What do sweaty socks, a glass of curdled milk, and moldy fruit all have in common? They stink! Bacteria are the source of all three different kinds of stink. For the first time, a new study has shown that some bacteria do more than just produce gross smells—they actually have a “nose” of their own.

The discovery was a bit of an accident—a team at Newcastle University in the United Kingdom was originally studying how biofilms form (see “They’re Sneaky . . . They’re Slimy . . . They’re Biofilms!” ). To save space, the team had placed wells containing two different kinds of bacteria next to each other on a tray. One half of the tray contained bacteria growing with plenty of nutrients, including ammonia. The bacteria on the other half of the tray formed biofilms, but the greatest biofilm formation happened in the wells closest to the ammonia-rich neighbors. Somehow, the bacteria could sense the ammonia in the air, and that triggered the formation of a biofilm. A biofilm is a colony of bacteria living together within a slimy “net,” which offers greater protection from competitors or enemies.

“From an evolutionary perspective, we believe this may be the first example of how living creatures first learned to smell other living creatures,” says Grant Burgess of Newcastle University.

Lots of work remains to be done to figure out how the bacteria sense chemicals like ammonia in the air, but this breakthrough shows that bacteria are even more complex than previously thought. In fact, smell is a basic form of communication for bacteria. The scent of ammonia coming from one kind of bacteria told another kind that it was time to form a biofilm.

“Bacterial infections kill millions of people every year,” says Burgess. “Discovering how your bacterial enemies communicate with each other is an important step in winning this war.”

Do you like to eat fish? If you do, good for you! If not, you probably aren’t getting enough omega-3 fatty acids in your diet. A “fatty acid” sounds like something you’d find on greasy french fries, but omega-3s keep your body healthy and may even help prevent heart disease or cancer. The problem is there always has been just one way to get omega-3s: Eat fish (or take fish oil vitamins).

Now, there’s a new way to get those fatty acids without any fish involved. The company Monsanto genetically engineered a soybean plant to contain omega-3s. In 2010, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave the new soybeans GRAS status, which stands for “Generally Recognized as Safe.” Once Monsanto gets permission to grow the genetically modified crop on a large scale, you may start seeing the oil in all sorts of foods.

The new soybean oil contains stearidonic acid (SDA), and your body can change SDA into eicosapentaenoic acid, or EPA. Both SDA and EPA are types of omega-3 fatty acids, but EPA is usually what you get from eating fish. You’ll need to eat about four to five times more SDA to get the same benefit as the EPA in one serving of fish.

“Yeah, but I don’t eat soybeans!” you might say. Actually, you probably do. Look at a couple of food labels until you find “vegetable oil” listed as an ingredient—there’s a good chance that the oil comes from soybeans. When the new “fishy” soybean oil comes out, you won’t even taste a difference.

Human farmers grow corn, rice, or tomatoes . . . and amoeba farmers grow bacteria! The Dictyostelium discoideum amoeba, better known as a slime mold, lives in the soil and munches on bacteria until it’s time to migrate. To do this, the amoebas come together and form something called a slug, which can move through the dirt. When it finds a good spot, the slug becomes a fruiting body, which looks like a tall and skinny mushroom (although it’s only one millimeter across). The fruiting body releases spores, or baby amoebas.

The cool new discovery is that some variations of the slime mold bring along “seeds” during this migration, and “plant” the seeds at the new location. “It was a bit of serendipity, really,” Debra Brock, a graduate student at Rice University and the lead author of a study published last January in Nature, told BBC news. Most researchers work with lab-grown slime molds. But Brock worked with clones of wild ones instead. She discovered that 13 of 35 types of slime mold are farmers, and that the trait is genetic: Farmers will always be farmers, and nonfarmers can’t learn.

These farmer slime molds don’t eat up all the bacteria in sight. They save some, and pack it away to carry with them when they travel. Then, when the fruiting body sends out spores, baby amoebas and bacteria are released together—now, no matter where the baby amoebas go, they will be sure to have some yummy bacteria to eat.

She’s not afraid of anything. Snakes? No problem. Walking alone in the dark? Easy. A haunted house? Hilarious. We’re not talking about a superhero here -- SM is a 44-year-old mom. And she’s fearless because she happens to be missing part of her brain: the amygdala.

Shaped like a pair of almonds sitting in the middle of your brain, the amygdala helps control fear and anxiety. A rare condition called Urbach-Wiethe disease left SM without her amygdala, and seems to have completely erased her sense of fear.

To try to understand how the amygdala works, a team of researchers tried their hardest to scare SM. They showed her horror movies and took her to the Waverly Hills Sanatorium Haunted House in Kentucky. She poked one of the monsters and laughed. SM said she didn’t like snakes, but at a pet store full of poisonous creatures, she kept asking to touch them. When asked to rate her feelings, SM reported feeling surprised or disgusted, but never fearful.

“She tends to approach the very things she should be avoiding,” says Justin Feinstein of the University of Iowa. This means the amygdala could do more than just turn fear on or off -- it could control deeper urges to approach or avoid danger. Other scientists are critical of the study, though. “I don’t believe you can make a general statement about what the amygdala does by a single case study,” Elizabeth Phelps told Science magazine. In 2002, Phelps published a study on a similar patient with amygdala damage who still showed fear.

It may sound like fun to be totally fearless, but we get scared for a good reason. “The nature of fear is survival and the amygdala helps us stay alive by avoiding situations, people, or objects that put our life in danger,” Feinstein said. SM was once accosted in a park after dark by a man with a knife, and she simply walked away. “It is quite remarkable that she is still alive,” said Feinstein.

