reason for the trip.

"The President needs to win smokestack industrial states to win (another term). Albany has a population like he needs to win, and Andrew Cuomo is the kind of governor who he needs to be closer to," Sheinkopf said. While he's accelerated capital spending in an attempt to create jobs, Cuomo has held the line on government spending, negotiating austere contracts with state worker unions and cutting benefits for new public employees.

Above: The invasive Eurasian woodland plant Alliaria petiolata, more commonly known as garlic mustard, looking appropriately dramatic. Garlic mustard is most obvious in Northeastern woods around this time of year, when it is in full bloom. Photo by Flickr user Brian Hefele; published under Creative Commons license.

Call it Conservation 2.0: Citizen science is getting more and more digitally connected all the time.

Take iMapInvasives, an ambitious new project for mapping the spread of invasive species. iMapInvasives combines citizen reports from the field with larger databases maintained by state agencies and nonprofits, allowing backyard nature buffs to make real contributions to public scientific knowlege on invasives.

HealthAlliance of the Hudson Valley, the parent company that runs Kingston Hospital, Benedictine Hospital, Margaretville Hospital and the Mountainside and Woodland Pond residential care centers, is considering closing one of its two Kingston hospital campuses.

The news was announced in a press release this afternoon. The release did not say which campus HealthAlliance may close.

Until a few years ago, Kingston and Benedictine operated as separate entities -- one a secular hospital, the other a Catholic hospital run by the Benedictine Sisters. The two hospitals were consolidated under the management of HealthAlliance of the Hudson Valley in 2009.