Cover; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Staff Editor; 1 Page(s)

Table of Contents; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Staff Editor; 2 Page(s)

SA Perspectives: A Waste of Energy; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Staff Editor; 1 Page(s)

America needs a new energy policy to reduce its reliance on foreign oil, but the $26-billion measure that stalled in Congress last November clearly wasn't it. The bill was bloated with $17 billion in tax breaks intended to spur production of oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear power. Although the act would have also funded efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions - such as the Clean Coal Power Initiative - its strategy was wasteful and wrongheaded. The energy bill would have spent billions of taxpayer dollars on the development of unproven technologies that may never be adopted by the private sector.

Rather than resurrecting the failed 2003 bill this year, Congress should start afresh with a law focused on energy conservation. The energy saved through efficiency measures since the 1970s has been far greater than that produced by any new oil field or coal mine. As those measures came into effect between 1979 and 1986, the U.S. gross domestic product rose 20 percent while total energy use dropped 5 percent. Last year's energy bill would have set new efficiency standards for several products (traffic signals, for instance) and provided tax incentives for energy-efficient buildings and appliances, but the government can do much more.

How to Contact Us and On the Web; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Staff Editor; 1 Page(s)

Letters to the Editors; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Staff Editor; 2 Page(s)

October is a month with a knack for drama. Soaking hurricanes attack unsuspecting crisp autumn days. Floods sweep through one state while wildfires rage in another. And although weather is not really a reliable litmus test of public mood, the unsettled conditions experienced last fall do create a fitting theatrical setting for the reader responses to the October issue. With critical probes of socioeconomic theories, nervous nods at potential new cancer therapies, faltering faith in government offices, and even some humorous commentary on our Chinese translations, the ensemble of contributions to this month's letters column truly had it all.

In SA Perspectives ["Biotech's Clean Slate"], the editors propose the "wild thought" that good experiences with industrial biotechnology might assuage the public's fears about agricultural and medical biotechnology enough to end the "biotech impasse." Here's another wild thought: maybe the biotech impasse is not about the safety of genetically modified organisms in the first place. Maybe it stems from fears that our current risk-assessment methodology is not an adequate guide into a world where corporate entities hold ever more potent tools with ever shrinking attention to any but fiduciary responsibility.

50, 100 and 150 Years Ago; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Staff Editor; 1 Page(s)

RED FEAR - "The Fort Monmouth spy story fizzled out last month. Senator Joseph R. McCarthy concluded a series of public hearings, which he had said would 'show that there was espionage' in the Fort Monmouth radar laboratory. His parade of witnesses has failed to develop any testimony on spying. Of some 30 Signal Corps scientists suspended by the Army as a result of the McCarthy investigation, none was accused of espionage. The New York Herald Tribune writer Walter Millis reported in his column: 'This really vital and sensitive military installation has been wrecked - more thoroughly than any Soviet saboteur could have dreamed of doing it...[through] the processes of witch-hunting, sheer bigotry, cowardice, race prejudice and sheer incompetence.'"

RABBIT PLAGUE - "It is with diametrically opposite feelings that different parts of the world now look upon the two-edged phenomenon which is the subject of this article - the deadly infectious disease of rabbits called myxomatosis. Introduced deliberately in Australia three years ago, it has swept rapidly over immense areas, causing great epizootics among rabbits. In Australia the disease is hailed as a measure of salvation which is ridding the continent of its major pest; in Europe, where it broke out in 1952, it is viewed as a malevolent killer which threatens to wipe out a favorite food, game, pet and laboratory animal. To check the disease in Europe, investigators are searching for a vaccine against the myxoma virus."

Ballot Breakdown; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Wendy M. Grossman; 2 Page(s)

Even before the last chad was detached in the 2000 Florida election fiasco, discussions began about how to improve the voting systems in the 170,000-odd jurisdictions in the U.S. The Help America Vote Act, which passed in October 2002, allocates $3.8 billion to modernize voting systems across the nation. In large part, that modernization has led to the consideration of computerized voting. But although everyone agrees that punch cards must go, so far no one can agree on standards for the systems to replace them. The biggest bone of contention: finding a way to let voters check that their votes have been cast the way they intended. The solution, in fact, may lie with paper.