How do you turn fruit juice, ice cream, or lipstick red? Easy: Crush up some bugs. Carmine dye has a rich, red color extracted from the dried and ground-up bodies of a small, sap-sucking beetle. This natural dye has been around for hundreds of years, yet most people have no idea that it’s in their food. Also known as Red 4, it’s sometimes confused with Red 40 -- a super bright red dye made from organic petroleum. Ingredient labels often disguise carmine as “artificial color” or “color added.”

Not anymore! As of January 5, 2011, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has proclaimed that food and makeup containing the buggy coloring must declare “cochineal extract” or “carmine dye” on their labels. The FDA didn’t do this because eating beetles is gross; most people can safely consume the “beetle juice” and not even notice. The FDA stated that the new law “responds to reports of severe allergic reactions.” Vegetarians and others opposed to eating insects or smearing them on their faces also now can read the labels to avoid beetle-colored foods and cosmetics.

Your Turn! Are you going to start scanning labels for carmine dye? Does it gross you out to know that a common coloring is made from beetles, or do you think it’s cool?

Send your thoughts to odysseymagazine@caruspub.com or mail to: BUG JUICE, ODYSSEY, 30 Grove Street, Peterborough, NH 03458.

It’s hard to imagine how a single-celled blob in the ocean evolved into a fish, a turtle, or eventually a human. For 2.5 billion years, life on Earth was all single-celled. Then, these teeny-tiny creatures started getting bigger, evolving into multicelled blobs that eventually became animals. Multicellularity is one of the most important steps in evolution, but it’s hard to study because tiny blobs in the ocean don’t really leave fossils behind.

However, there are plenty of single-celled creatures still living today. And one of them, the choanoflagellate (ko-AN-oh-FLA-je-let), seems to be our closest living single-celled cousin. This means that a long time ago, a common ancestor of both you and the choanoflagellate evolved in two different directions. By looking at what choanoflagellates and animals have in common, scientists can start to describe that single-celled common ancestor. “Choanoflagellates really are a unique window back in time to the origin of animals and humans,” said Dan Rokhsar of the University of California at Berkeley, who worked on sequencing the genome of the choanoflagellate.

Looking at a choanoflagellate, it’s impossible to see any resemblance to an animal. One egg-shaped cell swims by moving a long tail. The tail has a collar of tentacles that catch bacteria to eat. But inside that single cell, in the genes, Dan Rokhsar and his team confirmed something interesting. Choanoflagellates’ genes produce cadherin proteins, which have a well-known role in animals: they stick cells together like glue. But a choanoflagellate only has one cell! It doesn’t need cell-sticking glue. University of California scientist Nicole King proposed that the common ancestor of both choanoflagellates and animals used this glue to stick to surfaces or to capture bacteria to eat. The leap to multicellularity then makes more sense, because the first multicelled creatures were able to put this glue to a new and different purpose --holding their cells together! Now that’s a clever trick of evolution.

Genome -- The full sequence of a creature’s DNA

“Stop copying me. Stop copying me.” “You’re annoying! You’re annoying!” Have you ever had an experience like that with a younger brother or sister? No matter what you say or do, your sibling copies you. Believe it or not, this annoying behavior has a good purpose. By copying what grownups and older kids do, little brothers and sisters are learning important life skills. The strange thing is that human kids will copy everything, not just actions that have an obvious useful purpose. Psychologists call this overimitation.

“It’s something that we know other primates don’t do,” said Mark Nielsen, a psychologist at the University of Queensland in Australia. A chimpanzee won’t copy pointless actions, such as dragging a feather over a box containing a treat before opening it. But a human child will. “Animals focus on getting the job done,” Mark Nielsen told the journal Science. “Humans seem to almost forget about the outcome and copy everything we see.”

Nielsen wanted to find out if this human tendency to copy even something silly applied to kids all over the world. Most psychological studies are done with children from western cultures where adults spend a lot of time directly teaching their kids and encouraging them to copy, but not all cultures do this. Nielsen worked with groups of kids, ages 2 to 13, from suburban Australia and from an indigenous Bushman community in South Africa. An adult demonstrated how to open a box, but did so in a strange and complicated way, tracing circles over the box, or using a stick to pull it open.

To Nielsen’s surprise, all of the kids copied the strange procedure, even kids who’d had a chance to play with the box first and figure it out on their own. “I was gobsmacked,” Nielsen said. Overimitation is a worldwide, universal human trait, and one that may be the reason for our complex cultures. Because humans focus on the specific way things get done rather than the result, we can develop cultural traditions with no clear result, such as shaking hands. “We’re so motivated to do things like those around us and be like those around us,” said Nielsen. Next time your sibling copies everything you say, you can tell him, “Go ahead. Keep up the overimitation. It’s good for the development of your cultural mind.” Maybe he’ll be so confused, he’ll leave you alone!

Indigenous -- Originating and living in an area

How do you get your exercise? Maybe you play sports -- on a team or in an interactive video game. Or maybe you dance, skateboard, or ride your bike. Or maybe, you belong to a health club!

More than 4.6 million American kids ages 6 to 17 now belong to health clubs, according to the International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association. Ten years ago in 2000, that number was only 3.2 million. The growing numbers match Americans’ growing body size: more then 9 million kids and teens are overweight.

“I can’t pretend we don’t eat our share of fast food because of scheduling,” Mary Baldwin, of Novato, California told the New York Times. Her daughter, Jena, joined Fitwize 4 Kids gym in fifth grade. “I’m not looking for the new Miss USA,” Baldwin said. “For us it’s about maintaining health.”

Health club programs for kids involve more than just running on treadmills. Some programs offer fresh fruit as rewards and include activities like jump rope. Taylor Kevin Isaacs, a personal trainer who works with kids, gives typical exercises funny names like “tricep skull crusher” to make them sound more exciting.

