Here are some other interesting bioscience- and non-bioscience-related contributes, selected according to my opinions : I hope you find them useful. Please give me your suggestions !

life science veterinary medicine forensic or legal medicine sports medicine injustices theories perspectives alternative medicines industrial microbiology paleoanthropology

alternative energy sources military assistive technology physics astronomy and astrophysics natural catastrophes informatics entertainment recreational mathematics

• life science
• life : the aggregate of vital phenomena; a certain peculiar stimulated condition of organized matter; that obscure principle whereby organized beings are peculiarly endowed with certain powers and functions not associated with inorganic matter. Generally, living things share, in varying degrees, the following characteristics: organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, and adaptation.
• terrestrial life
• intrauterine or uterine life : the period of life spent in the uterus; i.e., embryonic and fetal life.
• extrauterine life : the period of life spent outside the uterus
• extraterrestrial life
• vegetative life : that which is manifested in automatic acts requisite for the maintenance of the individual and the propagation of the species.
• animal life : vegetative life conjoined with the employment of the senses and with spontaneous movements.
• comparative medicine : the study of phenomena basic to the diseases of all species.
• physiatry / physiatrics / physical medicine : the branch of medicine that deals with the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of disease or injury, and the rehabilitation from resultant impairments and disabilities, using physical agents such as light, heat, cold, water, electricity, therapeutic exercise, and mechanical apparatus, and sometimes pharmaceutical agents
• psychosomatic medicine : a system of medicine which aims at discovering the nature of the relationship of the emotions and bodily function, affirming the principle that the mind and body are one, as well as emphasizing psychosocial aspects of medical care
• behavioral medicine : a segment of psychosomatic medicine focussed on psychological means of influencing physical symptoms, such as biofeedback or relaxation
• environmental medicine
• tropical medicine
• sports medicine
• rational medicine : practice of medicine based upon actual knowledge; opposed to empiricism
• experimental medicine : the study of disease based on experimentation in animals
• preventive medicine
• socialized or state medicine : a system of medical care regulated and controlled by the government, in which the government assumes responsibility for providing for the health needs and hospital care of the entire population, at no direct cost or at a nominal fee to the individual, by means of subsidies obtained by taxation
• sanitarian : a person who is expert in matters of sanitation and public health.
• doctor : 1. a practitioner of the healing arts, one who has received a degree from a college of medicine, osteopathy, chiropractic, optometry, podiatry, pharmacy, dentistry, or veterinary medicine, licensed to practice by a state.  2. a holder of a diploma of the highest degree from a university, qualified as a specialist in a particular field of learning
• physician : an authorized practitioner of medicine, as one graduated from a college of medicine or osteopathy and licensed by the appropriate board.
• physician assistant (P.A) : one who has been trained in an accredited program and certified by an appropriate board to perform certain of a physician's duties, including history taking, physical examination, diagnostic tests, treatment, certain minor surgical procedures, etc., all under the responsible supervision of a licensed physician
• Medex (Mx) [Fr. médecin extension extension of the physician] : a program that recruits former military medics for training and practice as physician assistants
• attending physician : a physician who attends a hospital at stated times to visit the patients and give directions as to their treatment.
• emergency physician : a specialist in emergency medicine
• family physician : a medical specialist who plans and provides the comprehensive primary health care of all members of a family, regardless of age or sex, on a continuing basis.
• resident physician / resident : a graduate and licensed physician receiving training in a specialty in a hospital
• attending staff : the corps of attending physicians and surgeons of a hospital.
• consulting staff : the corps of physicians and surgeons attached to a hospital who do not visit regularly, but may be consulted by members of the attending staff.
• house staff : the resident physicians and surgeons of a hospital.
• specialism : limitation of practice or study to a particular branch of medicine or surgery.
• specialization : in medicine, medical practice limited to some special branch of medicine or surgery.
• specialist : a physician whose practice is limited to a particular branch of medicine or surgery, especially one who, by virtue of advanced training, is certified by a specialty board as being qualified to so limit his practice.
• fee-splitting : the division of moneys received by a specialist, such as a surgeon, between himself and the physician who referred the patient to him
• intensivist : a physician who specializes in the provision of care in the intensive care unit
• nurse : 1. a person who is especially prepared in the scientific basis of nursing and who meets certain prescribed standards of education and clinical competence.  2. to provide services that are essential to or helpful in the promotion, maintenance, and restoration of health and well-being
• hospital nurse : one employed by a hospital.
• monthly nurse : a nurse who attends confinement cases.
• practical nurse : a person who has had practical experience in nursing care but who is not a graduate of any kind of nursing school; not to be confused with a licensed practical nurse.
• nurse practitioner,   see n. clinician.
• private duty or special nurse : one who attends an individual patient, usually on a fee-for-service basis, and who may specialize in a specific class of diseases; called also special n.
• probationer nurse : a person who has entered a school of nursing and is under observation to determine her fitness for the nursing profession; applied principally to nursing students enrolled in hospital schools of nursing.
• student nurse : a person enrolled in a basic program of nursing education.
• graduate or trained nurse : a graduate of a school of nursing; often used to designate one who has not been registered or licensed to practice
• licensed practical nurse : a graduate of a school of practical nursing whose qualifications have been examined by a state board of nursing and who has been legally authorized to practice as a licensed practical or vocational nurse (L.P.N. or L.V.N.), under the supervision of a physician or registered nurse.
• registered nurse (RN) : a graduate nurse who has been legally authorized (registered) to practice after examination by a state board of nurse examiners or similar regulatory authority
• clinical nurse specialist : a registered nurse with a high degree of knowledge, skill, and competence in a specialized area of nursing. These skills are made directly available through the provision of nursing care to clients and are indirectly available through guidance and planning of care with other nursing personnel. Clinical nurse specialists hold a master's degree in nursing, preferably with an emphasis in clinical nursing
• nurse clinician : a registered nurse, referred to as a nurse clinician or as a nurse practitioner, who has well-developed competencies in utilizing a broad range of cues. These cues are used for prescribing and implementing both direct and indirect nursing care and for articulating nursing therapies with other planned therapies. Nurse clinicians demonstrate expertise in nursing practice and ensure ongoing development of expertise through clinical experience and continuing education. Generally, minimal preparation for this role is the baccalaureate degree.
• general duty nurse : a registered nurse, usually one who has not undergone training beyond the basic nursing program, who sees to the general nursing care of patients in a hospital or other health agency.
• occupational health nurse : an especially prepared registered nurse employed by an institution to apply nursing principles and procedures for the promotion, restoration, and maintenance of optimal health of its employees as compared to a nurse who performs normal nursing functions in an occupational setting.
• office nurse : a registered nurse employed by a physician in his office to perform or to assist him in the performance of certain procedures.
• community or public health nurse / visiting nurse : an especially prepared registered nurse employed in a community agency to safeguard the health of persons in the community, giving care to the sick in their homes, promoting health and well-being by teaching families how to keep well, and assisting in programs for the prevention of disease
• district or community nurse : the name given in Great Britain to a public health nurse, from the fact that such a nurse was placed in charge of each one of the districts into which the city or community was divided
• Queen's nurse : in Great Britain, a district nurse who has been trained at or in accordance with the regulations of the Queen Victoria Jubilee Institute for Nurses.
• school nurse : an especially prepared registered nurse employed in a school system or public health agency to assist in safeguarding the health of students and to teach health practices.
• scrub nurse : one who directly assists the surgeon in the operating room.
• special nurse : 1. a private nurse.  2. a nurse who specializes in a particular class of cases.
• wet nurse : a woman who breast-feeds the infant of another.
Nursing shortages have become a permanent feature of many health systems and developed nations are increasingly dependent on overseas workers to help solve the shortages. But nurse poaching depletes poor nations of much-needed staff and leaves few incentives for rich countries to try to retain their native workers^ref.
• midwife : an individual who practices midwifery
• certified nurse-midwife (CNM) : an individual educated in the 2 disciplines of nursing and midwifery, who possesses evidence of certification according to the requirements of the American College of Nurse-Midwives
• midwifery : the practice of assisting in childbirth.
• nurse-midwifery : the independent management of care of essentially normal newborns and women, antepartally, intrapartally, postpartally, and/or gynecologically, occurring within a health care system which provides for medical consultation, collaborative management, or referral, and is in accord with the functions, standards, and qualifications as defined by the American College of Nurse-Midwives.
• nursing : the provision, at various levels of preparation, of services that are essential to or helpful in the promotion, maintenance, and restoration of health and well-being or in the prevention of illness, as of infants, of the sick and injured, or of others for any reason unable to provide such services for themselves. Sometimes designated according to the age of the patients being cared for (e.g., pediatric or geriatric nursing), or their particular health problems (e.g., gynecologic, medical, obstetrical, orthopedic, psychiatric, surgical, urological nursing, or the like), or the setting in which the services are provided (e.g., office, school, or occupational health nursing)
• paramedical : having some connection with or relation to the science or practice of medicine; adjunctive to the practice of medicine in the maintenance or restoration of health and normal functioning. Paramedical workers include physical, occupational, and speech therapists, medical social workers, pharmacists, technicians, and so on.
• practice : the utilization of one's knowledge in a particular profession, the practice of medicine being the exercise of one's knowledge in the practical recognition and treatment of disease.
• contract practice : the treatment of the members of a specified group for a lump sum, or at so much per member.
• family practice : the medical specialty concerned with the planning and provision of the comprehensive primary health care of all members of a family, regardless of age or sex, on a continuing basis.
• general practice : the provision of comprehensive medical care as a continuing responsibility regardless of age of the patient or presence of a condition that may temporarily require the services of a specialist.
• solo practice : the provision of care by a single, self-employed physician or dentist assisted only by auxiliary personnel
• group medicine : the practice of medicine by a group of physicians, usually representing various specialties, who are associated together for the cooperative diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of disease
• hospital (see also nosocomial infections) : an institution for the treatment of the sick. “An institution suitably located, constructed, organized, managed and personneled, to supply, scientifically, economically, efficiently and unhindered, all or any recognized part of the complex requirements for the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of physical, mental, and the medical aspect of social ills; with functioning facilities for training new workers in the many special professional, technical and economic fields essential to the discharge of its proper functions; and with adequate contacts with physicians, other hospitals, medical schools and all accredited health agencies engaged in the better health program.”—Council on Medical Education (CME)
• care / treatment : the services rendered by members of the health professions for the benefit of a patient

palliative care or treatment :
• primary care : the care a patient receives at first contact with the health care system, usually involving coordination of care and continuity over time
• secondary care : treatment by specialists to whom a patient has been referred by primary care providers.
