Science News

As a decades-long fan of The Golden Girls , I was saddened to learn of the death of Rue McClanahan last week. In fact, I think I genuinely shed a palpable, detectable tear, which is something I can’t remember ever doing on the death of a celebrity, with the exception perhaps of Bea Arthur and Estelle Getty. It sounds rather homosexually cliché, I know, but my partner, Juan, and I have gotten into the habit of watching an episode of The Golden Girls every night before bed. And along with the other “girls,” as we call them, Rue’s character Blanche Devereaux--the libidinous southern belle with an insatiable appetite for rich cheesecake and rich men--has become something of an imaginary, smile-inducing friend in our home. Fortunately, Blanche’s carnal spirit is burned forever on our DVDs. But the news of McClanahan’s death inspired me to read more about her in real life--well, at least to expend enough finger energy to flitter over to her Wikipedia entry. I knew she’d been an outspoken advocate of gays and lesbians, as well as animals, but I didn’t realize that her support for the former went all the way back to 1971. Just a few short years after the Stonewall Riots, she co-starred in a movie set in a Greenwich gay bar called Some of My Best Friends Are … as a “vicious fag hag". [More]

By Natasha Gilbert

Crocodiles are bad long-distance swimmers. [More]

By Anna Driver and Tom Bergin

VENICE, La./LONDON (Reuters) - Shares of BP Plc gained Monday after it announced progress in containing its Gulf of Mexico oil leak but the energy giant still faced tough questions from investors and U.S. lawmakers as the spill threatened more of the U.S. Gulf coast.

Counterfeiters and money minters constantly try to outsmart each other. But money could become much harder to forge--thanks to butterfly wings.

Butterflies that flit through tropical forests often have brightly colored wings that irridesce in the sun. But it’s not pigments that create those eye-catching shades. It’s microscopic structures on the insects’ wings that reflect the light.

In the late 1960s the renowned University of Oxford physicist and mathematician Roger Penrose came up with a radically new way to develop a unified theory of physics. Instead of seeking to explain how particles move and interact within space and time, he proposed that space and time themselves are secondary constructs that emerge out of a deeper level of reality. But his so-called twistor theory never caught on, and conceptual problems stymied its few proponents. Like so many other attempts to unify physics, twistors were left for dead.

In October 2003 Penrose dropped by the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., to visit Edward Witten, the doyen of today’s leading approach to unification, string theory. Expecting Witten to chastise him for having criticized string theory as a fad, Penrose was surprised to find that Witten wanted to talk about his forgotten brainchild.

[Sound of cricket mating call.] That's a cricket love song. Male crickets rub their legs together to produce the chirp in a bid to lure females. But 64 motion-sensitive infrared cameras have revealed that male crickets don't just sing for their mates--they actively seek them out. [Tregenza et al, http://bit.ly/dkWL1U ] [More]