A personal trainer or a health club membership can be expensive, so some families seek out programs at Boys & Girls clubs or local community centers. No matter where you get your exercise, the important thing is staying healthy by keeping active and eating right!

More than points are at stake in the video game Foldit. Players are actually helping science. How? They’re figuring out how to fold complex proteins, and doing a better job than computers. The game was developed by biochemists and computer scientists at the University of Washington two years ago to harness the brainpower of computer gamers to solve medical problems.

Proteins run the most basic processes of life inside our cells. They set off reactions, carry messages, and even help form scabs over cuts. Each protein is made up of amino acids that fold into a particular shape. The shape is important because many proteins act like locks or keys, matching up in certain ways to do their jobs. “Scientists are interested in working out the three-dimensional structures of proteins because they help us understand how the proteins carry out their jobs, [and] what they do inside cells,” says molecular biologist David Baker of the University of Washington in Seattle.

Scientists know that the sequence of amino acids determines the shape of a protein. But figuring out how physical forces determine that shape, exactly, is an extremely tricky problem, because there are billions upon billions of possible solutions. Some of those solutions could end up being proteins that could cure HIV or take on the flu virus! Brute computer strength takes a long time to figure out a correct answer. So Baker teamed up with computer scientists to make this monumental, very important scientific chore into a game.

Foldit players start with a partially folded protein. As a player moves parts of the shape around, his or her score goes up or down. To get the highest score, the player has to find the arrangement that requires the lowest total energy to maintain. In nature, proteins almost always fold into the lowest-energy shape. “The big advantage that a human has,” explains Baker, “is they can look at a huge complicated thing like a big protein and sort of zoom in on the regions that most need to be reworked.” The game helps pinpoint problematic, high-energy areas by coloring them red.

In a paper published in the journal Nature in August 2010, Baker, his team, and about 57,000 Foldit players showed that human ingenuity still beats computer brute strength. Try the game yourself at http://fold.it/portal. “Humans have all sorts of creativity, problem-solving skills, and insights,” Seth Cooper of the University of Washington told Science News. “Hopefully other problems can be cast in this way so people without formal training can still get involved and help out.”

Hmm. . .What about a game to find planets around distant stars? Or design cures for diseases? What scientific computer game would you want to play?

Send your game idea to odysseymagazine@caruspub.com or mail it to: GAMES FOR SCIENCE, ODYSSEY, 30 Grove Street, Peterborough, NH 03458.

Amino acids -- Small molecules that join in a chain to make up proteins

When you imagine nuclear waste, you probably think of something glowing green that makes your skin burst and your eyes fall out. This isn’t what radiation really looks like (usually it’s invisible) or what really happens to you after exposure to it (cancer is one possibility). But one thing is certain -- you don’t want radioactive materials anywhere near your body.

The problem is, you can’t just stick radioactive waste in a container and bury it. Groundwater, erosion, and other processes will eventually eat through the container and carry all that harmful radioactivity out into the world. In order to keep the waste safely locked up, scientists need to find a good geographic location, and a good container, called a waste form -- one that won’t leak or break down, even after tens of thousands of years. Many power plants currently use a glass log several feet thick and wrapped in metal. But glass might not be good enough.

Rodney Ewing of the University of Michigan has been working on the waste form problem for decades. “Now, the exciting possibility and the real need is to develop waste forms that match radioactive waste to a material that’s suitable for, and performs well, in the geologic environment,” he explains. In order to expand the role of nuclear power, we need to find better ways to deal with its waste. That means separating the waste, reusing some elements, finding new and creative uses for others, and throwing away the leftovers in the safest way possible.

Ewing’s approach is to lock up radioactive waste inside a mineral, creating a brand new, synthetic material: a crystal jail for radioactivity!

But there’s a solution that involves a totally different kind of mineral: “The surprise with gadolinium zirconate is that it constantly anneals and remains crystalline,” says Ewing. Basically, when plutonium shoots it with alpha particles, gadolinium zirconate (which actually isn’t related to zircon) can repair itself. This discovery of a self-healing material has exciting applications beyond nuclear waste disposal. One day a synthetic mineral like this may protect satellite electronics from cosmic rays!

Ooh, I smell a rose! No, wait; it’s a permanent marker.

Did you know your nostrils sometimes fight like competing siblings over different smells? Psychologist Denise Chen of Rice University in Texas wasn’t surprised by the result of her study that had 12 volunteers smell two very different scents at the same time -- rose through one nostril and permanent marker through the other. The participants experienced an “olfactory illusion,” says Chen. “Instead of perceiving a constant mixture of the two smells, they perceived one of the smells, followed by the other, in an alternating fashion, as if the nostrils were competing with one another.” There was no pattern to how often or when the switching happened, but all 12 people experienced it.

This sensory battle actually doesn’t happen in the nostrils, but in the brain; the same thing happens if your two eyes are presented with different images, or your ears with different sounds. Instead of mixing the senses, your brain switches between them in a seemingly random back-and-forth pattern. “Although both smells are equally present,” Chen explains, “the brain attends to one of them at a time.”

Go ahead and try the experiment yourself! Get two disposable eyedroppers and fill one with a liquid such as rosewater or lemon juice and the other with something that smells very different, like coffee. Place the open end of each dropper under your nostrils (not inside!) and sniff. Be careful not to squirt yourself! What did you smell? Try the experiment with a few of your family members, and let us know at odysseymagazine@caruspub.com if the results match the scientific study! You can also write to: NOSE WARS, ODYSSEY, 30 Grove Street, Suite C, Peterborough, NH 03458.