• tertiary care : treatment given in a health care center that includes highly trained specialists and often advanced technology
• respiratory care or therapy : 1. the health care profession providing, under a physician's supervision, diagnostic evaluation, therapy, monitoring, and rehabilitation of patients with cardiopulmonary disorders.  2. a general term for the type of medical care provided by the members of this profession 3. the diagnostic and therapeutic use of medical gases and their administering apparatus, environmental control systems, humidification, aerosols, medications, ventilatory support, bronchopulmonary drainage, pulmonary rehabilitation, cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and airway management. Called also inhalation therapy.
• coronary care unit : a specially designed and equipped hospital area containing a small number of private rooms, with all facilities necessary for constant observation and possible emergency treatment of patients with severe heart disease.
• intensive care unit (ICU) / intensive therapy room : a hospital unit in which are concentrated special equipment and skilled personnel for the care of seriously ill patients requiring immediate and continuous attention
• neonatal intensive care unit (NICU)
• cardiovascular intensive care unit (CICU)
• subintensive care unit (SICU)
• stroke unit
• long term care (LTC)
• heart integral care unit (HICU)
• acute care for elders (ACE)
• community aged care packages (CACP)
• supported residential services (SRS)
Bibliography : Health Services/Technology Assessment Text (HSTAT) Combination Book. Bethesda (MD): National Library of Medicine (US); 2003 Oct. [free at NCBI Book Shelf !]
• room : an enclosed place in a building, set apart for specific purposes such as the performance of procedures.
• operating room : a room in a hospital equipped and used for surgical operations.
• recovery room : a hospital unit adjoining operating or delivery rooms, with special equipment and personnel for the care of postoperative or postpartum patients until they may safely be returned to general nursing care in their own rooms or wards.
• delivery room : a hospital room to which an obstetrical patient is taken for delivery.
• labor or predelivery room : a hospital room where an obstetric patient remains during the first stage of labor, i.e., from the time the pains begin until she is ready for delivery; called also labor r.
• postdelivery room : a recovery room for the care of obstetric patients immediately after delivery.
• rooming-in : the practice of keeping a newly born infant in a crib near the mother's bed, instead of in a nursery, during the hospital stay.
• nursery : the department in a hospital where newborn infants are cared for.
• day care nursery : an institution devoted to the care of young children during the day.
• crèche : a day nursery for infants
• base hospital : a hospital unit within the line of communication of a branch of the armed forces, usually in a permanent building, designed for the reception of wounded and other patients received via field hospitals from the battle front, and for cases originating within the line of communication itself.
• camp hospital : an immobile military unit organized and equipped for the care of the sick and wounded in camp in order to allow continued mobility of field hospitals or other mobile sanitary organizations.
• closed staff hospital : a hospital in which only members of the staff are permitted to treat patients.
• cottage hospital : a hospital consisting of a number of detached buildings.
• evacuation hospital : a mobile advance hospital unit within the line of communication, designed to take over the functions of field hospitals when they move away with their divisions and to supplement base hospitals in their functions.
• field hospital : a portable military hospital, manned by noncommissioned officers and men, located beyond the zone of conflict, 3–4 miles beyond the dressing stations, designed to shelter and care for wounded brought in by ambulance companies until they can be transported to the line of communications.
• health promoting hospital (HPH)
• lying-in or maternity hospital : an institution for the care of obstetric patients.
• open hospital : 1. a mental hospital, or section of a hospital, without locked doors or other forms of physical restraint.  2. a hospital to which physicians who are not staff members may send their own patients and supervise their treatment.
• teaching hospital : one that allocates a substantial part of its resources to conduct, in its own name or in association with a college or university, formal educational programs or courses of instruction that lead to granting of recognized certificates, diplomas, degrees, or other documents required for professional certification or licensure.
• voluntary hospital : a private, not-for-profit hospital; one of the major purposes of voluntary hospitals is the provision of uncompensated care to the poor.
• partial hospitalization : a psychiatric treatment program for patients who do not need full-time hospitalization, involving a special facility or an arrangement within a hospital setting to which the patient may come for treatment during the day and return home at night (day hospital or day surgery); or return at night after a day in the community to receive treatment during the evening and to remain all night (night hospital); or return at the end of the week to receive treatment and remain all weekend, resuming his normal activities during the week (weekend hospital).
• lazaretto : 1. a hospital for contagious diseases.  2. a quarantine station.
• sanitarium : an institution for the promotion of health. The word was originally coined to designate the institution established by the Seventh Day Adventists at Battle Creek, Michigan, to distinguish it from institutions providing care for mental or tuberculous patients.
Web resources : Hospitals world wide
• health maintenance organization (HMO) : a broad term encompassing a variety of health care delivery systems utilizing group practice and providing alternatives to the fee-for-service private practice of medicine and allied health professions. They are essentially prepaid, organized systems for providing comprehensive health care within a geographic area to all persons under contract and they emphasize preventive medicine.
• infirmary : a hospital or place where sick or infirm persons are maintained or treated; commonly used to denote a space or a building set aside for the care of members of a group or community; a dispensary
• hospice : a facility that provides palliative and supportive care for terminally ill patients and their families, either directly or on a consulting basis.
• learning
• mnemonics : the cultivation or improvement of memory by special methods or techniques
• hypnopedia : sleep learning; learning during sleep, as by listening to recordings.
• medical mnemonics
• MedicalMnemonics.com : a free, non-profit, online searchable database of medical mnemonics to help remember the important details.
• Medical Antiques.com : the internet resource for collecting medical, surgical, apothecary, dental, and bloodletting antiques
• braille [Louis Braille, a French teacher of the blind, 1809–1852] : a system of writing and printing for the blind by means of tangible points or dots. Blinded by an accident in his early childhood, 15 year old Louis Braille (1809-1852) invented a system of reading and writing by touch. A Braille cell consists of 6 raised dots. By arranging the dots in various combinations, 64 different patterns cam be formed. Braille, a true alphabet, is read by moving the hand from left to right along each line. Readers average about 104-125 words per minute. Some can read 250 words by using both hands.








Web resources :
• National Braille Press (NBP)
• Braille Institute of America
• International Braille Research Center (IBRC)
• Braille with Pokadot
• IndexBraille : WinBraille is a powerful braille editor for Windows
• medical transcription
• Medword
• injustices
• disparities in drug and vaccine development for diseases that mainly affect the developing world, as opposed to those that affect industrialised nations. From the time of introduction of a new vaccine in Europe or the USA, the adoption of these vaccines in developing countries takes a decade or more. For example, hepatitis B vaccine and Haemophilus influenzae type b conjugate vaccines have been used routinely for over 10 years in North America and in most European countries, with very successful control of disease, but although these vaccines have also proven highly effective in developing countries, vaccine uptake has mostly been slow. Several factors have contributed to this situation, such as insufficient information on local disease burden, and questions of programme feasibility. However, the main reason is that the poorest countries cannot afford to purchase the vaccines. In 2001, three vaccine manufacturers developed group C meningococcal conjugate vaccines in response to public health concerns in the UK, where there had been about 10,000 cases of group C meningococcal disease and 1,000 deaths during the previous decade. By contrast, no manufacturer was interested in developing a group A meningococcal conjugate vaccine for prevention of meningococcal disease in sub-Saharan Africa where, during the same period, there were more than 700,000 cases and 100,000 deaths. For virtually all diseases that largely affect poor countries, choice of drug and vaccine development is market driven, and is not based on disease burden or mortality.
• Essentialdrugs.Org
• genetically modified (GM) food. See also risks for health
• Blind feeding Filipino babies with GMOs
• transgenic soya was found in 10 of 25 organic or health food products on sale in the United Kingdom. 8 of the 10 were labelled either as 'organic', which should indicate the absence of transgenic ingredients under Soil Association rules, or explicitly as 'GM-free'. Soya is a very popular ingredient, both in organic and non-organic foods. Over 60% of processed food in a typical supermarket contains soya extracts, including vegetarian sausages and soya mince. Soya flour and unprocessed soya beans are also popular in organic and health food shops. In addition, organic meat must come from animals fed on organic crops, and many farmers use organic soya meal as feed. The Soil Association, which employs some of the most rigorous tests used by the 16 organisations licensed to hand out "organic" labels in the United Kingdom, sets the upper limit for GM material in organic foods at 0.1%, as it is technically difficult to measure contamination at levels below this. But Murphy's paper reveals that at least one product labelled by the Soil Association - an organic soya flour - contained slightly more than the allowed 0.1% of transgenic soya. Other products, such as vegetarian sausage, had up to 0.7% GM content. Almost all the soya from the USA and Argentina, two of the world's major producers, is transgenic. The world's third largest soya producer - Brazil - legalised GM varieties of the crop last September. In many countries, GM-free crops are often mixed with transgenic varieties after harvesting. And batches of soya seed sold as non-GM can contain 1-2% from transgenic varieties.
• Life scientist exodus continues from Italy from The Scientist, Aug. 25, 2003
• patents :
• The European Patent Office on May 18 2004 revoked a controversial patent on a breast cancer gene, which it issued to the US company Myriad Genetics in January 2001. The patent gave Myriad exclusive rights to any exploitation of the BRCA1 gene sequence, including diagnostics in breast and ovarian cancer. Twenty health institutions throughout Europe opposed the patent, arguing that rights to a human gene should not be owned by a private company. However the office revoked the patent only after opponents convinced it that Myriad was not the first to register the correct gene sequence
• biopiracy
• Greenpeace says the variety of wheat patented by Monsanto, the world's largest genetically modified (GM) seed company, possesses genetic characteristics originally derived from a strain known as Nap Hal used to make chapatis, the flat bread traditional to northern India. Nap Hal has less gluten than other wheat varieties, which gives it lower viscoelasticity, meaning it expands less during baking. This makes it perfect for crisp breads such as chapatis. Unilever obtained Nap Hal seeds from public seed banks and bred a variety dubbed Galatea from it. Monsanto acquired Galatea when it bought Unilever in 1998. The European Patent Office granted patent number EP445929, November 9, 1991 for the strain last May. The Unite States had issued Unilever patents regarding low-viscoelasticity wheat strains : US Patent Number 5,763,741, June 9, 1998 and 5,859,315, January 12, 1999. Greenpeace filed legal opposition to the patent at the European Patent Office on January 27, with the support of the India-based Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology and the Indian farmers' organization Bharat Krishak Samaj. "The technical features of the plants described in the patent are typical of seed which is grown normally and not allowed to be patented,” the opposition stated. “The patent owners have not added anything new to what is state of the art; they have merely described known features of wheat plants in such a way that they are supposed to look as if they are new.” The activists added that “keeping the patent would mean illegal monopolization of important genetic plant resources,” and could block cultivation of all related varieties. While the patent applies in 13 European countries as well as Japan, Australia, Canada and the United States, it was not granted in India. This means Monsanto would not have control over their new variety there, McDermott said. But the company has not commercialized Galatea, and Monsanto is planning to exit the wheat business in Europe.