To develop standards that all voting machines would meet, the Help America Vote Act turned to the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). Project 1583 is the resulting effort and is intended, the IEEE summary says, to assure confidentiality, security, reliability, accuracy, usability and accessibility. To set standards, an IEEE working group first puts together a draft proposal, which it sends out for public comment. Then the draft must pass a vote by the members of the standards association, a subset of the IEEE's worldwide membership.

Not So Icy Stares; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Sarah Simpson; 2 Page(s)

For those who fantasize about a thriving human outpost on the moon, finding thick sheets of ice at the lunar poles would be like striking gold. Massive chunks could be carved out of the ground and melted for drinking, growing plants and making rocket fuel. Alas, that dreamy vision may have to be tempered. New moon scans from Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico suggest that future lunar colonists may have to make do with tiny ice crystals suspended within the lunar soil.

The Arecibo team, headed by Bruce A. Campbell of the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the Smithsonian Institution, used 70-centimeter-wavelength radar to probe up to five times as deep into the lunar surface as any of the earlier studies that found hints of ice. "We just wanted to be sure we hadn't missed anything," Campbell remarks.

When Blade Meets Bat; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Wendy Williams; 2 Page(s)

The interaction of bats and wind turbines is emerging as a major and unexpected problem in northern Appalachia. From mid-August through October 2003, during the fall migration period, at least 400 bats died at FPL Energy's 44-turbine Mountaineer Wind Energy Center on Backbone Mountain in West Virginia.

The bats apparently died by colliding with the wind turbines, but why so many animals were killed at this particular site remains a mystery. The public outcry over these numbers threatens to delay or halt construction of some of the additional several hundred wind turbines planned for the tristate region of West Virginia, western Maryland and south-central Pennsylvania.

Doping by Design; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Steven Ashley; 2 Page(s)

A furor erupted in the world of sports last fall when chemists announced that they had identified a new performance-enhancing synthetic steroid undetectable by standard antidoping tests. Scientists familiar with androgenic steroids and their illicit use in athletics were not at all surprised. "We've known about designer steroids for many years, but up to now we've never been able to prove that someone is actually making them," says Don H. Catlin, a molecular pharmacologist and director of the Olympic Analytical Laboratory at the University of California at Los Angeles. Catlin led the effort to isolate and analyze tetrahydrogestrinone (THG), the compound at the center of the storm. "The fact that we finally characterized one is certainly no reason to celebrate. I'm much more worried about the next THG out there that we haven't found yet."

That's because it is fairly easy for organic chemists to design novel anabolic steroids that standard drug tests would not detect. (Identification depends on knowing the compound's structure beforehand; THG use was discovered only because an anonymous coach sent a spent syringe to U.S. antidoping officials.) All androgenic steroids are based on a chemical structure featuring a central complex of four hexagonal carbon rings. Small changes to the molecular groups attached to the periphery of central ring complex yield new derivatives. "Nature has made thousands of steroids, and chemists can make thousands more relatively easily," Catlin comments.

Becoming Behemoth; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Kate Wong; 2 Page(s)

For the generation raised on Jurassic Park and perhaps for posterity, Tyrannosaurus rex will endure as a household name. It is the dinosaur people most love to loathe, a gargantuan, dagger-toothed monster every bit as fearsome as the fire-breathing dragons of fairy tales. Less widely appreciated is that the tyrant lizard king had modest roots. Indeed, before T. rex hit the scene, tyrannosaurs were relatively petite. Weighing one to two metric tons and standing several meters tall, these were not animals to be met in a dark alley or kept as pets. But in fact, T. rex broke the tyrannosaur mold, nearly tripling in body mass over its predecessors.

Evolutionary biologists have long pondered the factors that might have led to gigantism among theropods, the bipedal and mostly carnivorous dinosaurs. (Besides T. rex, four species in two other groups - the carcharodontosaurs and the spinosaurs - managed to evolve similarly supersize proportions.) In recent years, a few prime-mover hypotheses have emerged, attributing the growth spurt to such things as increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (leading to elevated plant productivity, which in turn could support more of the herbivorous dinosaurs that theropods preyed on). At the annual meeting of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in St. Paul, Minn., last October, Scott Sampson of the University of Utah and his colleagues outlined a more nuanced model, one that takes multiple influences into account.