You choose: Do you want $70 in three days, or $110 in three months? University College London (UCL) researchers posed this question, along with others relating to lifestyle, in a study on the BBC Web site. Almost half of over 40,000 participants wanted less money sooner, and that “money-today” attitude is linked to ignoring the future in other ways. Dr. Stian Reimers of UCL explains that the respondents who chose $70 in three days were “more likely to smoke and more likely to be overweight, which may reflect a similar preference for the immediate pleasure of nicotine and food over long-term good health.” Basically, if you have trouble saving money, you’re less likely to think carefully about your decisions in general.

“One of the big questions about people’s financial planning is whether decisions to spend or save come from personal knowledge and experience of money matters or whether they reflect someone’s personality more generally,” Reimers says. It seems like the answer may be a combination of personality and experience. While the less-money-sooner respondents tended to be more impulsive, they were also generally younger, less educated, and on lower incomes than the rest of the participants. “Learning to make decisions that lead to long-term happiness, not just instantaneous gratification, could benefit us all,” says Reimers. Here are some decision-making (and money-saving) tips: Imagine how you’d feel about your decision in a year’s time, and avoid making decisions in the heat of the moment. So, did you change your mind about that $70?

How much would you pay not to get shocked? It turns out, the answer depends on a couple of different things, including how bad the pain is and the amount of money you have in your pocket. Scientists at the University College London set up a study to explore how much people are willing to spend in order to avoid pain. Thirty-four student participants got different amounts of money with the understanding that they could keep whatever they had left at the end of the study. Then, they sat down to get shocked.

Let’s imagine that you’re about to participate in this study, and you just received $100. The first pulse of electricity to your hand hurts a lot! You now have to choose: How much of your $100 would you pay to avoid getting 15 more shocks in a row just like that one? Let’s say you’re feeling brave and you have your heart set on a new video game, so you offer $50. Now, a computer randomly chooses a number between $0 and $100. If the computer chooses a number higher than your offer, you get shocked! If it’s lower, you pay your $50 and your hand is safe. Then you have to do the whole thing over again!

This study had a few interesting conclusions: The amount people were willing to pay had almost nothing to do with how rich or poor they were in their normal lives. They made decisions based on the money they had in their pockets, instead. Also, they would pay more money to avoid pain if it was going to be worse than what they’d felt before. Basically, the value of pain relief depends on the situation. Now, doesn’t that shock you?

Imagine that you’re an astronaut on the International Space Station. On June 12, 2009, you look out the window to see this fabulous plume of steam and ash rising into the sky above Earth. Suddenly you realize that you’re floating safely above a live erupting volcano!

This fabulous photo shows in perfect detail what the beginning of an explosive eruption looks like. Located northeast of Japan, Sarychev Peak is one of the most active volcanoes in the Kuril Island chain. The lack of high winds kept the beautiful form of the eruption from breaking apart, and it looks like the force of the eruption blew a hole in the clouds! But that’s only one possibility. Air flowing down as the plume rises (like water flowing down off a whale as it rises out of the sea) could also form a hole, and the simple presence of the island (even without an erupting volcano) could be enough to break up the cloud layer.

The soft white cloud at the top of the eruption may be water vapor, and the brown smoke-like billows are volcanic ash. If you look closely near the ground, there is a cloud of dense, gray ash, called a pyroclastic flow, rolling down from the top of the exploding mountain. You can also see the shadow of the plume darkening the island below.

The Sarychev peak eruption lasted over a week, and during that time, airplanes couldn’t fly anywhere near the erupting volcano. Ash would have been sucked into their engines!

You’d never confuse a mannequin’s body for your own, would you? Think you couldn’t be fooled? Well, think again! In a fascinating experiment called the “body-swap illusion,” neuroscientists Valeria Petkova and Henrik Ehrsson of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden showed that people can be fooled into feeling like they are in a body other than their own, even if that body is plastic. “Our subjects experienced this illusion as being exciting and strange, and often said that they wanted to come back and try it again,” Petkova told Science News.

Petkova and Ehrsson demonstrated the experiment for a National Geographic video with volunteer Andrew Ketterer, an American studying at the Karolinska Institute. Ketterer had electrodes attached to his fingers to measure his reactions, and wore a virtual reality headset. The headset was hooked up to two cameras positioned over a mannequin’s eyes, so he could see the world from the plastic mannequin’s point of view. Petkova aimed the cameras toward the mannequin’s stomach, and had Ketterer look down while she brushed a marker against both his own and the mannequin’s stomachs.

“The illusion starts right from when you move your head down and look at ‘your’ body,” said Ketterer. “Then once she started brushing the pen against my stomach, I mean, it just snapped -- I viewed the mannequin's body as being my body.”

Then Petkova pulled out a knife! She dragged a kitchen knife across the mannequin’s stomach and arm. “It’s not like she’s trying to stab you with it, but you do have the reaction to pull away,” described Ketterer. During the actual study, fear registered on the electrodes attached to the fingertips of ten of 32 volunteers who experienced a body-swap. But when the knife was passed over the volunteers’ own arms, there was no fearful response.

Petkova then put on a hat with two cameras positioned over her own eyes, and shook Ketterer’s hand. He experienced the truly odd sensation of shaking his own hand! Ehrsson repeated the pretend knife-slicing over both Ketterer’s and Petkova’s arms -- and Ketterer responded as if Petkova’s arm were his own.

Not every participant experienced the illusion, and it vanished as soon as the researchers brushed the volunteer’s arm or stomach without mirroring the action on the false body. However, this kind of brain trick could help scientists better understand the human sense of perception and even the sense of self. Ehrsson asked the intriguing question, “What happens if you’re in a body that’s very different from your own? For instance, an old body if you’re young, or a female if you’re a man. How could that influence the way you think about different groups of people?”

