Situated next to the accompanying but room-temperature Below Zero restaurant, the bar is kept at -5 Celsius year round.



For a cover charge of $25 Cdn, patrons are given a thermal cape, thick gloves and a glass made out of ice before entering the second of two airtight doors designed to keep heat out.

There are many thorny medical mysteries doctors can't explain: How can pluripotent stem cells give rise to any type of cell in the body? Why is the genetic marker for Huntington's disease characterized by an excess of trinucleotide repeats? What accounts for the phenomenon of spontaneous remission in some cancers? With intelligent design, we don't ever need to find out. Years from now, we'll all lie in our hospital beds while ID-trained doctors hold our hands and assure us that we are merely dying of God.

We'll all be able to huddle around our radios and listen to Car Talk as a family. After the question is posed, we can all yell out in unison with Click and Clack that the mysterious drut-drut-drut coming from that lady in Vermont's carburetor is … "God!!"

And Law & Order: Special Victim's Unit will be vastly improved when Mariska Hargitay can look ruefully over at Chris Meloni, shake her head over the dead victim's limp frame, and shrug: "Heck if I know what happened. It's a real mystery. I guess we'll have to get a warrant for God." Sigh. "Again." Cut to closing credits.

Replacing every single gap in human knowledge with a theory of divine agency would save us billions of dollars in wasteful public education.

ashuraou

At least two species of honeybees there, the native Apis cerana and the introduced European honeybee, Apis mellifera, engulf a wasp in a living ball of defenders and heat the predator to death. A new study of heat balling has described a margin of safety for the defending bees, says Tan Ken of Yunnan Agricultural University in Kunming, China.



"I've seen a single wasp overwhelm a colony of 6,000 bees" of a species that doesn't make heat balls, says Seeley. The invader wasp stands at the nest's entrance as one guard bee after another comes out to defend its home. "The wasp cuts the guard into pieces ... and waits for the next one," says Seeley. When all the defenders are dead, "the wasps strip-mine out the larvae," he reports.

In the new paper, the team describes what happens to electrons when scientists put two molecules between electrodes, which are bits of tiny conducting wire. Existing theoretical models of molecular electronics take into account that electrons avoid each other, according to Nancy Sandler, Ohio University assistant professor of physics and astronomy. The scientists report that molecular vibrations, in addition to strong electronic interactions, will produce unexpected “transport channels.” The electrons move through the molecule while the molecule vibrates, said Sergio Ulloa, co-author of the paper and Ohio University professor of physics and astronomy.

“The electrons go through the molecule like a pinball and they leave all the bells ringing (atoms moving) as they pass by,” said Ulloa, adding that this model focuses on the general behavior of short molecules. Other scientists studying molecular electronics, he noted, are using longer molecules, such as DNA or carbon-based molecules, to serve as longer “wires” or connectors.

Using a chemical communication process called quorum sensing, bacteria converse among themselves to count their numbers and to get the population to act in unison. A synchronized group of bacteria can mimic the power of a multi-cellular organism, ready to face challenges too daunting for an individual microbe going it alone. Swelling populations trigger their quorum-sensing apparatuses, which have different effects in different types of bacteria. One species might respond by releasing a toxin, while another might cut loose from a biofilm and move on to another environment.

...

But this common language does not guarantee the correct message gets through, the researchers discovered. In earlier work, Xavier had found that E. coli both produces and consumes AI-2. In this study, she set up an experiment where multitudes of E. coli first produced then devoured enough AI-2 to dim the lights of the marine bacteria, essentially fooling the thriving oceanic gang into thinking its members were few, thereby terminating its quorum-sensing behaviors.

The insects all use their legs to pull the water's surface up at the front and rear, while pressing downwards with their middle segments. Insects that live on ponds and puddles tend to have bodies that are generally water-repellent. But the insects in this study possess retractable 'wetting' claws that attract and hold the water's surface, allowing them to pull it upwards and out of shape.