LASH Out; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Phil Scott; 1 Page(s)

Today's blimps are fat, happy billboards hovering above sporting events. Tomorrow's blimps may well play a much more serious role: airborne surveillance.

U.S. Navy engineers have equipped an airship with a system known as LASH, or Littoral Airborne Sensor Hyperspectral. Basically, LASH works by detecting colors. Every object reflects light in its own unique pattern, invisible to the naked eye. LASH, developed by Science and Technology International in Honolulu, is essentially a camera that feeds the light pattern - usually in the infrared or ultraviolet range - into an onboard computer. The computer differentiates wavelengths and produces an image showing a real-time picture with enhanced color variations. "For instance, man-made camouflage is a couple of frequencies off from the surrounding natural color spectrum," says Steve Huett, director of airship advanced system development for the Office of Naval Research. "Your eyeball could never tell the difference."

By the Numbers: The Great Migration; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Rodger Doyle; 1 Page(s)

It began between 1916 and 1918, when more than 400,000 southern blacks went north; at times, entire communities and church organizations packed up and moved virtually intact to New York, Detroit, Chicago and other northern cities. During the next 50 years, net migration of blacks from the South totaled over five million, with additional millions leaving but returning after a relatively short stay. In 1900, 90 percent of black Americans lived in the South, compared with about 50 percent by 1970.

Substantial migrations had occurred before - for example, the movement to the Oklahoma Territory between 1890 and 1910 - but nothing on the scale of the mass exodus of 19161918. Northern industry, newly deprived of immigrant labor from Europe by World War I, precipitated the migration, but conditions in the South made migration possible. At the time, southern blacks were coping with the devastating effect of the boll weevil on the cotton crop, which had thrown hundreds of thousands off the land. Industrialization in the South, much of it financed by northern interests, made obsolete many black-dominated occupations, such as blacksmithing. Meanwhile importation of cheap goods from the North had eliminated local manufacturing firms and, with them, jobs. Expanding Jim Crow laws further oppressed blacks.

News Scan Briefs; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by JR Minkel, Steve Mirsky, Charles Choi; 2 Page(s)

Manufacturers of magnetic memory can pack chips pretty densely using lithographic techniques, but they will need another method to cheaply and reliably fashion nanoscale bits. In one possible approach, researchers have coaxed cobalt nanoparticles to assemble into rings capable of storing magnetic information at room temperature. The particles, which start by floating in an organic solvent mixed with surfactant, attract one another just like tiny magnets. They assemble into a spectrum of shapes, including rings less than 100 nanometers across; tuning the concentrations of surfactant and particles controls the fraction of rings formed. Building devices from the rings will require mechanically stabilizing them and integrating them with other types of nanofabrication, says lead investigator Alexander Wei of Purdue University. They might be combined with nanoscale wires, for example, to switch magnetic states, he adds. The work appears in the November 2003 Angewandte Chemie.

If you thought the annoying tug of doubt was a distinctly human trait, think again. When shown a series of images, we tend to remember the first and last ones best; ask us about the middle images, and we're inclined to throw up our hands. Researchers gave this test to rhesus monkeys, but with a twist - the choice to decline to answer. The animals tended to decline on the middle images like human subjects did. They may not feel full-blown doubt the way humans do, comments group leader John David Smith of the University of Buffalo, but he says it makes sense for higher animals to have a mechanism for mulling options in novel situations, and he would like to begin mapping which species have the ability. (Rats and pigeons don't seem to have it; dolphins may.) A special December 2003 issue of the Behavioral and Brain Sciences presents the research along with numerous commentaries.

