Brain sweat
What number is four times one-third the number that is one-sixteenth less than 33 seconds?
Verbatim
For anyone who has wondered how global warming and reduced sea ice will affect polar bears, the answer is simple – they die.
– Richard Steiner of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks on the finding that polar bears were drowning in attempts to swim ever-farther distances between melting ice sheets
Prime numbers
$2,200 – Approximate cost for a Smart Cells International gift certificate, which pays to have a newborn's umbilical stem cells harvested and stored for possible later therapeutic use
1 – Average number of new blogs created each second
1.9-2.5 – Length, in miles, of the silk contained in a single silkworm cocoon
Sources – Smart Cells International; Technorati, San Francisco; "The Sizesaurus" by StephenStrauss (1995)
Brain sweat answer
1/24
Bee and see
The brain of a honeybee has about one-thousandth the number of neurons found in a human retina, but that doesn't make the bee a mental midget.
Some research suggests that bees can count, at least up to four. Now, it seems, they can recognize human faces.
Adrian Dyer and colleagues at the University of Cambridge in England trained honeybees to associate a sucrose drink with a photograph of a particular person, according to New Scientist.
Then the researchers tested the insects' memory and recognition skills by presenting that photo along with several others not associated with any reward. Seven bees were tested. Two lost interest and flew away, but the remaining five correctly went to the target face more than 80 percent of the time, even after the reward was removed.
Dyer repeated the experiment two days later, with some of the bees still remembering the face, an indication that the insects have at least some sort of long-term memory.
Datebook
Nobel laureate F. Sherwood Rowland of UC Irvine will present a public lecture Jan. 10 at 3 p.m. in the Natural Sciences Building auditorium, Room 125, at UCSD. Rowland will discuss how scientific understanding can lead to sensible public policy. In 1995, he shared the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on the formation and decomposition of atmospheric ozone, which eventually helped lead to international rules for banning the production of ozone-destroying CFC gases.
Abstracts
Thieves of Baghdad
Matthew BogdanosBloomsbury, 302 pages, $25.95
Before Sept. 11, 2001, Bogdanos was a Manhattan assistant district attorney best known for prosecuting high-profile defendants like rapper Sean "Puff Daddy" Combs.
But he was also a former Marine and after 9/11, he went back into the service as an anti-terrorist specialist in Afghanistan. Then came the war in Iraq and Bogdanos turned to hunting down artifacts stolen from Iraq's museums.
His recounting of that effort makes for an unusual treasure hunt, fraught with colorful characters, shady dealings and the fog of war. It's also a cold-eyed and sometimes depressing look at the sordid underbelly of the international antiquities trade.
Just asking
If it's zero degrees outside today and it's supposed to be twice as cold tomorrow, how cold will it be?
Love is a many-armed thing
Squids have generally been considered poor parents, mostly because they lay their eggs on the seafloor and split, abandoning their progeny to fate.
But dramatic photographic evidence from scientists at the University of Rhode Island and the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute suggests that at least one species has an eight-tentacled grip on the notion of real parenting.
Images taken deep in Monterey Canyon off the California coast show Gonatus onyx, an abundant species of squid, transporting large pouches of 2,000 to 3,000 eggs attached to hooks under its arms. By regularly extending the arms, adult squid appear to flush water through the eggs, aerating them in the oxygen-poor waters of the deep canyon.
After a few months, mature eggs break away from the pouch and hatch, with the squidlings fending for themselves. This happens not a moment too soon for the adults, said Brad Seibel, a URI biologist, since egg-encumbered parents don't swim very well and present easier prey for hungry whales and seals.
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