Welcome to the coldest, bleakest, and most extreme desert in the world: the Dry Valleys of Antarctica. This is perhaps the last place on Earth you’d expect to find life. . .but it’s here. A blood red, frozen waterfall at the tip of Taylor Glacier was the clue that led scientist “detectives” to discover a hidden pool where tiny microbes thrive in total darkness and zero oxygen. The microbes breathe sulfur and iron!

These bizarre little creatures seem to be long lost cousins of similar microbes that still exist in the oceans today. Scientists think that 1.5 million years ago, when sea levels across the globe fell, one pocket of salt water got stuck beneath a glacier. Imagine a mountain slowly sliding over the top of a swimming pool! All the microbes that got stuck beneath the glacier had to either adapt to their dark, airless new world, or die. Amazingly, life found a way to survive. “I don’t know of any other environment quite like this on Earth,” says Jill Mikucki, who led the study while at Harvard. She is currently a research associate at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.

The water these microbes call home is rich in sulfur and very salty (that’s why it doesn’t freeze even under the ice in Antarctica). Also, iron is constantly rubbed off of the surrounding bedrock by the motion of the glacier, providing a supply of food for the hidden microbe community. And every once in a while, some of the water from the trapped pool seeps up and out of the side of the glacier, where the iron oxidizes to form the striking red color of Blood Falls. Case solved!

Hey, all you Harry Potter fans: Invisibility isn’t just wizardry any more; it’s science! Ever since researchers at Duke University in North Carolina surprised the world with the first ever “invisibility cloak” made of metamaterials in 2006, scientists have been searching for ways to cloak objects from different wavelengths of light.

Metamaterials are cool because they gain special properties from their structure, and can be created from many different base materials, including crystals, metals, and more. Some metamaterials can bend waves backwards through a truly bizarre effect called negative refraction. If you look at a straw in a glass of water, you see that it appears to bend. That’s normal, positive refraction. If the water had negative refraction, it would look like the bottom of the straw was bent backward so far that it was floating above the water! A cloaking device uses negative refraction to bend waves around an object, like water flowing around a rock in a stream.

That first “invisibility cloak” couldn’t actually hide any objects from you, because it only cloaked against microwaves, which have fairly long wavelengths (measured in centimeters) and aren’t in the visible light spectrum. Cloaking something from visible light is a more difficult problem because visible light has wavelengths between 400 and 700 nanometers. (A single strand of your hair is 200 times thicker than that!) Special features in a metamaterial’s structure must be smaller than the wavelength of the light to be bent. Are you still on my wavelength? Good! Making features smaller than a centimenter to bend microwaves is much easier than working on the nanoscale to bend visible light. Xiang Zhang, head of two teams of researchers at The University of California, Berkeley, was ready for the invisibility challenge. In 2008, these teams announced the first three-dimensional metamaterials that can reverse the direction of light at very small wavelengths. These materials aren’t perfect: “Both bend light at different angles depending on [the light’s] wavelength, while a real invisibility cloak should bend light equally across the spectrum,” reports Science News. Meanwhile, David Smith of Duke University is still perfecting his microwave-cloaking device. “The difference between the original device and the latest model is like night and day,” Smith says. “The new device can cloak a much wider spectrum of waves -- nearly limitless -- and will scale far more easily to infrared and visible light.” This means that once researchers figure out how to shrink the structure of the cloak down to the nano scale, it will be able to cloak certain wavelengths of visible light.

Manipulating light is useful for more than just invisibility; nanoscale metamaterials could contribute to the development of super high-powered microscopes with the ability to see things as tiny as DNA molecules!

Imagine a glass building reaching to the sky in the middle of a bustling city. Inside, an elevator takes you up, not to stores, office buildings, or apartments, but to rows of tomatoes, beans, or pumpkins. In May 2008 at the first ever World Science Festival in New York City, Columbia University professor Dickson Despommier presented his Vertical Farming ideas. He imagines a future where glass-walled skyscraper farms use natural sunlight and recycled wastewater to grow crops right in the middle of cities.

Right now, most of our food grows on acres of flat farms, which take up precious space and are vulnerable to natural disasters, pests, and seasonal weather. Meanwhile, the human population continues to increase and crowd into cities. There will most likely be about 9.2 billion people in the world by 2050! There simply isn’t enough room on our planet for regular farms to support all those human lives.

Vertical farming could feed all those people using much less land. One indoor acre equals about four to six or more outdoor acres, depending on the crop. Thirty acres worth of strawberries, for example, can be grown on one indoor acre! That’s because Despommier designed his 21-story skyscrapers to produce more energy than they consume. There’s no need for pesticides or chemicals, and the farms can recycle sludge from wastewater as topsoil (see the March 2008 “Poop! What a Waste” ODYSSEY), recirculate water to feed the plants, and produce energy by composting non-edible plant parts. Returning all these extra acres of traditional farmland to a wild state would combat global warming: More trees and shrubs would absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

If vertical farms were a part of every city, tons of money and energy would be saved on transportation costs, and city kids would grow up with more fresh veggies and a better understanding of where food comes from. Despommier estimates that 150 of his buildings could feed New York City for a year. The cost of building one vertical farm would be about $84 million, according to Despommier, but it would cost only $5 million to run the farm per year, which would bring in as much as $18 million in profit, based on the rising prices of produce.

But please talk beforehand. Spend just ten minutes talking to a friend before your next test, and you may get a better grade. No, you don’t have to talk about history or math or whatever you’re studying; some plain old socializing could help keep your memory sharp. So go ahead -- discuss your favorite music, the movie you watched last night, or your dog’s new trick. Just make sure you stop talking when the teacher passes out the test!