Innovations: Micro(mechanical)phones; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Gary Stix; 2 Page(s)

In 1987 a camera attached to a microscope snapped images of tiny gears, each of which had a diameter approaching that of the proverbial human hair. The black-and-white photographs that graced the pages of national magazines at the time evoked prospects of a true-to-life Fantastic Voyage. One of the creators of the microgears was a researcher at Bell Labs, just a few years removed from a graduate degree in electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In the ensuing 17 years, the gears took a quick beeline to nowhere. The minuscule elements, producing a lot less torque than a mechanical watch part, will never power a submarine through the blood vessels on a trip to the islets of Langerhans. But the researcher, Kaigham (Ken) J. Gabriel, did go on to become a major figure in shaping the still emerging field of microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS.

Staking Claims: Working the System; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Gary Stix; 1 Page(s)

A patent is supposed to last for a predetermined period so that the know-how contained therein eventually passes into the public domain. But if it is important enough, companies will try to get around the inconvenience of an expiration date. A dispute currently in the courts illustrates just how far some will go.

The case involves a patent that one litigant calls the "fundamental technology" needed for the artificial synthesis of antibodies. Last spring MedImmune, a maker of monoclonal antibodies, sued biotechnology giant Genentech, the City of Hope National Medical Center (a research partner of Genentech) and the British company Celltech. The suit levels antitrust charges, claiming that Genentech and Celltech colluded illegally to extend a monopoly over monoclonal antibody technology for more than a decade beyond a patent's 2006 expiration date. MedImmune has also asked that a patent that prolongs the rights to the technology be invalidated and stipulates that the agreement between Genentech and Celltech has "profoundly and fundamentally altered the competitive landscape in the biotechnology industry." The making of antibody drugs is one of the most dynamic industry sectors. In 2002, for example, Genentech and its marketing partners, took in total revenues of more than $1 billion for Rituxan, an antibody-based lymphoma drug.

Skeptic: A Bounty of Science; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Michael Shermer; 1 Page(s)

The most common explanation for the Bounty mutiny pits a humane Fletcher Christian against an oppressive William Bligh. In her 2003 revisionist book, The Bounty, Caroline Alexander recasts Bligh as hero and Christian as coward. After 400 pages of gripping narrative, Alexander hints that the mutiny might have involved "the seductions of Tahiti" and "Bligh's harsh tongue" but concludes that it was "a night of drinking and a proud man's pride, a low moment on one gray dawn, a momentary and fatal slip in a gentleman's code of discipline."

A skeptic's explanation may seem less romantic, but it is more intellectually satisfying because it is extrapolated from scientific evidence and reasoning. There are, in fact, two levels of causality to consider: proximate (immediate historical events) and ultimate (deeper evolutionary motives). Both played a role in the Bounty debacle.

Insights: Talking Bacteria; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Marguerite Holloway; 2 Page(s)

It is far too early in the morning, and Bonnie L. Bassler is charging across the Princeton University campus, incandescent purple coat flying, brown curls bouncing, big laugh booming. She has come directly from the aerobics class she teaches every morning at 6:15 - "I get up at exactly 5:42, not a minute earlier, not a minute later," she says emphatically. She says most things with similar energy, and when the conversation turns to her work, she becomes, impossibly, even more dynamic. "I am not meant to be stopped in time," she laughs. "I am supposed to be a blur."

The 41-year-old Bassler - a professor of molecular biology, winner of a 2002 MacArthur Foundation genius award, and occasional actress, dancer and singer - studies bacteria and how they communicate among their own kind and with other species. Quorum sensing, as this phenomenon is called, is a young science. Until recently, no one thought bacteria talked to one another, let alone in ways that changed their behavior, and Bassler has been instrumental in the field's rapid ascension. She has figured out some of the dialects - the genetic and molecular mechanisms different species use - but is best known for identifying what might be a universal language all species share, something she has jokingly referred to as "bacterial Esperanto."

Insights into Shock; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Donald W. Landry and Juan A. Oliver; 6 Page(s)

Whatever the cause - a heart attack, a car accident, a serious bacterial infection - the glassy-eyed catatonia of a person in shock often portends death. Every year in the U.S. alone, about 500,000 people go into sudden shock, and half die from it. For millions more, it is the final stage of terminal illness. Doctors know a good deal about what causes the condition: very low blood pressure that results in dangerously reduced delivery of blood to tissues. And they know that it kills when the lack of oxygen irreparably damages the brain and other vital organs. They also have a few tools for reversing shock before it goes too far, at least in some people. But all too often treatment is ineffective, especially when a runaway infection is the trigger.

