Scientific Gossip (37-2)
Contains 100% gossip from concentrate
Planned Patenthood
It will soon be possible for parents to patent their offspring for a period of seventeen years. It will also be possible for them to copyright their children's fingerprints.
An international committee of legal scholars is
reaching agreement on the dispute over whether and how to patent living
organisms.
Look for legal action on both matters in the next year.
Killing the Bee Story
Killer bees have been terrorizing South and North American imaginations for thirty years. It turns out that the killer bees were a hoax.
It is true that the bee population of the Americas is changing. In 1956, several queen bees of the species Apis mellifera were brought from their native Africa to a Brazillian laboratory. In the late 1950's, a number of the African bees escaped. Ever since, "Africanized" bees have been spreading northward and southward. But they are not appreciably larger or more fearsome than the "more native" bees.
Twenty-five years ago, an American network television reporter visited the lab in Brazil, attached a close-up lens to his camera -- so the bees would appear much larger than their actual size — and then took a stick and thrust it repeatedly into the hive, provoking the bees into a frenzy. Thus a legend was born.
Total Quality: Maybe Not
Econometricist Norge Grover is finishing a book in which she disproves a shibboleth of modern economics: namely that the best way to protect one's position in the marketplace is to make better products than the competition. Grover argues that the opposite is in fact the case.
Schizophrenics Anonymous
Researchers at the University of Sapporo are attempting to use fuzzy logic to solve the "schizophrenics anonymous problem." This old chestnut of a mathematical puzzle can be stated in the form of an amorphous riddle: How many schizophrenics does it take?
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