The uplifted bit of water under the insect's foot then becomes an area of particularly high tension, as is the portion of the puddle's meniscus at the very edge, where it is steepest. Like bubbles on the surface of a glass of champagne, these two areas of high tension attract each other in order to lower the overall tension of the water surface. This attraction pulls the insect to the top of the hill.



"They scamper onto the menisci and are sliding down under gravity, then they lock into position and travel up it," says Bush.

A research team, led by UC Riverside’s Ludwig Bartels, is the first to design a molecule that can move in a straight line on a flat surface. It achieves this by closely mimicking human walking. The “nano-walker” offers a new approach for storing large amounts of information on a tiny chip and demonstrates that concepts from the world we live in can be duplicated at the nanometer scale – the scale of atoms and molecules.



The molecule – 9,10-dithioanthracene or “DTA” – has two linkers that act as feet. Obtaining its energy from heat supplied to it, the molecule moves such that only one of the linkers is lifted from the surface; the remaining linker guides the motion of the molecule and keeps it on course. Alternating the motions of its two “feet,” DTA is able to walk in a straight line without the assistance of nano-rails or nano-grooves for guidance.

Does a scientific explanation for any given phenomenon diminish its beauty or its ability to inspire poetry and emotional experiences? I think not. Science and aesthetics are complementary, not conflicting; additive, not detractive. I am nearly moved to tears, for example, when I observe through my small telescope the fuzzy little patch of light that is the Andromeda galaxy. It is not just because it is lovely, but because I also understand that the photons of light landing on my retina left Andromeda 2.9 million years ago, when our ancestors were tiny-brained hominids. I am doubly stirred because it was not until 1923 that astronomer Edwin Hubble, using the 100-inch telescope on Mount Wilson in the hills just above my home in Los Angeles, deduced that this "nebula" was actually a distant extragalactic stellar system of immense size. He subsequently discovered that the light from most galaxies is shifted toward the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum (literally unweaving a rainbow of colors), meaning that the universe is expanding away from its explosive beginning. That is some aesthetic science.

Do not all charms fly
At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
We know her woof, her texture; she is given
In the dull catalogue of common things.
Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
Empty the haunted air and gnomed mine –
Unweave a rainbow.

Fish, frogs, birds and mammals all experience image-forming vision, thanks to the fact that their eyes all express crystallins and form a lens; however, the vertebrates' nearest invertebrate relatives, such as sea squirts, have only simple eyes that detect light but are incapable of forming an image. This has lead to the view that the lens evolved within the vertebrates early in vertebrate evolution, and it raises a long-standing question in evolutionary biology: How could a complex organ with such special physical properties have evolved?

In their new work, Shimeld and colleagues approached this question by examining the evolutionary origin of one crystallin protein family, known as the ß-crystallins. Focusing on sea squirts, invertebrate cousins of the vertebrate lineage, the researchers found that these creatures possess a single crystallin gene, which is expressed in its primitive light-sensing system. The identification of the sea squirt's crystallin strongly suggests that it is the single gene from which the vertebrate ß-crystallins evolved.

The researchers also found that, remarkably, expression of the sea squirt crystallin gene is controlled by genetic elements that also respond to the factors that control lens development in vertebrates: The researchers showed that when regulatory regions of the sea squirt gene are transferred to frog embryos, these regulatory elements drive gene expression in the tadpoles' own visual system, including the lens.

Michael Dooley, a gynaecologist, obstetrician and fertility expert, said that in the past five years he has seen a 20 per cent increase in the number of patients seeking "inappropriate or premature" IVF treatment.

"Many of these couples are simply not having sex or not having enough sex," he said. "Conception has become medicalised. It's too clinical. There has been a trend away from having sex and loving relationships towards medicalised conception."

Mr Dooley practises at Westover House clinic and the Lister Hospital, both in south-west London, and a clinic in Poundbury, Dorset. He said: "I have people who come to me for IVF who haven't got time for sex."