• fake medicines : in Lagos, they are called gbogbo n’ises, which means “they can cure all ailments with one drug.” In Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, and other parts of francophone Africa, they are known as pharmacies par terre (roadside pharmacies). They are referred to as “chemists” in Makola, Ghana’s biggest market, and they are very conspicuous as you arrive at the City Market in Nairobi. In Lomé, Togo, they are more than “pharmacists”; they are known as docteurs de rues (street doctors), because they go beyond selling drugs. They diagnose, prescribe, and even advise families to bring their patients to a given address if the symptoms persist. These “doctors” and “pharmacists” claim to cure such ailments as malaria, tuberculosis, sexual impotence, mental illness, infertility, and HIV/AIDS. In most cases, they prescribe one drug that, according to them, is capable of curing all those maladies
• Office of Minority Health Resource Center (OMHRC)
• theories
• intelligent design hypothesis : the idea that the origin of information is best explained by an act of intelligence rather than a strictly materialistic process^ref. Some consider it an evolved form of creationism that resulted from legal decisions in the 1980s ruling that creationism can't be taught in schools. Perhaps surprisingly, many theologians are equally upset by intelligent design. "The basic problem that I have theologically is that God's activity in the world should be hidden," says George Murphy, a Lutheran theologian, PhD physicist, and author of The Cosmos in the Light of the Cross. Murphy says Lutherans believe that God's primary revelation came through Jesus Christ, and many find it distasteful that additional divine fingerprints should appear in nature. Catholics, for their part, have accepted evolution based on the idea that God could still infuse the natural human form with a soul at some point in the distant past. And even the evangelical Christians who make up the backbone of intelligent design's political supporters sometimes object to its inability to prove whether Christianity is the true religion^ref.
• baraminology : a term introduced in 1990, views biological creation as happening instantly, rather than through evolutionary descent.
Views of US teenagers (aged 13-17) :
"Just your opinion, do you think that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is..."
• a scientific theory that has been weel supported by evidences (37%)
• just one of the many theories and one that has not been well supported by evidence (30%)
• you don't know enough about it to say (33%)
• "Which of the following statements comes closest to your views on the origin and development of human beings ?"
• human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process (43%)
• God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so (38%)
• human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God has no part in this process (18%)
Support for Darwin increases with level of education : % of adults who believe evolution is a scientific theory well supported by the evidence :
• postgraduate education (65%)
• college graduate (52%)
• sample average (35%)
• some college education (32%)
• high school or less (20%)
Web resources :
• Baraminology Study Group
• IDEA clubs
• Discovery Institute Center for Science and Culture
• National Center for Science Education
• research biologists were puzzled by the fact that a wide range of ultimately related properties, such as aortal surface area in warm-blooded animals, and trunks or stems in plants, ranged in line with a fourth, rather than a third, power law. This latter law was established in 1932. This long-awaited explanation of why biology scales in four rather than three dimensions emerged during the late 1990s^ref and subsequent papers from this team showed that their theory is applicable to all life forms: analyses of data sets taken over a long period did not provide irrefutable evidence for 3/4 power scaling^ref. Practical applications of these laws are emerging. Examples include determination of correct drug doses for humans based on trials on smaller animals, and acreage needs of animals of all sizes in the wild
• in biology, the principal group of power laws relates a variety of fundamental properties to the mass, M, of the organism. Now M varies in line with the organism's volume and therefore as the cube of linear dimensions such as height. At first sight, it would seem that other geometrically based properties such as aorta diameter--and, in turn, functions such as metabolic rate (the rate at which each cell produces energy) that depend on these properties--should scale in line with the organism's volume as some third-power law. But instead, they scale in various forms of a fourth-power law, as if the organism's mass were a function of 4 rather than 3 linear dimensions^ref. The oldest and best-known power relationship is Kleiber's law^ref, devised by Swiss-American zoologist Max Kleiber in 1932. It states that the metabolic rate of individual cells scales as M^-1/4 so that the metabolic capacity of a whole organism (calculated by multiplying the total number of cells by the average metabolic rate of each cell) scales as M^3/4. If cellular metabolic rate were a function of the organism's volume, this would scale as M^-1/3 and the total metabolic capacity as M^2/3. The 1997 paper derived the quarter-power laws from the hydrodynamics and fractal geometry of the organism's branching network, in this case the blood circulation of mammals, that delivers resources to an organism's cells. Resources enter the blood stream via surfaces--the gut lining for nutrients and water, and the alveoli of the lungs for oxygen. The key point, and source of the fourth dimension, is the fact that the terminating units through which resources pass into the blood stream, and out into cells, are of fixed size independent of the mammal. Larger mammals just have more of them. Therefore, the area of exchange between each terminating unit remains the same. So, an organism's total area of exchange depends on the total number of these invariant terminating units, and these are packed into a volume, such as the lung or the gut's epithelial lining. The total area of resource exchange, comprising all the invariant terminating units, therefore scales in three dimensions. But the average distance the blood travels to take resources from the source exchange point, such as the lung, to the destination cell, also increases with the organism's size, but in a single dimension. The total blood volume is then a product of the terminating unit's total area, which scales in three dimensions, and the average distance between source and destination, which scales in one. The result is a quantity that varies in 4 dimensions, but which also must range in line with the organism's mass if the ratio of blood volume to total tissue is to remain constant. This does not immediately yield the precise quarter-power scaling, but the relationships follow from consideration of the dynamics of branching, subject to the principle that natural selection evolves efficiently by transferring resources to the blood stream and then distributing it. The theory of the quarter-power law has turned out to apply even more widely than its pioneers expected. It was not clear whether quarter-power scaling applied to such a wide range of phenomena--metabolic rate, aortal diameter--that the underlying theory had to be generalized. Consequently, the work led to a flurry of experiments and measurements showing that these quarter-power scaling laws were more ubiquitous than almost anyone expected.4 Kleiber's law scales from the largest to the smallest mammal, that is, from blue whales to shrews, which covers about 6 orders of magnitude of mass, with the same applicable to birds. But it is now known through their work and others that Kleiber's law scales right down to unicellular organisms, increasing the span of mass-magnitude order to 20, and it also applies to cold-blooded creatures, plants and trees with exactly the same power law exponent of 3/4. Even within the respiratory complex of mitochondria, West et al. found the metabolic rate to scale as a 3/4 power of mass.2,3 This extends the range of Kleiber's law to 27 orders of mass magnitude, from large trees or blue whales down to individual metabolic components at the molecular level. In effect, Kleiber's law now embraces almost all biological processes relying on distribution of metabolic resources, such as unicellular organisms and even the mitochondria within them. Kleiber's law scales from the largest to the smallest mammal, namely the blue whale to the shrew, which covers about six orders of magnitude of mass. This development created a new theoretical problem, because some of the systems now embraced by the power laws did not have anything resembling a fractal branching network, which is a branching set of connections that looks the same at different scales. This led Brown, West, and Enquist to generalize their theory to any hierarchical form of distribution in which resources are transported from a central location to all points of the system--that is, the network fills the system's space, whether this is a mammalian body or a single cell.2 The West/Brown/Enquist theory still leans heavily on fractal geometry, even though it is now applied in a virtual sense to networks that may not have any physical branches at all, such as a cell's vesicles. As pointed out earlier, some physicists, including Banavar, are unhappy that the theory must rely on the assumption that resource distribution is based on a branching hierarchy, whether virtual or not, in which supply lines divide progressively into smaller and smaller tributaries. Some argue that the laws should apply for any network that transmits resources from sources to destinations, subject to a few fundamental constraints, such as tissue density and cell size being the same for all organisms (for example, mammals) within a group. But for most biologists the point is that the case for power laws now has been established beyond all reasonable doubt. The challenge is to apply them in their research. The quarter-power laws apply equally on the scale of ecosystems, which can be regarded as resource distribution networks serving the fauna within them. Brown is working to exploit the power laws to develop a complete "Metabolic Theory of Ecology," which could be used for predictive modeling of ecosystems based on three key variables: size, temperature, and availability of critical resources. Size of the body determines the rate at which you can supply resources to an animal. The second thing is the temperature of the bath, which means environmental temperature, except for birds and mammals. These two variables, size and temperature, account for most, but not all, of the variations in a wide range of phenomena, from growth rates and life-span, to rates of molecular evolution, to rates of speciation and extinction, and the rates at which ecological interactions come in. The effects of temperature are determined by Stefan Boltzmann's law, equating chemical reaction time to e^-E/KT, where e, again, is the natural logarithm base, E is the potential reaction energy dependent upon the nature of the reaction ingredients, T the absolute temperature of the environment, and K Boltzmann's constant. The temperature law is well known, but Brown has been studying the predominant cause of the remaining ecological variation--resource availability. As oxygen and CO₂ are ubiquitous, the primary resources that can run short are water (over land), phosphorus for nucleic acids, and nitrogen for protein. A shortage of any of these reduces an ecosystem's productivity, but the question was by how much and whether any precise scaling rule analogous to the quarter-power law could be derived. The early evidence, says Brown, suggests that ecosystem productivity scales with water according to a one-to-one linear relationship. That still needs to be worked on, but it appears there is a linear scaling with water at least. That means that where water is an issue, halving its availability will halve the biomass of the ecosystem. If this is correct, then ecosystem productivity varies, with mass according to the quarter-power law, with temperature according to Boltzmann's Law, and with resource availability according to a simple linear relationship. But for warm-blooded animals, which have constant body temperature, the only relevant scaling is the quarter-power law of size, assuming there is no resource shortage. At first sight of the South African tropical savanna, there sometimes appear to be insufficient resources for the existing species within a particular habitat. Large species and small species view the world at a different scale, so that the bigger you get, the more detail you omit. This opens up opportunities for smaller species to have the leftovers of the larger ones. This finding may seem obvious, but the power law makes it possible to quantify the relationship between species and habitat sizes. Bigger species have a disproportionate need for area, greater than you would expect from their size alone. This has obvious implications for conservationists attempting to maximize the protection for species given constraints over available land area. Spanish Catchfly was once considered rare because of its narrow distribution. Deptford Pink, despite its wider distribution, is actually more rare. Power laws make such predictions possible. Another notable ecological application of power laws is in determining how vulnerable a rare species is to extinction. Put simply, a plant can be numerically rare, but common in the sense that it is found in many different locations, or it can be abundant in just one small spot. The more abundant plant might then be more vulnerable to extinction through a single event, such as building on its only habitat. This is an extreme example, but something similar happening in the United Kingdom with 2 varieties of carnation, the Deptford Pink and the Spanish Catchfly. Only the latter was listed as rare, on the grounds that it was found within only about 6 adjacent 10 km² grids within one region, East Anglia. The Deptford Pink was deemed more common because it had been spotted in about 16 cells scattered across the whole country. But the Spanish Catchfly was more abundant, by a factor of 200, because of its greater density within the 10 km grids. So, by replotting the occurrence of the two plants at a scale of 100 m² grids rather than 10 km grids, the relative rarities would be reversed. It all depends on how closely one looks. The relevance here is that plant distribution ranges with grid size according to a rule closely resembling a quarter-power law, with a slight deviation resulting from other factors. The big prize is that the power law makes it possible to predict with some degree of accuracy how a plant variety is distributed in detail at a fine level of resolution by considering sparse data at a coarser level, which is easier to obtain. If that follows a power law, or indeed any other coherent relationship, then looking at these relatively coarse scale things, you should be able to make some sort of prediction about what's happening at finer scales. The same principle should apply to animals as well as plants, although complicated by seasonal and random migration. Power laws also have potentially highly valuable applications at the level of single organisms, for example, in the pharmaceutical industry. For years, researchers have used rats to test new drugs, with dosage levels then scaled up to humans on the basis of a linear mass relationship. This leads to overdosage if the decline in cellular metabolic rate with size is not taken into account. The situation is complicated further by the fact that some drugs, such as local anesthetics, act in a small area, in which case the effective organism size is the immediate region of the injection. Drug companies are now showing interest in this potential application of power laws.