Researchers from the University of Michigan gave three groups of college students a test of mental processing speed and memory. Beforehand, one group did math and crossword puzzles, another watched a TV show, and a third group talked about a social issue. The results? Talking with friends kept the students’ brains just as sharp as doing a difficult crossword puzzle. In a related study, over 3,000 participants ages 24 to 96 took an exam measuring general knowledge and working memory, then answered questions about how often they talk to friends, neighbors, and relatives. Regardless of age, gender, or income, the more socially active people tended to score higher on the exam. This doesn’t mean it’s bad to be an introvert -- plenty of geniuses didn’t get along so well socially -- but it does mean that spending time with your friends may help keep your mind smart and healthy. Just don’t take this as an excuse to hang out instead of doing your homework!

Remember when you used to make play-dough spaghetti by squeezing it through a strainer? Extrusion works in a similar way. This delicious technology uses machines that push dough through a narrow barrel using turning screws. If you’re making pasta, the temperature must stay low. For crispy crunchy snacks like cheese puffs, you need high heat. “When you’re heating the dough and there’s a lot of water in there, the water turns to steam,” Alavi says. “It pops like popcorn and puffs up. When the dough expands, it gives you the desired crunch.”

For cool snack shapes like letters and numbers, you just need to put a special opening, called a die, on the end of the barrel and shoot.

So, that settles the question about crunchy snacks. Now, I want to know how they make those twisted, chewy strips of red licorice.

Vegetarians give up meat. Vegans give up all animal products. Freegans give up money. If you went without your allowance for a few weeks, it would be tough. But what would you think if your parents all of a sudden decided to stop earning a paycheck and instead gathered the things you needed from the stuff everyone else throws away?

Freegans believe that most people are numb to the ways our greed is destroying the world. “In a complex, industrial, mass-production economy driven by profit, abuses of humans, animals, and the Earth abound at all levels of production. . .in just about every product we buy,” states the Freegan Web site, http://freegan.info/. “Our hope is for people to think about mass consumption, to think about the waste we produce,” says Adam Weissman, a freegan for the past decade.

Freegans live off the leftovers of others. They find most necessities of life, including food, in the trash. Eewww! you’re probably thinking, but they’re not talking about the foul smelling black bags your mom asks you to take out. Freegans go dumpster-diving behind malls, grocery stores, bakeries, and other businesses. Foods are often discarded simply because of an advertising slogan like “made fresh daily!” or because a newer shipment of fresher vegetables has arrived. The older, but perfectly good, foods are simply thrown away.

How about the Village People? Well, that was sort of a joke. But listen to this: Although we don’t have a list of the names of the builders, Mike Parker Pearson, a professor of archaeology at Sheffield University in the United Kingdom, told New Scientist magazine reporters that he at least has found the village of the builders.

In case you’re scratching your head because you’ve never heard of Stonehenge (Welcome to Earth, by the way!), it is a circular array of large, standing stones in southwest England that is believed to be an ancient Druid temple, burial ground, or astronomy site that dates back to between 3000 and 1600 B.C.

Now, the new village was discovered during an excavation at Durrington Walls, which is about two miles from Stonehenge. At least 25 houses have been identified (and there are probably a lot more). The village -- the largest Neolithic village ever found in Britain -- dates to about 2600 B.C. What’s more, the researchers also found 4,600-year-old debris, including burnt stones and animal bones strewn on the clay floors. “We think that we are looking at the village of the builders of Stonehenge,” Pearson told New Scientist.

The houses were located in a small valley north of Stonehenge that leads down to the River Avon. They are on either side of an avenue that leads from the river to a wooden version of Stonehenge. This discovery is outstanding because, as Pearson says, “What we have revealed is that Stonehenge is one-half of a larger complex,” referring to the stone and wooden circles. “Woodhenge,” for instance, could have been used for festivals, while Stonehenge could have been a memorial or burial site. If true, Pearson says that we are seeing a “very interesting contrast in terms of life and death.”

It’s no secret. Chocolate can make you feel good. That’s because it contains many substances that act as stimulants -- like serotonin, a chemical that helps people feel calm and relaxed. But now a new study suggests that chomping on chocolate may help your memory and increase your brain’s performance!

In a study led by Bryan Raudenbush (associate professor of psychology at Wheeling Jesuit University in West Virginia), subjects who had consumed either milk chocolate or dark chocolate 15 minutes before taking a neuropsychological test performed better than those given carob (a chocolate substitute made from the pods of an eastern Mediterranean tree) or nothing at all.

The tests, which were designed to assess memory, attention span, reaction time, and problem-solving skills, were given to a group of volunteers on four separate occasions. On one occasion, Raudenbush and his colleagues fed the volunteers 85 grams of milk chocolate. On another occasion, the test subjects received 85 grams of dark chocolate; on another, 85 grams of carob; then, nothing at all. Each time, after a 15-minute digestive period, the volunteers tackled the tests.

Raudenbush found that the composite scores for verbal and visual memory were greatest after the volunteers had consumed the milk chocolate. Consumption of milk and dark chocolate was associated with improved impulse control and reaction time.

Now, that’s sweet!

Hey, kids! How would you like to send something out of this world? Well, the time is near!

Maybe as early as 2008, Masten Space Systems (MSS), in Santa Clara, CA, will be ready to send an object of your choosing into space and back for $99!

The restrictions? All cargo must fit into a canister the size of a soda can (a CanSat) and weigh no more than 12 ounces. “We’ll launch anything, as long as it’s legal,” says MSS’s Michael Mealling.

About 300 CanSats are expected to fly at once aboard MSS’s XA (eXtreme Altitude) 1.0 suborbital rocket, which is still being designed. The 22-foot-tall rocket is planned to make its first commercial flight by the spring of 2008. After a 43-second burn, the XA rocket will achieve an altitude of some 60 miles straight up. After the CanSats are exposed to microgravity for several minutes, the craft will return to the launch site. As soon as one rocket blasts off and lands, another will be ready for firing within hours.

