From the MIT news office: It's a bug's life: MIT team tells moving tale. This is news of David Hu's thesis on meniscus-climbing insects. You can't swim or climb up a meniscus by normal means, it being near-frictionless, so these insects neatly create their own local meniscus and propel themselves by the resultant inter-meniscus forces.

This is an oldish story, but worth reading anyway: The Throat Singers of Tuva, a September 1999 Scientific American piece on the singing technique of 'overtoning' - generating dual pitches by resonance harmonics in the vocal tract. If you have popups blocked, here's the sidebar linking to sound samples; this track by master throat-singer Kaigal-ool Khovalyg is especially impressive. There are many other sites on the topic - far too many, unfortunately, latching on to it as a New Age scam by those claiming therapeutic value to singing weird noises at you. But Kiva's site, one of the sensible ones, is worth checking out for its good set of links for musical practitioners, such as Michael Emory's Khoomei - How To's And Why's which explains how to do it. More tips and technical background at Khoomei.com. Another site, Friends of Tuva, leads off in unexpected directions. The late Richard Feynman having collected Tuvan stamps, the site segues to How bent spaghetti break, the solution of a problem that stumped Feynman. Do try it at home: it's surprising.

Occasionally I'm blown away by people's ingenuity. I'm not a great folllower of Flickr, but Dave Mitchell just sent me a link to a lovely photo set of Topsham (where I live) taken over the last couple of days: aerial shots using a kite-mounted radio-controlled camera. Here is the Topsham set; here's the KAP (Kite Aerial Photography) equipment. His Flickr contributions (49 currently) also include aerial shots of his home town of Totnes.

From Eurakalert, New trigonometry is a sign of the times: a press release about the new 'rational trigonometry' system devised by Dr Norman Wildberger, Associate Professor in mathematics at the University of New South Wales.
      The system is a geometry based not on distance and angle, but on "quadrance" (square of distance) and "spread" (sine-squared of angle), enabling analytical geometry to be handled by simple algebra without irrational and transcendental terms. Unlike Euclid, it's rooted in Cartesian geometry, taking core definitions of a point as an ordered pair (x,y) and a line as a linear equation.
      At a first glance, I'm fairly sceptical. It pitches straight at those for whom trigonometry was a bugbear at school, with the result that it's being widely blogged with little analysis of the specifics - particularly that the dimensionless "spread" is itself a trig function (a detail that none of the PR mentions).
      Another detail not mentioned is that its basic laws all appear to be recast forms of standard trig formulae. One is credited as based on Pythagoras' theorem: a^2 = b^2 + c^2 becomes an expression in quadrances Q1 = Q2 + Q3. But the Spread Law and Cross Law are uncredited as equivalents of the sine and cosine rules, and the Triple Quad Formula for collinearity as an equivalent of Heron's formula (three points are collinear if they make a triangle of zero area).
      In short, it's not an entirely new geometry, but the old one put in terms of transformed variables. Moving distance/angle to this quadrance/spread domain does look a potentially useful transformation for some tasks, and makes some equations simpler. But there's a major tradeoff: as derived quantities, quadrance and spread don't add linearly like distance and angle. For instance, the equivalent of adding two angles a1+a2 is a nonlinear function of the corresponding spreads s1 and s2, given by 2*sqrt(s1*s2*(1-s1)*(1-s2))-2*s1*s2+s1+s2
      There's a forthcoming self-published book, Divine Proportions: Rational Trigonometry to Universal Geometry. Judging by the preview page, which also has PDFs of introductory material and the first chapter, I doubt if it'll change established analytical geometry. But it still looks interesting reading for maths enthusiasts.

Addendum: There's some good-quality discussion of the pros and cons at PhysOrgForum.

The suburbs tend to attract derision as a repository of conformity, but in the UK at least, their growth is a significant episode in social history. Ideal Homes: Suburbia in Focus is an interesting University of Greenwich project to document that history for south-east London, exploring the complex factors behind their growth (Why suburbs happen).
      The inter-war boom was one notable phase; though newly-created suburbs were promoted to buyers as idyllic and offered an escape from inner-city slums, their growth was often udnerpinned by shoddy practices. One notable case was that of the Coney Hall estate, where Jim and Elsy Borders led a mortgage strike in 1937 in protest against the poor building quality. There's very little about them on the Web, except for this cache of "The Mortgage Strikes (Elsy and Jim Borders 1939 battle against the building societies)", History Today, June, 2001, by Andrew McCulloch: (Part 1 / 2 / 3). They're mentioned briefly in Alan Crisp's M.Litt Oxford thesis The working-class owner-occupied house of the 1930s.

The end of Life as we know it: Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger on the future of the Guardian's science coverage. The weekly Guardian science section, Life, is to be scrapped and replaced by a daily science page. "The page will continue to publish some of Life's most popular features" - at least Bad Science will stay - "but will also enable us to be more responsive to the daily news and explain the science behind events and issues, some of which may, on first sight, appear to have little connection with science".
      I'm not convinced this is a good idea; it'll mean the end of double-page in-depth science articles, one of which appeared in the concluding issue of Life: Don't dumb me down, Ben Goldacre's indictment of media coverage of science stories. He argues that science coverage is still plagued by distortion and innaccuracy, due to being filtered through the stereotyped perceptions of non-scientists in the media hierarchy.