Meanwhile, the underlying mathematical debate relating to the 3/4 power scaling law remains to be settled, with the quest being to circumvent fractal geometry and develop a general scaling theory that holds for any resource network that delivers materials within some structure. But such a theory must also embrace the wide variety of biological phenomena that obey the 3/4 law.
• Jacques Benveniste, who gave the world the 'memory of water', died in Paris on 3 October 2004. His talk of witch-hunts, scientific priesthoods, heresies and 'Galileo-style prosecutions' played well with those inclined to regard science as an arrogant, modern-day Inquisition. He conjured up images of a conservative orthodoxy, whose acolytes were scandalized by a ground-breaking discovery that demolished their dogmatic certainties^ref. He was, he suggested, a Newton challenging a petty-minded, mechanistic cartesianism^ref. Back in 1988, however, Benveniste was very much part of the establishment. He was the senior director of the French medical research organization INSERM's Unit 200, in Clamart, which studied the immunology of allergy and inflammation^ref. That was when he sent his notorious paper to Nature^ref. In it, he reported that basophils can be activated to produce an immune response by solutions of antibodies that have been diluted so far that they contain none of these biomolecules at all. A talk he delivered last June was a blinding blizzard of histograms. It was as though the water molecules somehow retained a memory of the antibodies that they had previously been in contact with, so that a biological effect remained when the antibodies were no longer present. This, it seemed, validated the claims made for highly diluted homeopathic medicines. After a lengthy review process, in which the referees insisted on seeing evidence that the effect could be duplicated in 3 other independent laboratories, Nature published the paper. The editor, John Maddox, prefaced it with an editorial comment entitled 'When to believe the unbelievable'^ref, which admitted: "There is no objective explanation of these observations." Naturally, the paper caused a sensation. "Homeopathy finds scientific support," claimed Newsweek. But no one, including Benveniste, gave much attention to the critical question of how such a 'memory' effect could be produced. The paper itself offered only the suggestion, at face value almost meaningless, that "Water could act as a 'template' for the [antibody] molecule, for example by an infinite hydrogen-bonded network, or electric and magnetic fields." The idea that water molecules, connected by hydrogen bonds that last for only about a picosecond (10^-12 seconds) before breaking and reforming, could somehow cluster into long-lived mimics of the antibody seemed absurd. Other teams were subsequently unable to repeat the effect, and the independent results that the reviewers had asked for were never published. Further experiments carried out by Benveniste's team, in double-blind conditions overseen by Maddox, magician and pseudo-science debunker James Randi and fraud investigator Walter Stewart, failed to verify the original results^ref. The Nature paper was never retracted, but Maddox subsequently commented, "My own conviction is that it remains to be shown there is a phenomenon to be explained"^ref. Benveniste was unmoved by the wave of scepticism, even derision, that greeted his claims. At DigiBio, the Paris-based company he set up in the wake of the controversy, he devised another explanation for his strange results. Biomolecules, he said, communicate with their receptor molecules by sending out low-frequency electromagnetic signals, which the receptors pick up like radios tuned to a specific wavelength. Benveniste claimed that he was able to record these signals digitally, and that by playing them back to cells in the absence of the molecules themselves he could reproduce their biochemical effect, including triggering a defence response in neutrophils, which kill invading cells^ref. The questions this raises are, of course, endless. Why, if this is the way biomolecules work, do they bother with shape complementarity at all? (When I asked Benveniste this, he said something about audio earpieces being shaped to fit the ear.) How could a molecule act as an antenna for electromagnetic wavelengths of several kilometres? And how does the memory of water fit into all of this? Benveniste proposes that transmission of the signal somehow involves the 'quantum-coherent domains' proposed in a paper^ref that now seems to be invoked whenever water's 'weirdness' is at issue - for example, to explain cold fusion. The details were not, Benveniste said, his responsibility. He was an immunologist, not a physicist. But his failure to simplify his experimental system so that he could clarify the precise nature of the effects he claimed to see, or the mechanisms behind them, fell short of rigorous science. Benveniste could surely have tested his radio-transmission theory at the level of simple, cell-free molecular systems. I have found no evidence that he ever devised such experiments: he stayed at the level of cells, tissues or whole organisms, where direct cause-and-effect is hard to track and statistical tests are needed to cope with the significant responses from control samples. The talk that he and his co-workers deliver in June 2004 was a blinding blizzard of histograms. There can be no doubt that Benveniste was genuinely convinced he had chanced upon something revolutionary. It is a shame that he became isolated (he may have played a part in that), which meant that genuine enquiry into his curious findings was hampered by posturing on all sides. But the fact that it is the 'memory of water', not 'digital biology', that he will be remembered for illustrates a point that I think Jacques failed to appreciate: his work tapped into a potent and persistent cultural myth about the miraculous properties of water. And under the influence of myth, it can be hard to keep a level head.
• a handful of clued-up individuals can steer a swarm of honeybees or a school of fish in the right direction, research suggests. The finding could help engineers to deploy robots more effectively in the future. A computer algorithm has shown that animals with simple behaviour can use simple rules to make complex group decisions. And as the group becomes larger, the proportion of individuals who need to know what they are doing falls. The algorithm gives its virtual animals several rules of thumb. One is that they try to avoid becoming cut off from the crowd. Wild animals try to avoid this too : a herring will die from stress if it is isolated from its school. Another rule is that group members should avoid getting so close that they crash into one another. In addition to these opposing forces, the virtual animals are given a power of persuasion that depends on their desire to lead the group in a specific direction. Completely naive animals, with no idea of where to go, have zero power. The simulations show that even when naive and informed individuals cannot recognize one another, the novices spontaneously respond to decisions by the experts, because they follow their tendency to stick with the group. More surprisingly, the computer simulations reveal that as a group grows larger, it requires a smaller percentage of leaders. Researchers already know that a few individuals, perhaps 5% of the total, can guide a honeybee swarm. And the simulations show that a larger proportion isn't necessary: this model explains how that kind of complex information transfer can occur without requiring individual cognitive complexity^ref. The findings could help engineers design protocols to guide groups of robots operating beyond human control, such as in outer space or the deep sea. Robots could use simple collective decision-making to travel wisely in dangerous environments. To see how well the findings apply to animals with more sophisticated cognition, the researchers have begun to study human crowds. They hope it will help to explain how people behave during evacuation procedures. But the model may not apply directly to more complex animals
Web resources :
• The Virtual Library - Mathematics
• The Virtual Library - Statistics
• The Virtual Library - Complex Systems
• Cell size and organism size : mini mouse two-thirds size
• Some personal remark on the ideal cursus studiorum for researchers in medical sciences
• perspectives

Web resources :
• Governing the human genome
• industrial microbiology
• the 30-MB genome of Phanerochaete chrysosporium strain RP78 contains 11,777 protein-coding genes, including secreted oxidases, peroxidases, and hydrolytic enzymes that cooperate in wood decay. The white rot fungi are the only microbes known to efficiently degrade all the components of wood, including lignin, the most significant aromatic polymer on Earth. Only a handful of organisms are able to degrade lignin, so they're believed to be pivotal to the carbon cycle. P.chrysosporium is also used extensively in industry, for instance, for the bleaching of pulp from paper and textiles and the degradation of an array of organo-pollutants. While other filamentous fungi respond to chemical stimuli with coordinated expression of groups of genes, P.chrysosporium individually regulates individual enzyme component
• alimentary microbiology
• assistive technology has dramatically changed opportunities for students with disabilities : scientific research can be tricky at the best of times, but people with disabilities face additional challenges both in the lab and when dealing with data.
• IVEO — one of the newest assistive technologies for the blind.
• screen readers : softwares that convert what is displayed on a computer screen into either audio or a Braille output that can be read on a special keyboard.
• 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act
• WinTriangle, produced by Gardner's Science Access Project, allows a blind user to write mathematical equations, perform calculations and hear mathematical text. In its simplest form it is a scientific word processor with a specialized set of fonts representing symbols and operations that can be read by a speech synthesizer. At Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts, physicists write papers using a typesetting language called LaTeX, so David Thompson, a fellow student, wrote a software program to convert LaTeX into WinTriangle. WinTriangle is 'open-source' software, which lets users adapt and rewrite it to meet their needs. It is fairly common for assistive technologies to be modified or enhanced by their users. Gardner recently teamed up with Victor Wong, James Ferwerda and Ankur Moitra at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, who have developed software that translates colour pixels on a computer screen into piano notes. The group hopes to combine the audio software with IVEO's tactile technology to solve a particularly challenging information problem.
