Slow developers risk all for a meal UNDERSIZED salmon try to catch up with well-grown rivals by taking more risks when feeding. Neil Metcalfe and his team at the University of Glasgow attached electronic tags to salmon that were all the same age, but different sizes. They could then monitor when the fish emerged from hiding places to feed (Proceedings of the … News
How not to win friends FOR YEARS it was Shakespeare versus the second law of thermodynamics. But as the new millennium approaches, devotees of C.P. Snow's two cultures should surely be pondering a more contemporary clash of totems—Damien Hirst, say, versus Ian Wilmut. Or so, at least, suggests Oxford physiologist Colin Blakemore. In his presidential address at the British Association … Opinion
Life Blood on the axe THE LETTER was short and to the point. Would I be interested in analysing six flint tools from the Similaun Glacier in the Alps? It took a fraction of a second to realise this was an offer I couldn't refuse. The letter was from Konrad Spindler, director of the Institute of Alpine Studies at the … Features
Bolts from the blue IN MARCH 1998, the discovery that an asteroid dubbed 1997 XF11 was on a near collision course with the Earth provoked apocalyptic headlines around the world. A few hours later, revised calculations based on additional orbital data predicted that the 2-kilometre wide lump of rock would miss the Earth by about a million kilometres at … Inside Science
Feedback THANKS to J. Kent Harbaugh for alerting us to the authorship of the error message haiku poems we published three weeks ago (22 August) . These were sent in by several readers who found them on the Internet without knowing where they came from. It turns out they were the result of a contest by … Regulars