Because shock is so devastating, many investigators are aggressively trying to develop better treatments. Yet despite their initial promise, several seemingly helpful drug candidates have failed in recent years. To our great satisfaction, though, a chance discovery we made not long ago has led to a successful therapy. This agent does not cure the conditions that caused the shock, but it is already helping to treat thousands of shock victims. In addition, during the course of our research into this compound, we learned new information about the underlying mechanisms of shock. With luck, our insights and those of others may lead to further advances in treatment.

Four Keys to Cosmology; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by George Musser; 2 Page(s)

For cosmologists, it was like stepping on the brakes and feeling the car speed up, an exhilarating but disconcerting sensation that something wasn't working quite as it should.

In what is widely regarded as the most important scientific discovery of 1998, researchers turned their telescopes to measure the rate at which cosmic expansion was decelerating and instead saw that it was accelerating. They have been gripping the steering wheel very tightly ever since.

The Cosmic Symphony; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Wayne Hu and Martin White; 10 Page(s)

In the beginning, there was light. Under the intense conditions of the early universe, ionized matter gave off radiation that was trapped within it like light in a dense fog. But as the universe expanded and cooled, electrons and protons came together to form neutral atoms, and matter lost its ability to ensnare light. Today, some 14 billion years later, the photons from that great release of radiation form the cosmic microwave background (CMB).

Tune a television set between channels, and about 1 percent of the static you see on the screen is from the CMB. When astronomers scan the sky for these microwaves, they find that the signal looks almost identical in every direction. The ubiquity and constancy of the CMB is a sign that it comes from a simpler past, long before structures such as planets, stars and galaxies formed. Because of this simplicity, we can predict the properties of the CMB to exquisite accuracy. And in the past few years, cosmologists have been able to compare these predictions with increasingly precise observations from microwave telescopes carried by balloons and spacecraft. This research has brought us closer to answering some age-old questions: What is the universe made of? How old is it? And where did objects in the universe, including our planetary home, come from?

Reading the Blueprints of Creation; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Michael A. Strauss; 8 Page(s)

As late as the 1970s, cosmology, the study of the universe as a whole, was a field filled with much speculation but few hard facts. New observations and theoretical work over the past two decades have changed that dramatically. Cosmology has become a rigorous, quantitative branch of astrophysics with a strong theoretical foundation backed by abundant data. The big bang model, which states that almost 14 billion years ago the universe started expanding from a state of extremely high density and temperature, is able to explain galaxy motions, the abundance of hydrogen and helium, and the properties of the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the remnant heat from the expanding and cooling gas.

Cosmologists can now go to the next level and claim an understanding of the formation of structures in the universe. Measurements of the large-scale distribution of galaxies, as mapped by cartography projects such as the ongoing Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), are in beautiful agreement with theoretical predictions. We currently have a coherent model that tracks the growth of subtle density fluctuations laid down in the early universe to the present richness of the night sky.

From Slowdown to Speedup; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Adam G. Riess and Michael S. Turner; 6 Page(s)

From the time of Isaac Newton to the late 1990s, the defining feature of gravity was its attractive nature. Gravity keeps us grounded. It slows the ascent of baseballs and holds the moon in orbit around the earth. Gravity prevents our solar system from flying apart and binds together enormous clusters of galaxies. Although Einstein's general theory of relativity allows for gravity to push as well as pull, most physicists regarded this as a purely theoretical possibility, irrelevant to the universe today. Until recently, astronomers fully expected to see gravity slowing down the expansion of the cosmos.

In 1998, however, researchers discovered the repulsive side of gravity. By carefully observing distant supernovae - stellar explosions that for a brief time shine as brightly as 10 billion suns - astronomers found that they were fainter than expected. The most plausible explanation for the discrepancy is that the light from the supernovae, which exploded billions of years ago, traveled a greater distance than theorists had predicted. And this explanation, in turn, led to the conclusion that the expansion of the universe is actually speeding up, not slowing down. This was such a radical finding that some cosmologists suggested that the falloff in supernova brightness was the result of other effects, such as intergalactic dust dimming the light. In the past few years, though, astronomers have solidified the case for cosmic acceleration by studying ever more remote supernovae.