So, if you want to send Angela’s ashes or your pet salamander for a spaced-out ride, start saving your dimes. . .and then dollars. You see, the $99 price tag is only an introductory offer; later flights will cost at least twice as much. Still, it’s a cheap way to have a blast! For more information, go to http://masten-space.com/.

When was clothing invented? Well, statues and pottery dating to about 27,000 years ago show evidence of woven clothing. And sewing needles might date to about 40,000 years ago. Now anthropologists Mark Stoneking and his colleagues at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany, are trying to push that date back even further.

Stoneking’s interest in early fashion began after he had learned that a child at his son’s school had lice. Suddenly, the light bulb of his imagination turned on. Maybe lice, he thought, could solve the “first clothing” mystery.

You see, there are two kinds of lice: head lice (Pediculus humanus capitis), which live and feed on people’s scalps; and body lice (Pediculus humanus corporis), which feed on skin but live only in clothing. “That distinction,” Stoneking told Science News, “probably arose when humans began to make frequent use of clothing.” By comparing the DNA of human lice from around the world, the researchers estimate that body lice arose from head lice about 72,000 years ago. . .give or take 42,000 years.

Not everyone agrees. Consider, for instance, Neanderthals, a species of early humans who lived in northern Europe 500,000 years ago . Since temperatures plummeted there in the winter, Ian Tattersall, who studies Stone Age beings at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, can’t imagine Neanderthals surviving without wearing animal hides or some other sort of clothing. So the head-scratching debate over early clothing is not over.

That said, we’re itching to hear from you. Let us know when you think humans first gained a fashion sense. Send your thoughts to “Fashion Bug,” ODYSSEY, 30 Grove St., Suite C, Peterborough, NH 03458, or email them to odyssey@cobblestone.mv.com. The first 10 responders will receive a unisex faux scarab necklace to wear.

You see, these shells, which have been in the care of the Natural History Museum in London and at the Musee de l’Homme in Paris since the early 20th century, have just been identified as the earliest known example of jewelry; the shells, it is believed, were strung together to form a necklace What’s more, these shells date to 100,000 years ago. That means we humans have been creating jewelry at least 25,000 years earlier than previously believed.

What does that mean? It means, 100,000-year-old humans were using the same type of sophisticated (creative) thought that we see in humans today! It also means that origins of modern thought need to be pushed back by at least 25,000 years!

“Humans were all over Africa and the Middle East by 100,000 years ago,” professor Chris Stringer of the Natural History Museum told Science News. Stringer believes that modern behavior was turning up all over that range. “This must go even further back,” he said, “ though we don’t know how much further back or to what place. If people were using beads, they were using them to convey a message about themselves,” Professor Stringer said. “I believe that implies there was language, which does much the same thing.”

Superman's leaps may soon have to be greater than a single bound if he plans to hop over buildings in Kuwait's future City of Silk. According to Architects' Journal, the Kuwaiti government has asked the London-based architecture firm Eric Kuhne and Associates to draw up plans for a skyscraper that could house 7,000 people.

Although the designs have yet to be made public, blueprints show the record-breaking structure to be almost twice the height of the world's tallest building -- the Taipei 101 in Taiwan, which stands at 1,670 feet. The 0.6-mile-tall skyscraper will also dwarf Burj Dubai, a building under construction in Dubai, which is expected to stand 2,300–2,600 feet tall once it's completed in 2008.

The construction will not be without extraordinary challenges. "As a building gets taller you need more lifts [elevators], but that can consume more of the core of the building," Mohsen Zikri, a skyscraper expert with the UK engineering company Arup, told New Scientist magazine. The solution, he says, could be to use double-decker -- or even triple-decker -- lifts instead of conventional ones. The design of such a tall building would also have to prevent wind from whirling around it, as this could produce powerful windstorms on the ground. Finally, Zikri notes that construction work would pose a massive logistical challenge.

As for the cost of construction. . .think sky high -- say, about $150 billion!

A California teenager wants to clear the air with this scoop.

Ryan Kim, son of Long Beach allergy researcher Kenneth Kim, has conducted a study that demonstrates how an English ivy plant can rid the air of mold and other nasty pollutants.

Kim presented his findings at the 2005 annual meeting of the American College of Allergy, Asthma, and Immunology. By his side was his paper's co-author, Hilary Spyers-Duran, an allergy investigator at West Coast Clinical Trials in Long Beach, CA, where Kim's father is chief executive officer.

In his study, Kim put moldy bread and dog feces in individual containers and measured how many particles spread into the air. He then placed an English ivy plant in each container, recorded what happened, and repeated the experiment.

The results? Over a period of 12 hours, the ivy plant reduced mold particulates by 78.5 percent and airborne particles of fecal matter by an average of more than 94 percent. The results appear to give the best commercial air purifiers a run for their money. In clinical tests, the best commercial air-purifying systems have reduced airborne mold particles by 72 to 84 percent.

Should your parents rush out and buy an ivy plant for your home? Well, beware! Jeffrey Siegel, an assistant professor of civil engineering at the University of Texas at Austin -- who specializes in indoor air quality -- says that English ivy is toxic when eaten and shouldn't be placed near small children or pets. Siegel also notes that Kim's study examined only what Ivy plants do in containers, not in entire rooms -- where commercial air purifiers are tested.

Until more research is done on the effects of ivy in the home, Siegel suggests that if you want to combat indoor pollution, keep a clean house.

Lichen, that grayish organism whose presence on tree bark is a great indicator of clean air, can survive in the harsh vacuum of outer space! That's the recent finding from a European Space Agency (ESA) experiment (called the Foton project) that flew aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft May.

