Technology Wanted: hard facts on how volcanic ash affects jets Hmmm, what should today's tolerance be? How much volcanic ash can an aircraft safely fly through? If you listen to the organisations dealing with flight safety, you may believe it's a known quantity, backed by scientific data. Far from it. The fact is, no one has rigorously tested how different jet engines cope with different … 51¶¯Âþ
Venter: The implications of our synthetic cell ON 14 December 1967, Arthur Kornberg at Stanford University and colleagues announced that they had copied the DNA of the Phi X174 virus, producing an entity with the same infectivity as the wild virus. Though the DNA sequence in question was not known, Kornberg hoped the achievement would aid studies of genetics and the search … Opinion
Physics Magic numbers: A meeting of mathemagical tricksters Martin Gardner, who inspired the gathering we report on in this article, died on Saturday. 51¶¯Âþ consultant Jeff Hecht has written an assessment of his career on our CultureLab blog. Features
Enigma Number 1597 Next door An encyclopedia salesman was working his way along a row of terraced houses. His standard patter was to ask about the children in the household. At one house the lady who answered the door told him: "I have three children. The product of their ages is 72. The sum of their ages equals … Regulars
Those unrelated related items RANDOM correlations continue their spread across the World Wide Web – particularly through helpful suggestions of "related items". Feedback has so far concentrated on the imaginative offerings to book-seekers on Amazon.com – most recently on 1 May . Now the blight is spreading across online forums. Consider the plight of those seeking help on the … Regulars