Out of the Darkness; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Georgi Dvali; 8 Page(s)

Cosmologists and particle physicists have seldom felt so confused. Although our standard model of cosmology has been confirmed by recent observations, it still has a gaping hole: nobody knows why the expansion of the universe is accelerating. If you throw a stone straight up, the pull of Earth's gravity will cause it to slow down; it will not accelerate away from the planet. Similarly, distant galaxies, thrown apart by the big bang expansion, should pull on one another and slow down. Yet they are accelerating apart. Researchers commonly attribute the acceleration to some mysterious entity called dark energy, but there is little physics to back up these fine words. The only thing that is becoming clear is that at the largest observable distances, gravity behaves in a rather strange way, turning into a repulsive force.

The laws of physics say that gravity is generated by matter and energy, so they attribute a strange sort of gravity to a strange sort of matter or energy. That is the rationale for dark energy. But maybe the laws themselves need to be changed. Physicists have a precedent for such a change: the law of gravity that Newton formulated in the 17th century, which had various conceptual and experimental limitations, gave way to Einstein's general theory of relativity in 1915. Relativity, too, has limitations; in particular, it runs into trouble when applied to extremely short distances, which are the domain of quantum mechanics. Much as relativity subsumed Newtonian physics, a quantum theory of gravity will ultimately subsume relativity.

Better Displays with Organic Films; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Webster E. Howard; 6 Page(s)

Before the videocassette recorder there was the movie projector and screen. Perhaps you remember your fifth-grade teacher pulling down a screen - or dad hanging a sheet on the wall, ready to show visiting friends the enthralling account of your summer vacation at the shore. Just as the film got started, the projector bulb often blew out.

Those days did have one advantage, though: the screen was light, paper-thin and could be rolled into a portable tube. Compare that with bulky television and computer screens, and the projector screen invokes more than just nostalgia. Could yesterday's convenience be married to today's technology?

The Case of the Unsolved Crime Decline; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Richard Rosenfeld; 8 Page(s)

For a short period during the closing decade of the last century, U.S. crime rates dropped precipitously. Homicide, burglary and robbery rates fell more than 40 percent, to levels not seen since the 1960s. The reduction in serious felonies per capita stunned criminologists, who have struggled to provide a satisfying explanation for such an unexpected and complex phenomenon. The research community has reached a consensus on the basic contours of the 1990s crime decline - the who, what, when and where - but still argues about the why.

Today, as crime rates are again creeping upward, it seems appropriate to examine the evidence associated with the 1990s drop and the theories put forth to account for it. Such an analysis could help society to better understand the causes underlying shifts in national crime statistics and may even be used to forestall future increases in serious offenses. In this article, I will weigh the relative merits of the leading explanations and present some suggestions for policies and experiments that could help prevent the next rise in criminal activity.

Working Knowledge: Data Driven; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Mark Fischetti; 2 Page(s)

Cars and trucks have a small, rugged box of electronics that can reveal how the vehicle was operating before a crash. Few drivers were aware that they were sitting on such hardware until last August, when police sought the box from U.S. Representative Bill Janklow's Cadillac after he hit and killed a motorcyclist in South Dakota.

Event data recorders began to be installed in U.S. passenger vehicles in the mid-1970s to deploy air bags when they detect extreme changes in velocity. Automakers gather data from boxes in random accidents to analyze which velocity deltas, stored by the boxes, caused deployment - useful for improving designs. But since 1999 the units, typically installed under the front seat carpet, now record vehicle speed, engine rpm, degree of throttle (accelerator) and brake deployment, and seat-belt engagement. Coupled with crash injury reports, the data are used to enhance performance or to help in recalls of faulty systems.

Technicalities: A Walk in the Woods; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Mark Clemens; 3 Page(s)

Congratulations! You've found it! Intentionally or not! What is this hidden container sitting here for? What the heck is this thing doing here with all these things in it?