• touch-sensitive tablet to explore 3D images with a 'wireless' electronic pen. "When you move the pen around on the tablet it's the same as looking around on the screen. When using the tablet, Wong finds the pen is almost too sensitive — it is actually better than the naked eye and gives too much detail. In addition, there is no easy way to uncover the major features of an image without tedious, pixel-by-pixel exploration. This is where Gardner comes in. By combining IVEO's ability to display tactile maps with the Cornell team's software for converting colour into sound, users will be able to determine the boundaries of a map or graph more easily. Widespread use of these technologies requires both money and cultural adjustments : the latter is the hardest to achieve. Counsellors and teachers at all levels, from preschool through to the very critical high-school years, do not believe that students with disabilities can persist and excel in science and engineering fields. One reason is there aren't enough role models. In addition, few students, counsellors, teachers or employers know about assistive technologies. And for some people, such technology doesn't yet go quite far enough : this may be reflected in the low number of disabled researchers. In 2000, the NSF estimated that 365,500 people with disabilities were employed in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) in the United States — about 7% of the science workforce. But there are more people with disabilities in the general workforce (13%), and even the college-educated workforce (9%). There is a strong under-representation of persons with disabilities in STEM fields, especially at the PhD level
• voice-activation software : Dragon Naturally Speakin
• Griffin Shield : a navigation and communication system for motorized wheelchairs and scooters : a small video camera is attached to the rear of thewheelchair and an LCD monitor to the front. In effect, this is an electronic 'rear-view mirror', powered by the chair's battery, which can also be hooked up to a laptop for communication purposes
• deep-sea exploration
• human-operated vehicles (HOVs)
• Alvin, introduced in 1964, could dive to 4,500 metres : it has had a long and venerable career, playing a central role in collecting data for around 1,800 scientific papers of research teams across the globe. Alvin's most famous moment came in the late 1970s. While surveying Pacific Ocean ridges researchers found a whole ecosystem that was based not on energy from the sun, but on chemical energy from volcanic vents.
• remotely-operated vehicles (ROVs), operated through a cable from the support ship. 10-kilometre rings of plankton, fish clad in gooey coats, and dozens of species of squid - these are all part of a newly uncovered treasure trove of life in the deep. The Norwegian-led expedition, called MAR-ECO, journeyed to the mid-Atlantic Ridge and spent two months sampling the oceans to a depth of 4 kilometres. The 60-strong research team made some staggering and unexpected discoveries. Among the 300 fish species found was Aphyonus gelatinosus, a rare translucent bottom-dweller that covers itself in a gelatinous layer. The team also spotted around 50 species of squid and octopus, and untold plankton and corals.The plankton were marshalled by shifting currents into huge rings some 10 kilometres across. But perhaps most intriguing was the scientists' discovery of evenly spaced burrows in perfectly straight lines on a rocky outcrop 2,000 metres down. The researchers believe they were made by a crustacean, but are at a loss to explain how they were created in such a straight line, remarking that the holes look as if they were made by a giant sewing machine.
• autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) which make their own way through the oceans.
• a yet unnamed $23-million vehicle completed in 2008 will be capable of diving to 6,500 metres, giving it access to 99% of the sea floor, including the Cayman ridge in the Atlantic Ocean, which is about 5,000 metres deep. A variable ballast system will allow the vehicle to work at multiple depths during a single dive and a fibre-optic cable connected to a floating transmitter to send data back to a support ship. This will enable the sub to transmit information to the surface much faster than any existing deep-sea sub, giving teams of scientists on the support ship or elsewhere real-time access to the data and the chance to influence the work being done by the sub.
Web resources : Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
• skyscrapers : the Freedom Tower is to be the centrepiece of the rebuilt New York site and was originally designed by architect Daniel Liebeskind. It should reach 541 metres and scoop the crown for the world’s tallest building from the current record holder, the 508-metre Taipei 101 tower in Taiwan. But Manhattan is unlikely to hold the accolade for long, if at all. A residential tower called the Burj Dubai, already germinating in the Arab Emirates, is designed to top out at comfortably over 610 metres in 2008. Although it temporarily dented confidence in the world’s tallest buildings, the World Trade Center’s on September 11, 2001 collapse has not had a huge impact on the structure of these future towers. Many believe the building fell not because of flaws in its design but because of the intense heat caused by the burning jet fuel. And experts say that expecting skyscrapers to be able to withstand the onslaught of a jet plane is impractical, if not impossible. Instead, the focus is on being able to evacuate thousands of people quickly and safely in the event of a disaster, with some new designs factoring in more escape routes, security measures and fire-resistant building materials. Meanwhile, advances in technology are changing some of the ways that architects and engineers reach for the clouds. Most existing towers support the enormous weight of their 70 or more storeys through a rigid skeleton of vertical steel columns, and sometimes a sturdy concrete core in the heart of the building. But today’s skyscraper engineers are experimenting with new materials. The Burj Dubai, for example, will use super-strong concrete reinforced with materials such as microsilica, which fills the gaps between other particles and makes for a more rigid support. Super-tall buildings must also withstand the fierce winds that are present at altitude. These create small vortices, which can generate uncomfortable or even dangerous vibrations. To avoid this, architects often try to break up the outline of a building: hence the tapered 452-metre Petronas towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Sophisticated computer modelling and wind tunnels are likely to allow architects to experiment with even more flamboyant designs in future. Engineers are also reaching for fresh solutions to deal with the mind-boggling logistics of moving large numbers of people and goods into and around such buildings, such as elevators that move both vertically and horizontally, and to make the buildings more environmentally friendly. Plans for the Freedom Tower include an array of wind turbines on the roof. Solar cells and naturally lit atriums are on the cards in other buildings. So how high will skyscrapers go? Technology is unlikely to be the limiting factor : today’s building methods would allow engineers to reach far beyond any current plans; perhaps as high as 1,600 metres, except for the huge banks of elevators that would be required and the ear-popping pressure changes that those riding in them would be subjected to. Ultimately the heights we reach will be determined the egos and wealth of those behind the projects.
• scientists are not doing enough to make sure that that information is getting out of the lab to those who can use it, a meeting of environmental scientists in Washington DC heard this week. For example, scientists knew about December 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake within minutes of it happening. Yet no formal alert was sounded and the resultant tsunami killed hundreds of thousands. All 3 links of the warning chain were weak: the monitoring system in the Indian Ocean wasn't good enough; there were no communication channels to local authorities; and the public was not educated. And compared with establishing lines of communication and teaching the populace to run for high ground, setting up a few buoys is the easy part, speakers told the conference of the National Council for Science and the Environment on Thursday 3 Feb 2005. Too many times in the past the researcher kept all his work in a filing cabinet somewhere and you didn't get your hands on it until he was dead. But large projects such as the Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS) and Washington-based National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) are now trying to tailor their data to the needs of the non-scientists who might use it. These might include land managers, policy-makers and disaster workers. The environmental-forecasting community should make their data as compelling and well publicized as the Mars Rover photographs : how come the Earth doesn't get any respect? Younger scientists are being trained in communicating science to the public and see it as a rewarding part of their job
• Many people love pearls for their soft, delicate beauty. But some engineers admire mother-of-pearl / nacre—the substance of which pearls are made—for its brute strength. Evolution has designed it over ages to protect soft-bodied creatures such as sea snails. Now, researchers are trying to steal nature’s secret by investigating the material’s structure at scales not much bigger than the width of an atom. They’re hoping to use what they learn to develop better armor for soldiers, airplanes and cars. Mother-of-pearl forms the inner layer of shells of mollusks, shelled ocean invertebrates such as snails and clams. The nanoscale is where the material’s structure and properties set the foundation for its overall behavior, and its complexity at this level is “quite amazing. Nacre is composed of 2 relatively weak materials: 95% calcium carbonate, a brittle ceramic, and 5% a more flexible material made of chains of molecules, called a biopolymer. These materials are organized into a “brick-and-mortar” structure with millions of ceramic plates, each a few mm in size, stacked on top of each other like rolls of coins. Each layer of plates is glued together by thin layers of the biopolymer. Nacre’s toughness results from the way the materials are combined at different size scales. Even though the calcium carbonate is very weak and brittle on its own, one can get enormous increases in toughness this way. Replacing the weak building blocks of nacre with stronger materials—in a similar design—has the potential to yield much tougher composites for use in armor systems or structural applications like automobile panels or plane wings. The team imaged the tiny plates cut from the nacre of Trochus niloticus, a sea snail, using an atomic force microscope. Each plate was divided like a pie into separate sectors, with cylindrical beams running through the thickness of the plates, and a fine surface of bumps, called nanoasperities, which were further organized into groups. Biopolymer molecules crossed over and bound to the array of bumps. The researchers then used a diamond-probe tip a few hundred nm in size to push into a plate while measuring the resistance it offered : the tablets were both extremely stiff and strong at these length scales. The team is now studying the forces that glue the plates and biopolymer together, as well as the properties of a single biopolymer molecule. Nature uses nanoscale structural design principles to produce materials with superior mechanical properties. In many aspects, human engineers have yet to achieve the same skill. However, as nanotechnology methods advance, the creation of artificial nacre—and other kinds of high-performance armors—is becoming a more and more realistic goal. (Ortiz C, Journal of Materials Research)
• entertainment :
• recreational mathematics
• music :
• in both written text and speech, the frequency with which different words are used follows a striking pattern. In the 1930s, American social scientist George Kingsley Zipf discovered that if he ranked words in literary texts according to the number of times they appeared, a word's rank was roughly proportional to the inverse of its frequency. In other words, a graph of one plotted against the other appeared as a straight line. The economist and sociologist Herbert Simon later offered an explanation for this mathematical relationship. He argued that as a text progresses, it creates a meaningful context within which words that have been used already are more likely to appear than other, random words. Piano and jazz usic pieces show a text-like distribution, especially for the higher-ranking notes, but the strength of the relationship varies. Although all of the piano pieces have a text-like property, the atonal composition has less structure and less context; it is like a story whose characters are constantly changing. The finding implies that the reason many people find it unsatisfying to listen to atonal music is not simply because its harmonic and melodic structures are unfamiliar, but because the meaning or context of the piece is constantly changing^ref
