The Insects. Peter Farb and the editors of Life. New York: Time Inc., 1962. 192 pp. $4.00.

Excerpt: It is a pleasant surprise to find a book that can effectively communicate much information about insects to the lay public, amateur entomologist, and professional entomologist alike. In straight-forward language the author gives genuine insight into the morphology, physiology, behavior, evolution, and adaptation of insects. These areas are not treated as unrelated topics but are skillfully blended into a meaningful whole. The text is supported liberally with pertinent facts, clear drawings, and many photographs of remarkable quality. The lack of obvious mistakes indicates that editing has been carried out carefully

Food Plants of Some Adult Sphinx Moths (Lepidoptera: Sphingidae)

Excerpt: While food plants of many species of sphinx moth larvae are well known, food plants of the adults are not. Many observations of the feeding habits of adult sphinx moths undoubtedly have been made, but much of the information is probably resting in the field notebooks and memories of the observers. To my knowledge no summary of known feeding information has been presented previously for American Sphingidae. A rather thorough list of food plants for adult European sphinx moths has been published by Wahlgren (1941). This list also includes other moth families as well and it can be a useful reference for many workers

The Nuclear Imaging Uncertainty Principle. Do Nuclear Cameras Really Work?

The introduction of the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle and Nuclear Cardiology occurred simultaneously in 1925-1927. Thirty years later the Anger gamma camera would allow for a more sophisticated radioactive isotope counting to determine the presence or absence of disease. When employed with technetium-99m isotopes, ischemic heart disease can be inferred by differences in visual appearance of cardiac images. These gestalts of imaging results have been separated from the quantitative information recorded by the cameras computer. We investigated whether current camera and computer systems are sophisticated enough to quantify differences between images to be clinically relevant. Our study demonstrated that efforts to "sharpen" image appearance does so at a reduction in "accuracy". Like Heisenberg, this work shows that one cannot know the exact location AND the amount of activity simultaneously and that a decision must be made for accuracy over image sharpness if one is to truly quantify differences in isotope concentration between images

Helminths in the gastrointestinal tract 1 as modulators of immunity and pathology

Helminth parasites are highly prevalent in many low- and middle-income countries, in which inflammatory bowel disease and other immunopathologies are less frequent than in the developed world. Many of the most common helminths establish in the gastrointestinal tract, and can exert counter-inflammatory influences on the host immune system. For these reasons, interest has arisen in how parasites may ameliorate intestinal inflammation and whether these organisms, or products they release, could offer future therapies for immune disorders. In this review, we discuss interactions between helminth parasites and the mucosal immune system, and progress made towards identifying mechanisms and molecular mediators through which it may be possible to attenuate pathology in the intestinal tract

Gluinos condensing at the CCNI: 4096 CPUs weigh in

We report preliminary results of lattice super-Yang-Mills computations using domain wall fermions, performed at an actual rate of 1000 Gflop/s, over the course of six months, using two BlueGene/L racks at Rensselaer's CCNI supercomputing center. This has allowed us to compute the gluino condensate and string tension over a wide range of lattice parameters, setting the stage for continuum, chiral extrapolations.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figures, talk given at "Continuous Advances in QCD 2008," Fine Theoretical Physics Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN, May 15-18, 2008; v2: reference adde

The Role of Strategy Statements

Under the terms of the Public Service Management Act, 1997, there is a statutory requirement on all government departments and offices to produce a strategy statement once every three years, or within six months of the appointment of a new minister. Strategy statements must set out the key objectives, outputs and related strategies (including the use of resources) of the department or office concerned. They are seen as a central element in the development of a strategic management process in the Irish civil service. This report aims to review progress to date with the formulation and implementation of strategy statements. In particular, an assessment is made of the first two sets of strategy statements, published in 1996 and 1998. Lessons are drawn from this experience to guide future practice. The research framework established to facilitate the review focuses on three elements: (a) the content of strategy statements; (b) the process by which statements are derived and implemented; and (c) the impacts and linkages which strategy statements are intended to secure in practice