Standing on a hillside in Lake George, N.Y., I pored over the letter left in a Tupperware container that I'd found just moments before on a rock shelf. The note explained the somewhat mischievous rules of a new high-tech sport called geocaching (pronounced "geocashing"). Flush with excitement, I read on: This container is part of a worldwide game dedicated to GPS (Global Positioning System) users. The game basically involves a GPS user hiding "treasure" (this container and its contents) and publishing the exact coordinates so other GPS users can come on a "treasure hunt" to find it. Geocaching is a relatively new phenomenon. Therefore, the rules are very simple: 1. Take something from the cache. 2. Leave something in the cache. 3. Write about it in the logbook.

Reviews: Good with Their Feet; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Blake Edgar, Staff Editors; 2 Page(s)

"Anyone who thinks that six million years of human evolution has created an optimally designed, anatomically perfect human has never looked closely at his own body," asserts biological anthropologist Craig Stanford in Upright, his brief, breezy tour through the most vexing problem (aside from language) in human origins: why we, alone among primates and all mammals, took to full-time, two-footed locomotion. Fossil evidence unearthed during the past 30 years has confirmed that bipedalism emerged long before culture, big brains, stone tools and other attributes we have upheld as uniquely ours. Bipedalism still guarantees inclusion as a hominid, a member of the human family, although that is one of the bones that Stanford has to pick in his fifth book.

Rather than harp on why bipedal humans are so unusual, Stanford, a professor at the University of Southern California, places people into a broad ecological and evolutionary perspective. He points to another group of captivating fossil creatures - dinosaurs - as nature's first experiment with erect posture. Dinosaurs came in all shapes and sizes and employed different kinds of bipedalism for different circumstances.

Puzzling Adventures: All or Nothing; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Dennis E. Shasha; 1 Page(s)

Any message can be represented as a number. For example, the word "meet" in "Let's meet at the corner of Constitution and Lake" would be represented in most computers by 109 101 101 116 in decimal, using the encoding known as ASCII.

Suppose you want to send a secret directive - perhaps a rendezvous time and location - via five couriers, but you fear that one or two will be caught. You therefore want to spread the message among the couriers such that any three of them can together reconstruct it but two or fewer cannot.

Anti Gravity: It Is High, It Is Far; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Steve Mirsky; 1 Page(s)

As has been said often in these pages, there's a clear and present need for better math and science education in this nation. One obvious place for improvement in our math and science skills can be found among the hosts of and callers to the country's many sports talk radio programs.

Recently I was listening to a show on which the host contended that the Boston Red Sox's payroll had swelled to the point where Sox fans couldn't complain that the New York Yankees' even larger payroll gave the Yankees any advantage. A Boston caller disagreed, saying, "The Red Sox payroll is only $120 million, and the Yankees is $180 million. You know what percentage $120 million is of $180 million? Seventy-five percent." The host did not dissuade the caller. This display came from two grown men who spend an inordinate amount of their time calculating batting averages.

Ask the Experts; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Staff Editor; 1 Page(s)

The exact mechanism by which exercise augments strength remains unclear, but its basic principles are understood. Two processes appear to be involved: hypertrophy, or the enlargement of cells, and neural adaptations that enhance nerve-muscle interaction.

Muscle cells subjected to regular bouts of exercise, followed by periods of rest that include a sufficient intake of dietary protein, undergo hypertrophy. (This should not be confused with short-term swelling resulting from water uptake into cells.) Improved muscle protein synthesis and incorporation of these proteins into cells cause the muscle-building effect. When a muscle cell is activated by its nerve cell, the interaction of the proteins responsible for muscle contraction - actin and myosin - generates force via changes in protein structure called power strokes. The total force generated depends on the sum of all the power strokes occurring simultaneously within all the cells of a muscle. Because more potential power strokes accompany an increased presence of actin and myosin, the muscle can exhibit greater strength of contraction. In addition, hypertrophy is aided by certain hormones and has a strong genetic component.

Fuzzy Logic; February 2004; Scientific American Magazine; by Roz Chast; 1 Page(s)