• French composers such as Edward Elgar and Claude Debussy. The researchers avoided modern composers, because they would probably have been exposed to a range of cultures and languages. Whereas previous work has compared the range of different pitches in languages and their associated music, Patel and his colleagues looked at the size of the jumps from note to note (how variable the intervals between pitches were, not just how variable the pitches were). The intervals in French speech and music turned out to be considerably less variable than their English counterparts. In other words, classical concerts and café chatter may sound rather smoother in Paris than in London. English language and music both contain more rhythmic variation than the corresponding French forms^ref. Together, the rhythm and melody results make a strong case that language significantly affects composers. This work suggests that people internalize those patterns and express them in their music : understanding the patterns in music can help to illuminate the statistical models our brains use to digest language. Native Mandarin speakers are nearly 9 times more likely to have perfect pitch
• is appreciation of music a uniquely human trait, or does any animal with decent hearing prefer pleasant combinations of notes? Cotton-top tamarin monkeys, a species of squirrel-sized primates, have no taste for the consonant tones that mostly make up music, suggesting that musicality may be restricted to humans alone. Consonant tones are combinations of sound waves whose wavelengths are simple multiples of each other. The sounds overlap to create a smooth waveform that is pleasing to our ears. But dissonant sounds are produced when the wavelengths are very slightly different, so the 2 waves come in and out of phase, creating an unpleasant, jarring noise. For years, scientists have sought to explain why we prefer consonant sounds to dissonant ones. One theory is that our dislike of dissonance is related to the sensation of 'beats' that occur when the notes interfere. Previous research has shown that macaque monkeys and songbirds can tell the difference between consonant and dissonant sounds^ref. But the question of whether or not animals actually prefer consonant tones has been unanswered, until now. The researchers put the tamarins into a chamber shaped in a horizontal V. They played different types of sounds in either end of the chamber, and judged which the monkeys preferred based on the amount of time they spent on each side. McDermott and Hauser tested their set-up by running 2 preliminary experiments. In the first, opposite sides of the chamber played soft and loud white noise (static). The second test contrasted feeding chirps and tamarin distress calls. The cotton-top tamarins clearly favoured the softer white noise and feeding chirps, as one would expect. Next, the scientists tested whether the monkeys found consonant sounds more agreeable than clashing notes. But the animals spent equal amounts of time on the both sides of the chamber. In contrast, the humans tested by McDermott and Hauser showed a distinct liking for consonant sounds^ref. More closely related primates, such as chimpanzees, might still share some sort of musical appreciation with people. But he speculates that rather than being a result of the mammalian auditory system, our enjoyment of consonant, musical tones derives from specifically human properties of our brains.This research supports the idea that humans have a special preference for consonance, one of the most basic structural elements of music : this could account for the fact that as far as we know, only humans produce songs simply for enjoyment
• Britain is in harmony with Europe, Nordic countries fancy each others' stars, and France is out on a limb. That's the verdict of a group of physicists who have studied the much loved and loathed Eurovision Song Contest. This annual event pits musical groups from each of 20 or so European countries against one another in an orgy of kitsch costumes, unique dance routines and songs with titles such as Diggi-Loo Diggi-Ley. To non-Europeans it might seem a puzzling and even vaguely disturbing cultural phenomenon. But to the contestants, it is serious stuff. In 1974 Eurovision shot the Swedish group Abba to international fame when their song Waterloo triumphed. The 2005 contest, held in Kiev on 21 May and marking the event's 50th anniversary, will be broadcast to an audience approaching 1 billion people. But the significance of the Eurovision Song Contest goes deeper than music : it is a barometer of European nations' feelings about their neighbours, and thus as a testing ground for compatibility as the creation of a European constitution looms. In the contest, each country performs a song, which is awarded points by all the others; the one that gathers the most points overall is the winner. The system sparks bitter accusations of reciprocal voting: for example, some accuse the Scandinavian states of favouring each other. Others think that the votes reflect traditional antipathies between adjoining countries, meaning the Dutch won't vote for the Belgians. This is arguably the only major international forum in which a given country can express its opinion about another, free of economic or governmental bias. They argue that a systematic pattern in voting can be revealing and have analysed vote networks between 1992 and 2003. Each country represents a point in the network, and links between them are forged when one country awards points to another. Statistically, these networks turn out to be far from random: some countries form cliques that tend to vote in the same way and for each other. This is most evident for Greece and Cyprus, but the Nordic countries also tend to operate a block vote. Geographical proximity doesn't guarantee harmony, however: Spain generally doesn't vote the same way as Portugal. The Eurovision Song Contest is an example of an international marketplace in which players repeatedly exchange goods. In this case the goods are votes, but they could equally well be ideas, opinions, money or food. They claim to have found a measure of how close each nation feels to the rest of Europe. And to their surprise, it seems that Britain is the most 'European', despite the fact that it is an island. France, which is often thought of as a 'core' European state, shows the least compatibility. Their analysis is based on one contentious assumption: that all the songs presented are equally good, so that votes are a reflection of national taste rather than the absolute quality of the entries. However, for many aficionados, assessing the awfulness of the entries is the whole point^ref.
• Australian researchers have delved deep into the world of acoustic physics to unravel part of their country's indigenous heritage: the ancient art of playing the didgeridoo. The secret of an accomplished performance, they have discovered, is all in the voice box. The didgeridoo, an aboriginal instrument also called the yidaki, is traditionally made from a tree trunk hollowed out by termites. It can produce a huge variety of different timbres, despite it usually playing only a single note. This is because a skilled player alters the acoustics inside the mouth to set up strong resonances at certain frequencies. This alteration is done by moving the glottis, the part of the windpipe that contains the vocal cords. This enhances certain frequencies while inhibiting others, much as different vowel sounds are produced by adopting different positions for the tongue and vocal cords. Skilled didgeridoo players do this subconsciously : none of the players to whom we've spoken is aware of it. But the creation of these characteristic frequency bands, called formants, is what gives their playing expression and variety. The researchers investigated the acoustics inside experienced players' mouths by inserting a thin tube, about the size of a drinking straw, next to the didgeridoo. They played a 'probe sound' made of a range of frequencies through this tube and recorded the sound as it bounced back out, while the player was performing. By analysing this recording for frequencies that were impeded or enhanced during didgeridoo playing, the team investigated the acoustic properties of the mouth and throat. Such studies are difficult because they involve detecting the probe sound amid the noise of the didgeridoo's drone. Sound levels inside the player's mouth can reach 100 decibels, which is as loud as a chainsaw. Wolfe and his team discovered that formants are produced when the player closes the glottis, which narrows the windpipe. If the vocal tract remains fully open, as in normal breathing, the lungs absorb much of the sound. So have they discovered a fast track to expert didgeridoo playing? It will still take practice to emulate the most sophisticated players, not least because skilled playing requires a mastery of circular breathing. This involves maintaining the outward airflow through the mouth by contracting the cheeks while breathing in through the nose. Try it and you'll see how tricky it is... and that's before you start learning the repertoire of different sounds. It's easy to make a basic sound. "Then you have to learn circular breathing. Learning to make strong formants takes a while. Other techniques involve vocalizing and playing at the same time: one gets interactions between the vibrations from the lips and from the vocal cords^ref.

Web resources : University of New South Wales music acoustics
• some of the tunes are catchy, some vaguely familiar, others like nothing on Earth. There are more than a trillion trillion trillion of them, all accessible at the click of a finger. When you listen to one of the compositions created by WolframTones, an online music resource devised by researchers at Wolfram Research, you are almost certainly the first person ever to hear it. The tune is composed on the spot by a computer program that draws on the patterns explored by British mathematician Stephen Wolfram. The idea of using Wolfram's work to compose music isn't unique. But the site is perhaps the first to make it so easy to produce and listen to the musical creations; you can even download them as ring tones for your phone. In 2002, Wolfram excited intrigue and controversy when he published his book A New Kind of Science, a 1,000-page argument for why algorithmic processes based on cellular automata underlie the basic laws of physics. A cellular automaton model consists of a grid of cells that can each adopt one of several states, such as a checkerboard on which each square can be empty or occupied. The model evolves according to a set of rules that describe how the state of each cell depends on that of its neighbouring cells. Research has shown that automata can mimic natural phenomena, from snowflakes to patterns on sea shells. Wolfram has suggested that they form the basis of much more, including the fundamental physics of the subatomic world. Of particular interest are automata in which the rules lead to grid patterns that are constantly changing in a seemingly organized way, and yet are not repetitive. A classic example of this is the Game of Life devised in the 1970s by British mathematician John Horton Conway. In this program small clusters of 'live' cells seem to behave like coherent organisms, moving around a computer screen eating up other clusters or spawning offspring.  Now Wolfram and computer scientist Peter Overmann have constructed a program that converts an automaton to a musical score, assigning different pattern elements to different notes and instruments. Like the corresponding visual patterns, the scores (usually) have enough constancy to avoid descending into chaos, but enough unpredictability to remain interesting. Others have used aspects of Wolfram's early work on cellular automata to do something similar. George Lewis, a professor of music at Columbia University in New York, collaborated with experimental musician Joel Ryan in the mid-1980s to create compositions this way. Brazilian composer Eduardo Reck Miranda has even drawn on the Game of Life for his scores. What is different here is that it is made easy for just about anyone to do it, which I like very much. WolframTones produces compositions that last just 30 seconds. You can select compositions from a range of conventional styles, from 'classical' to 'country' and even 'experimental'. The program searches the automaton soundscape to find patterns that match the typical features of such styles. However, Overmann admits that this is a fairly subjective process. This aping of conventional styles actually limits the musical merit of the approach. All they're doing is modelling things on existing notions of how music goes. But is it really music? People do seem to perceive what we have as music. We've heard from many composers, both classical and pop, who want to use WolframTones in their work. He is currently working with a composer from the New England Conservatory, Boston, Massachusetts, to produce a full-length composition that will be played by live performers. Wolfram is equally interested in what this approach might teach us about music perception. It's surprising, to me at least, the extent to which different people seem to agree about which compositions they think sound good.
