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Biomimetics: Not a scratch
Sand? I spit on it
THE north African desert scorpion, Androctonus australis, is a hardy creature. Most animals that live in deserts dig burrows to protect themselves from the sand-laden wind. Not Androctonus. It usually toughs things out at the surface. Yet when the sand whips by at speeds that would strip paint away from steel, the scorpion is able to scurry off without apparent damage. Han Zhiwu of Jilin University, in China, and his colleagues wondered why.Their curiosity is not just academic. Aircraft engines and helicopter rotor-blades are constantly abraded by atmospheric dust, and a way of slowing down this abrasion would be welcome. Dr Han suspects that scorpions may provide an answer. As he writes in Langmuir, he has discovered that the surface of Androctonus?s exoskeleton is odd. And when that oddness is translated into other materials it seems to protect them, as well.Dr Han?s investigations began by scouring the pet shops of Changchun, where the university is located, for...
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The nature of humanity: What?s a man?
THE problem with understanding human uniqueness is precisely that it is unique. Though the proper study of mankind may be man, that study will yield little if there is no reference point to compare man with.That, at least, is the philosophy of Svante Paabo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig. Dr Paabo, whose work on fossil DNA was the inspiration for ?Jurassic Park?, has since become interested in human evolution. To this end, he and his colleagues have sequenced the DNA of both Neanderthal man and an Asian species of prehistoric human, the Denisovians, which Dr Paabo?s own work identified.Now he has turned his attentions to modern Homo sapiens. In collaboration with a team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Dr Paabo and his colleague Philipp Khaitovich have compared genetic activity over the course of a lifetime in the brains of humans, chimpanzees and rhesus monkeys. They have then matched what they found with what is known of Neanderthals, and think they have thus discovered at least part of the genetic difference between Homo...
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Scientific publishing: The price of information
SOMETIMES it takes but a single pebble to start an avalanche. On January 21st Timothy Gowers, a mathematician at Cambridge University, wrote a blog post outlining the reasons for his longstanding boycott of research journals published by Elsevier. This firm, which is based in the Netherlands, owns more than 2,000 journals, including such top-ranking titles as Cell and the Lancet. However Dr Gowers, who won the Fields medal, mathematics?s equivalent of a Nobel prize, in 1998, is not happy with it, and he hoped his post might embolden others to do something similar.It did. More than 2,700 researchers from around the world have so far signed an online pledge set up by Tyler Neylon, a fellow-mathematician who was inspired by Dr Gowers?s post, promising not to submit their work to Elsevier?s journals, or to referee or edit papers appearing in them. That number seems, to borrow a mathematical term, to be growing exponentially. If it really takes off, established academic publishers might find they have a revolution on their hands.A bundle of troubleDr Gowers?s immediate gripes are threefold. First, that Elsevier charges too much for its products. Second, that its practice of ?bundling? journals forces libraries which wish to subscribe to a particular publication to buy it as part of a set that includes several...
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Synaesthesia: Smells like Beethoven
What do you hear?
THAT some people make weird associations between the senses has been acknowledged for over a century. The condition has even been given a name: synaesthesia. Odd as it may seem to those not so gifted, synaesthetes insist that spoken sounds and the symbols which represent them give rise to specific colours or that individual musical notes have their own hues.Yet there may be a little of this cross-modal association in everyone. Most people agree that loud sounds are ?brighter? than soft ones. Likewise, low-pitched sounds are reminiscent of large objects and high-pitched ones evoke smallness. Anne-Sylvie Crisinel and Charles Spence of Oxford University think something similar is true between sound and smell.Ms Crisinel and Dr Spence wanted to know whether an odour sniffed from a bottle could be linked to a specific pitch, and even a specific instrument. To find out, they asked 30 people to inhale 20 smells?ranging from apple to violet and wood smoke?which came from a teaching kit for wine-tasting. After giving each sample a good sniff, volunteers had to click their way...
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Colony collapse disorder: Bee off
Looking for the cause
HONEYBEES are sensitive creatures. From time to time a hive simply gives up the ghost and vanishes. Colony collapse disorder, as this phenomenon is known, has been getting worse since 2006. Some beekeepers worry that it may make their trade impossible, and could even have an effect on agriculture?since many crops rely on bees to pollinate them. Climate change, habitat destruction, pesticides and disease have all been suggested as possible causes. Nothing, though, has been proved. But the latest idea, reported in Naturwissenschaften by Jeff Pettis of the Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, suggests that this may be because more than one factor is involved.Dr Pettis and his colleagues knew from previous reports that exposure to a pesticide called imidacloprid has a bad effect on honeybees? ability to learn things and wondered whether it might be causing other, less noticeable, damage. Since one thing common to colonies that go on to collapse seems to be a greater variety and higher load of parasites and pathogens than...
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