Three interesting science news items to round out the
week:
Surviving the Winter, and
Copying Nature
Dr. Bernd Heinrich, whose work with ravens I've reported on several
times in this blog, has a guest piece in yesterday's NYT entitled Hibernation, Insulation, and Caffeination
on animals' winter survival. I've written three times on this topic,
first on frogs' self-antifreeze protection in Somewhere Someone Calls My Name,
second on the clothing of the peoples of the arctic, which imitates and
uses native animals' protective covering in The Perfect House, and last
week in my paean to birds' winter survival skills, in The Fear of
Nature. I'd love to see Dr. Heinrich take on the issues of
man imitating nature, and of our attempts to understand animal language
(see second item below). It's a very hot topic today in the sciences,
from using refraction rather than pigmentation to produce colour, as
butterflies do, to attempts at understanding and replicating other
species' methods of navigation. John Lienhard, in his NPR program The Engines of Our Ingenuity says
it best, I think:
People often ask me if invention
copies nature. The answer's a surprise. We seldom manage to copy
nature. She's too complex. Her secrets are too deeply buried. Our
forbears were once in closer touch with organic nature. They knew the
herbs of the forest and, without chemistry, they extracted medicines
and processed chemicals from them. They used nature. But they made no
attempt to copy her... We did the same thing when we learned to fly. We
couldn't
combine lift with propulsion in a flapping wing. So we gave up,
froze the wing in place, and drove the plane forward with a
propeller. It was a crude solution for a hopelessly complex
problem.
Incidentally, complete transcripts of that NPR program are available online.
Communicating with Animals
In a recent article entitled If I Could Talk to the Animals
I described a grey parrot named Alex that stunned his owners by
impatiently saying "want a nut" and then in exasperation spelling
"n-u-t" when his expectations of receiving a treat for answering his
lessons correctly were not met. Now the BBC is reporting
another grey parrot named N'kisi who does some even more remarkable
things -- inventing his own words, conjugating verbs using consistent
rules, using the correct verb tense, and even evidencing a whimsical
sense of humour. His first words on meeting Dr Jane Goodall, having
seen pictures of her before with apes, were "Got a chimp?" If I had a
spare million or two I think I'd spend it, before anything else, on
understanding animal communications and emotions. If we could learn, or
even only imagine, what other species are saying, thinking and feeling,
we could change everything. [Thanks to Aalia Wayfare at The LeftHander for catching
this]
Disappearing Ink
And finally, from the New Scientist, the first small steps towards erasable
paper. This invention, licensed by Toshiba, uses three chemicals,
the first two of which give the ink its colour, and the third reverses
the process, rendering the ink invisible and allowing the paper to be
reused. It's not a commercially viable solution for most, since an
additional piece of equipment is needed to erase the pages, and the
energy (manufacturing, processing, and human) needed by the process is
exorbitant relative to the benefits received. But it's a start.
Discarded newspaper and writing paper still makes up 35% of our
landfill sites, the process to produce it causes serious pollution, and
it consumes an ever-increasing number of trees.
The Web has lost one of its
greats. South Africa's Ivan Weltman, the founder and voice of Tudogs, the incredible free Web
software evaluation site, died after a short illness January 16th, at
the age of 67. Ivan's wife Sheina sent the following lovely and
heart-rending note to Tudogs' e-mail subscribers, which tells Ivan's
story much better than I could:
Ivan was a lovely man,
intelligent, sensitive and caring. I know you readers knew him well
because he could express himself so well in his writings and it was
important to him to be able to communicate with every one of his
readers personally. I know that he enjoyed very much chatting with many
of you about your lives, software and personal issues and where
possible to advise you as best he could. He would spend most nights on
his computer, with the TV in front of him as background to his work and
to keep him abreast of world news and foreign affairs. Sometimes when I
had time I would just sit there with him and watch a soppy love story
as he worked. He loved you, his audience, and often when he came to bed
in the early hours of the morning he would tell me of some of you who
were experiencing illness or crises in your lives, or show me the very
inventive websites, clipart or software that some of you had created.
My son Jonathan and I have decided that we will continue Ivan's work
and promise to keep you abreast of all the Gratis Software that we can
find.
When I met and married Ivan we worked together, or rather I worked for
him, in an advertising agency and we then ran our own market research
company for 17 years. When asked why he married me he always said,
jokingly, good staff are hard to find. We have had a working as well as
loving relationship all of our lives. I have been his backroom surfer
helping him find interesting sites to present to you.
Jonathan is a professional IT man, and E-Commerce Consultant and has
been in the background for Ivan for technical and backend work since
the beginning of Tudogs.
We intend to give you as close a level of professionalism and
friendship, to that which you got from Ivan, as we can.
All of us in the family want to thank you for the friendship and
constant personal interaction you had with Ivan. I know how he valued
that and kept him constantly amazed at how "interesting" and "good"
people are out there.
I have read many of your notes to him from time to time and know how
much you have enjoyed conversing with Ivan. If any of you wish to make
a contribution to the upcoming memorial section of the site be it a
special piece of your correspondence with Ivan or just a sample of how
he helped you find just the right piece of software when you needed it
please send it through to me and we will try to post them all on the
site.
Tudogs scours the Internet for useful free software, sorts it by type
and ranks it by value, including warnings about glitches, spyware and
security flaws. Most of the essential utilities I use every day were
Tudogs recommendations.
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
The Web has lost one of its
greats. South Africa's Ivan Weltman, the founder and voice of 