Web resources :
• Art Ludwig's Sound Page
• Music Universals Study
• improving scientific accuracy in films :
• American Film Institute
• Future Film Festival
• Sloan Foundation
• geology
• human activities shift 10 times as much material on the Earth's surface as all natural geological processes put together. That's the conclusion of geologist Bruce Wilkinson at the University of Michigan, who has used the geological record to estimate the earth-moving capacity of natural processes over the past half a billion years^ref. Wilkinson was inspired to calculate a natural 'baseline' for the movement of soil and sediment after reading a paper published in 2000^ref. Hooke called humans "geomorphic agents", comparing them to land-shaping forces of nature, such as rivers, glaciers, rain and wind. He reconstructed the history of human impact on the landscape from intentional ground-moving processes such as excavation and mining, as well as unintentional effects caused by erosion of cultivated land. This impact has been increasing exponentially over the course of human civilization, and suggested that we have now become arguably the premier geomorphic agent sculpting the landscape. There's no argument about it: we are 10 times more active at land-shifting than nature. The new results should help to settle an ongoing debate about the effects of human activity on soil. When natural vegetation is cleared and land is tilled for growing crops, the soil typically becomes more prone to erosion by wind and rain. But some researchers have argued that, in the USA at least, fresh soil is being formed as quickly as existing soil is being eroded, or that, even if soil is being lost overall, it's not happening quickly enough to cause a crisis. In the light of his comparison with natural erosion rates, statement is difficult to substantiate. We're losing agricultural land rapidly. According to one estimate, it takes 500 years for natural soil-forming processes to replace an inch of soil. Wilkinson based his estimate of natural soil and sediment movement on the rate at which sedimentary rocks have been formed over the past 500,000,000 years. Taking into account that such rocks are also steadily destroyed as one tectonic plate slides under another, on average the continents lose a few tens of metres thickness of sediment every million years. In comparison, human earthworks and agriculture lead to a current average loss rate of about 360 metres per million years. That's enough material to fill the Grand Canyon in about 50 years. And although the figure is rising exponentially, it's not just in recent times that human activities have rivalled the effects of nature : human-related erosion became equal to natural processes about 1,000 years ago. A large part of the problem is simply population growth. Although modern agricultural techniques have led to a decline in the amount of earth moved per person, the world's population is growing so rapidly that this outweighs the effects of such improvements.

Web resources : Humans as geologic agents: A deep-time perspective
• an international team of researchers has used particles called antineutrinos that are produced in the bowels of the Earth to estimate how much of the core's heat comes from natural radioactivity. This is the first time these elusive particles have been used to study geology. Previous work on neutrinos and their antimatter counterparts, antineutrinos, has been concerned with fundamental physics and astrophysics. The results rely on measurements of antineutrinos made at the Kamioka liquid scintillator antineutrino detector (KamLAND), which is housed in a mine underneath a mountain in central Japan. They establish neutrino science as a way to look at the deep Earth. They may also help to solve some long-standing mysteries about how hot our planet is at its core, and how long it will take to cool. For the first time we can say that neutrinos have a practical interest for other fields of science. The 87-strong team, from Japan, the United States, China and France, say the results confirm that about half of the heat inside the Earth comes from the decay of radioactive elements that produces antineutrinos^ref. The rest comes from processes in the planet's iron-rich core and from heat left over from the Earth's fiery birth 4.5 billion years ago. This heat plays a central role in the behaviour of the Earth. It causes convection (the slow churning of sluggish rock in the planet's mantle), which in turn drives the movements of tectonic plates at the Earth's surface. This drives everything from mountain formation to earthquakes and volcanism. Much of the interior of the Earth is still a mystery to scientists. "Essentially, we only know the crust of our planet," says physicist Giorgio Gratta of Stanford University in California, a member of the KamLAND team. We can drill holes a few kilometres deep, but beyond that, you simply don't have access. Most of what is known comes from studying seismic tremors passing through the planet. These can reveal boundaries between different kinds of rock. But antineutrinos produced by radioactivity in the mantle can tell researchers something about the chemistry down below. Antineutrinos have hardly any mass, and barely interact with other matter at all, so they tend to pass straight through the Earth. But they can be detected by KamLAND, where flashes of light are triggered by occasional collisions between antineutrinos and other particles in a 13-metre-wide tank filled with oil and benzene. Despite counting antineutrinos for more than two years, the researchers haven't yet spotted enough of them to make a very accurate measurement of the heat produced by radioactivity. But they hope that this will improve as they gather more data and combine them with those obtained from a similar detector called Borexino in Italy, which is scheduled to begin operations in 2006. Better data could ultimately revolutionize some areas of geoscience. I'd like to see a more precise result, but this shows it can be done. With several antineutrino detectors in operation, it should be possible to conduct a kind of chemical tomography of the Earth, measuring how the radioactive elements are distributed and therefore how uniform the mantle is. It's a revolution, but these are very difficult measurements and the detectors are very expensive. It will be 10 or 20 years before there are enough neutrino detectors to obtain firm answers to geological questions.
• in 'karst' landscapes soluble rocks dissolve to form cavities and channels. Some of these become cave systems; others might be filled with water or oil, creating aquifers and petroleum reservoirs below the Earth's surface. Most karst systems are formed when carbonic acid, the product of CO₂ dissolved in water, eats away at carbonate minerals. However, sulphuric acid (a by-product of metabolism of hydrogen sulphide by bacteria forming white mats coating the floor of the cave) can transform limestone (calcium carbonate) into gypsum (calcium sulphate, which is very soluble in ground water, and it dissolves, leaving behind a void that gradually grows bigger) : the standard, wrong explanation was that hydrogen sulphide gas, from the water of thermal springs, bubbled out into air-filled pockets and reacted with oxygen to form the sulphuric acid^ref
• molten rock pushed through the cracks between tectonic plates up to 10 times faster during the Early Cambrian than it does today. More cracks in the rocks would allow more sea water to percolate through, dissolving minerals from below the surface and then delivering enormous amounts of extra calcium to the ocean. The amount of calcium in sea water shot up between the end of the Proterozoic era (about 544 million years ago) and the early Cambrian period (about 515 million years ago) and this could have helped to drive the extraordinary diversification of species and body shapes known as the Cambrian explosion : this change allowed soft-bodied marine organisms to create hard shells or body parts made from insoluble calcium minerals. Calcium carbonate is the main component of sea-shells today, and is also used by microscopic sea creatures such as radiolarians to make exquisitely patterned 'exoskeletons'. Although hard shells and exoskeletons are generally regarded as defences that make soft organisms hard for predators to eat and digest, some researchers think these mineral shells might have originally served a different purpose. They may have been simply a way for organisms to get rid of the calcium dissolved in their tissues when its concentration became dangerously high. In other words, the shells are a form of solid waste. The formation of mineral shells might then have prompted organisms to become more diverse, making new body shapes possible, fostering new designs in predators and helping to trigger the Cambrian explosion. But not everyone thinks organisms have to be so responsive to changes in their environment : after all, marine organisms have sophisticated mechanisms for keeping their internal calcium concentrations much lower than that of sea water^ref
• the 500-metre-high dunes in China's Badain Jaran desert remain standing in the face of savage winds as they are held together by a previously undiscovered groundwater system. Although the dunes are dry on the outside, water from melting snow on Qilian Mountain, 500 kilometres to the southwest of the desert, sticks the grains together just 20 cm below the surface, allowing them to stand firm against the elements, despite the fact that the well was 17 m above the level of one of the nearby lakes. It percolates through cracks in the mountain and into layers of carbonate rock, eventually finding its way into the dune system. The dunes are surrounded by 72 lakes, with a total surface area of 23 km². But nobody suspected that there would be so much extra water inside the dunes themselves - the researchers calculate that some 500 million m³ passes through the region each year. Chinese authorities are planning a large water-diversion project near Qilian Mountain, which would shift 250 million m³ of water a year. That may now be unnecessary and taking water from the dunes could cause them to move or break apart, with potentially severe effects on the local ecosystem^ref
• dating
• Internet gives scientists methodologies for dating
• Science Connection
• Jobslide Science Dating
• intriguing differences between real-life romance and the virtual version. In normal friendships and courting, for example, people tend to gravitate towards their own type; like movie stars, popular folk hang out with other well-liked friends or lovers. On pussokram, however, well-connected people are less selective. This might be because people feel freer to go for different kinds of romantic partners under the cloak of anonymity. Ultimately, such analyses could reveal information with a practical use. Marketers and political campaigners, for example, are interested in finding out how to identify and target people with numerous contacts (called hubs), who might spread the word about a product or candidate. These people might also be more likely to pass on a sexually transmitted disease, and so be targeted with public-health information. On pussokram, it is hard to tell whether seemingly popular people actually end up with more trysts in the outside world^ref.
• the vowel sounds in your name could influence how others judge the attractiveness of your face according to a reasearch on hotornot.com. For boys, a good name will contain vowel sounds made at the front of the mouth, such as 'e' or 'i' sounds; names with fuller, rounder vowel sounds such as 'u' tend to score lower. So pat yourself on the back if you're called Ben... but if your name is Paul you might have to work harder to snare a date. The opposite is true for girls, Perfors found. Women with round-sounding names such as Laura tended to score higher than those with smaller vowel sounds. Front-mouth vowels imply smallness, but when girls are looking for mates, they don't necessarily want a super testosterone-charged guy. They want someone who will hang around and be a provider. If you are a good-looking person with a bad name you are still more attractive than an unattractive person with a good name. the cultural connotations of a name could influence how attractive people find those with such names. She asked people to rate the 'masculinity' or 'femininity' of different names, to see whether this affected subjects' scores on the website. Predictably, guys with the names deemed most masculine tended to score highest. Names were generally judged masculine because they contained strong consonants such as 'b' and 'k'. But girls scored higher when they had either a very feminine or a strongly masculine name; names judged to be somewhere in the middle scored worst. The finding seems say that guys need a rugged name to impress the ladies, whereas being a tomboy is cool for girls. Experts, including the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, have previously argued that vowel sounds are arbitrary building blocks with no intrinsic meaning.
• although it may never reach the market, a new type of dating tool could give inspiration to the romantically challenged. By attaching electrodes to regular eating utensils, inventor James Larsson has created knives and forks that can pick up on whether the person across the table feels uncomfortable or pleased, helping those who have difficulty reading signals such as body language from their date. The device analyses data from the cutlery to provide information about how their dinner companion is feeling. The system relies on electrodes to measure the skin's resistance to electric charge, like those used in lie detectors. When people feel suddenly stressed, their skin's resistance plummets, partly because any sweat released under these circumstances facilitates the movement of charge. Lie detectors have relied on this phenomenon for decades, but only now have the sensors been brought to the dinner table. When he started building the as-yet-nameless dating device in 2001, Larrson originally aimed to make the system covert. In the ideal setup, dates would not know that they held a special monitoring device in their hands while eating, but lots of wires are currently needed to connect the knife and fork to a computer monitor, so the technology has not yet achieved this secrecy. And because dates must hold both utensils to allow the small, stress-measuring current to run through their body, the device does not work with when someone eats holding only a fork. Making the electrodes work on cutlery was a challenge. Lie detectors are generally used in a controlled environment where the subject sits still. But when people eat, they constantly shift their fingers over the different electrodes on the special utensils. And they apply varying pressure as they cut pieces of food on their plate. To address the first problem, Larsson designed specialized software on the machine to which the fork and knife relay information. The program selects data from only those electrodes touching the hand at a given time and ignores the ones without contact. He has also attached strain gauges to the utensils. These run to the computer as well, preventing the system from mistaking increased pressure as heightened stress. The result is a computer that produces graphs to show when the person eating felt uncomfortable and when they were more relaxed. Because the system remains obvious, with all of its wires, it has yet to be used on a real date. But Larsson has tested the device on himself during a lunch with his mother. The graphs revealed that he felt stressed. The inventor readily concedes that the system may not help any couples get together in the near future. At the moment, its value is more playful. Hopefully there's a good dollop of humour mixed in because that's what I intended

Web resources :
• American Polygraph Association
• Dating advice for geeks
• what exactly is it that makes overhearing others' mobile phone conversations so annoying? You might imagine that it's simply a question of being riled by loud voices spouting inane drivel about people we've never heard of. But we also feel an innate need to listen when we can only hear one side of a conversation. Even if it's no louder than a regular two-way exchange, the fact that we can only hear half means that we instinctively tune in, almost as if we're expecting to join in to complete the conversation. If this idea is correct, the researchers reason, then mobile phone chatter should be no more annoying than overheard conversations where both people are present but only one voice is audible. People are fine if there seems to be a purpose to the conversation^ref. Passengers rated 2-sided exchanges as less noticeable than both kinds of single-sided conversation. The team staged the one-sided face-to-face conversations by ensuring that both volunteers walked past the victim before sitting behind him or her, to establish that two people were present. On a train there's a lot of background noise - it's not unusual that one person's voice would be obscured. Bellowing voices are  more irritating than softly spoken ones^ref.  Another factor that makes mobiles annoying is the content of conversations. Mobiles are still a relatively new invention and it will take time for people to develop an agreed etiquette. As ever with new technologies, the Japanese are leading the way. Polite mobile phone users in Japan tend to turn away and shield their conversations from others. If that fails to catch on, there's always the less genteel approach. Many theatres and train companies are considering investing in jamming devices that will thwart phone pests before they've even had a chance to assault us with their oh-so-catchy ringtone.
• April Fool's Day is one of the most light hearted days of the year, yet it stems from a serious subject—the adoption of a new calendar. Ancient cultures, including those as varied as the Romans and the Hindus, celebrated New Year's Day on April 1. It closely follows the vernal equinox (March 20th or March 21st.) In medieval times, much of Europe celebrated March 25, the Feast of Annunciation, as the beginning of the new year. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII ordered a new calendar (the Gregorian Calendar) to replace the old Julian Calendar. The new calendar called for New Year's Day to be celebrated Jan. 1. Many countries, however, resisted the change. In fact, some European countries held out for centuries (Scotland until 1660; Germany, Denmark, and Norway until 1700; and England until 1752). In 1564 France adopted the reformed calendar and shifted New Year's day to Jan. 1. However, many people either refused to accept the new date, or did not learn about it, and continued to celebrate New Year's Day April 1. Other people began to make fun of these traditionalists, sending them on "fool's errands" or trying to trick them into believing something false. The French came to call April 1 Poisson d'Avril, or "April Fish." French children sometimes tape a picture of a fish on the back of their schoolmates, crying "Poisson d'Avril" when the prank is discovered. In 1752, Great Britain finally changed over to the Gregorian Calendar, and April Fool's Day began to be celebrated in England and in the American colonies. Pranks and jokes are of course still popular on this day—not to mention the rest of the year.
• in certain contests, candidates who take their turn at the end of a sequence are consistently ranked higher than those at the beginning. The bias is evident regardless of whether the judges score each contestant immediately, or rank them all at the end. Most experiments in decision science (a relatively new, interdisciplinary field that probes the mysteries of how humans make choices) present all of the options to their subjects simultaneously. But in the real world, when choosing an apartment or meeting a stream of suitors, for example, one often sees the alternatives in sequence : the judging of World and European Figure Skating Championships which are scored step-by-step, with judges awarding points to each skater directly after their routine, and the Eurovision Song Contest, an annual jamboree in which European countries pit their finest pop songs against one another, was studied. Before 1975, judges handed out all the scores together at the end of the competition, but the event's organizers have since switched to the more televisually dramatic step-by-step method. Scores climbed as the competitions went on, with late-appearing singers and skaters getting higher marks on average. Even those early Eurovision judges who gave out marks to everyone at the end preferred later acts. Score decisions nominally made at the end of the night may actually have been made step-by-step in each judge's head^ref. The reasons for this trend are still unclear. It may be due to 'direction of comparison effects', which arise as judges focus heavily on the differences between performers^ref. If contestants are all of a high standard, as in the figure-skating championships, any unique features will probably be considered positive, and the contestant will seem better than previous ones. Of course, one might question whether the Eurovision Song Contest is an event in which all the contestants are of an impeccable standard. Although the positive unique features in each performance may push scores up in skilled competitions, other situations are rife with negative features, and so scores may well slide downhill over the sequence. Scientists routinely present the options in their experiments in various orders to factor out the effects of position, but speed-dating is enough of a logistical effort without attempting to have everyone meet each other again in a different order. From wine-tastings to the dating game, the standard procedure is to assign positions in the sequence randomly. But this doesn't eliminate bias, it merely applies the bias randomly
• stone skipping has been a competitive past time for thousands of years. The aim - to achieve the maximum number of rebounds per throw - has remained unchanged since the time of the Ancient Greeks. Jerdone Coleman-McGhee, who in 1992 skipped a stone 38 times on the Blanco River in Texas, holds the world record. To achieve the maximum number of rebounds, the angle between a spinning stone and the water should be about 20°. Spin, speed and shape are also important. A stone is more likely to rebound if it is rotating because spin stabilises the object and prevents it from falling into the water. Speedy stones are more likely to bounce than sluggish ones. A 5-cm disc approaching the water at the magic angle needs to fly faster > 2.5 m/s in order to avoid taking a plunge. Flat, round discs are ideal as their large surface area creates bounce on impact. The system may help physicists who wish to model spacecraft descent. As the Space Shuttle re-enters Earth's dense atmosphere, for example, it also bounces much like a stone^ref.
• walking :
• the porters of Nepal are famous for being the most spectacular haulers of head-supported loads in the world. They trek up and down steep mountain trails, sometimes for hundreds of kilometres, while carrying goods in a basket supported by a strap across their foreheads. Often the loads exceed the porter's own body weight. Nepalis carry loads more economically than any other group previously studied^ref. They expend less energy per load than both Westerners with backpacks and African women who carry baskets on their heads, either directly or with a strap. It is known that they usually walk with a slow pace and take frequent breaks, sometimes resting for 45 seconds out of every minute on a steep climb. But the porters are also efficient when walking at a steady pace. Perhaps they alter their gait to somehow reduce muscular work, the researchers guess, or in some other way increase their efficiency. A selection of porters carrying their loads up to a weekly market at the town of Namche was asked to walk around a flat track at various speeds while carrying several different loads. The energy expended by these individuals was determined by measuring their oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production through a mask. The team then compared the results with work on women of the African Kikuyu and Luo tribes. These women can carry head loads of up to 20% of their body weight without expending extra energy. Additionally, they carry loads of up to 60% of their body weight at a considerably cheaper metabolic cost than army recruits carrying equivalent backpack loads^ref. At light loads, the Nepalese porters and the African women were about equally efficient. But the heavier the load, the better the Nepalese became at expending minimal energy. The African women conserve energy by swinging their bodies like a pendulum^ref. But the Nepalese porters had a different gait. They didn't use the same energy saving mechanism as the African women. The team plans to study this next.

As Monty Python's John Cleese famously complained, silly walks just don't get the support they deserve. But there is probably a good reason for that: a mathematical model shows that the traditional styles of walking and running really are the most efficient ways to get around. That's despite the fact that both walking and running involve bouncing up and down. The leading theory of locomotion holds that humans and other animals should move in a way that minimizes the amount of energy they expend. So Ruina and Srinivasan were intrigued to find out why all this jiggling is more efficient than slinking along as smoothly as possible, like a waiter carrying a tray of soup. The pair created a mathematical model that reduces locomotion to its fundamentals: a certain mass, representing the body, that must be moved around on two struts, the legs, that can absorb forces and expend energy to shift the mass. They used the model to deduce the styles that require the least effort to move a mass. Walking is best at slow speeds, and running is the most efficient mode when moving in top gear. Although other models have investigated the efficiency of walking and running before, this is the first to work out the best means of locomotion from first principles. It shows that the most energy-efficient way to move along is to bounce up and down. The model also predicted a third efficient way of moving, somewhere between running and walking. The style, dubbed 'pendular running', is not generally used in the real world. It is as looking like an 80-year-old trying to run. It's like a lumbering run, maybe for a fat or out-of-shape person. When walking, each leg acts as a pendulum, swinging the body's mass from leg to leg like an upside-down version of a monkey swinging from branch to branch. As a result, each footfall generates two force peaks: one as the foot lands, and another as it pushes off again. Walking is most efficient at speeds where the body is moving slowly enough to be passed smoothly from one pendulum to the other. This explains why walking is still efficient even when though the body bobs up and down - this is simply a product of the legs' natural pendular swing. When running, the foot acts more like a ball, bouncing the body back up into the air in the same instant that it lands. Each footfall therefore generates a single force peak. At speeds where the body is going too fast to be transferred smoothly from pendulum to pendulum, the most efficient method is to bounce it along in a series of free-falling flights. Pendular running falls halfway between the two. As in running, the two feet are never on the ground at the same time. But each foot stays on the ground long enough to cause the double force peak characteristic of walking. Perhaps the reason most of us don't use this in the real world is simply because we don't need to. But some people may benefit from the odd gait. Ruina notes that his model doesn't take into account our legs' natural springiness, which would make bounce-running even more efficient. But some people, such as those who are very heavy, might lack this springiness. For them, a lolloping half-run might be the most efficient way to travel