The experiment was the brainchild of Leopoldo Sancho from the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain. Sancho placed two species of lichen -- Rhizocarpon geographicum and Xanthoria elegans -- in a capsule that was timed to open in Earth orbit. The lichens were then exposed for 15 days not only to the vacuum of space, but also to extreme ultraviolet radiation and temperatures ranging from minus 68 degrees Fahrenheit on the night side of Earth to 68 degrees F on the sunlit side. The capsule then sealed itself and returned to Earth.

How did the lichens react to their outer-space journey?

René Demets, ESA's Foton project chief scientist, told New Scientist magazine that, in space, the lichens became dormant. But once they got back to Earth, "they returned to their normal activity and their DNA appeared not to have been damaged. To our big surprise, everything went fine after the flight. The lichens were in exactly the same shape as before flight." How is that possible?

Lichens are a combination of algae and fungi, arranged in layers of cells that grow one on top of the other. Perhaps, Demets says, the outer layers protect the inner cells from damage. He also notes that lichens have a tough mineral coating that could protect them from the harmful effects of intense ultraviolet radiation. Whatever, lichens are now the most complex forms of life known to have survived prolonged exposure to space. Hmmm, this means that -- lichen or not -- perhaps it is possible that life can be transported between planets on, say, an asteroid or comet.

In everyday experience, if we put more noise in, we get more noise out. For instance, one person yelling is not as noisy as 100 people yelling. But noise on the microscopic level might behave in just the opposite way.

Those are the bizarre and paradoxical findings of molecular biologist Jose M. G. Vilar (Princeton University) and Spanish physicist Miguel Rubí (University of Barcelona). They found that in some microscopic systems, like living cells, adding noise can make the system less noisy. This microscopic "noise" mostly involves random fluctuations in the flow of particles in systems like cell membranes. Physicists call these fluctuations "noise" because, like static in a stereo system, they interfere with an otherwise steady signal.

In a cell, noisy static is created by fluctuations in the flow of particles through so-called ion channels in its membrane. Imagine that the particles in that flow consist of "whole people" and "half people," and that the ion channel operates like a door. It turns out that this door will only open to let whole people through. The rate of particle flow, then, depends on how frequently the door is opened to let whole people through. The system becomes noisy when the door opens and closes, again and again, with slight variations.

But the researchers found that if they jostle some molecules around (adding some further noise to the system), the flow rate becomes smoother and more regular. Why?

Apparently, when a cell is given the molecular jitters, the doors of ion channels become, in a sense, pinned against doorjambs. So the noise levels lessen while the flow of whole people through the doors continues unimpeded.

Although the findings are mostly theoretical, Doering says that the "bottom line is that noise can be extremely beneficial. It can act as a lubricant to make things work better and smoother."

Yes, soon our shoes might tell us when it’s time to watch TV.

It’s true! Gillian Swan, a British senior majoring in design at Brunel University in London, has developed sports shoes that calculate whether their owner has done enough exercise to warrant time in front of the television.

Swan created the shoes, which she dubbed Square Eyes, as a final-year design project. As reported in New Scientist, the shoes contain an electronic pressure sensor and a tiny computer chip to record how many steps the wearer has taken in a day. A wireless transmitter passes the information to a receiver connected to a television, and this decides how much evening viewing time the wearer deserves and will be allowed to watch.

The design was inspired by a desire to combat growing obesity among British teenagers. Once a user has used up his or her daily allowance of television gained through exercise, the TV automatically switches off. The only way to watch more TV is to, well, get in step! How many steps? Swan says that every 100 steps recorded by the Square Eyes shoes equate to precisely one minute of TV time. So you do the math!

Okay, we can all go to bed now and get some sleep, thanks to Jeff Garner, a mollusk biologist at the Alabama Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, and his colleague Stephanie Clark.

You see, you've probably been staying awake at night wondering what ever happened to the cobble elimia and nodulose Coosa River water snails and their pal, the Cahaba pebble snail -- all of which have long been thought to be extinct. But they're not! Garner and Clark rediscovered the three snail species in their respective rivers.

Now, for a bit of trivia: Alabama is known to be the nation's top spot for extinct and imperiled snails and mussels in riverbeds. That's because from 1917 to 1967, many species were killed off as dams were built along the Coosa River, creating a series of reservoirs. But some of those little devils were hiding in the streams between reservoirs, where the Coosa River retains some of its original habitat. Before Clark found it in one of her dives, the Cahaba pebble snail -- round, yellow, only about a quarter of an inch long -- had not been spotted since 1965. Actually, Clark didn't know what she found immediately. "Behold, there was this oddball snail under a rock," she says. As for Garner, he knew immediately. In fact, one of the snails was his favorite, because it "sort of has teardrops around the periphery" of the shell.

Is anything really perfect? Just ask Japanese archaeologist Sakuji Yoshimura (Waseda University, Tokyo). He and his team have just found "a perfect mummy" sealed in a wooden coffin that they dug up in northern Egypt.

Before they stuck their shovels into the sand, the mummy's tomb had been "undisturbed" for more than 3,500 years. The coffin, they discovered, was painted yellow and inscribed with hieroglyphics in light blue. When they lifted the coffin's lid, they found their mummy wearing a mask painted blue and red. Most mummies discovered have faded or muted colors on their coffins or masks, but this one still retained its vivid hues. Therefore, Yoshimura says, the find is of high academic value. It is "a perfect mummy," he says, one that has escaped robbery and other damage.

Yoshimura also says that the hieroglyphics reveal what's behind the mask. . .the mummified remains of a man who was an administrative officer some 3,500 to 4,000 years ago. This makes him older than the era of Tutankhamen, the pharaoh of ancient Egypt who ruled from 1336 to1327 B.C. All we need now is a name for this perfect mummy man. Send your suggestions to "Mummy Dearest," c/o ODYSSEY, 30 Grove St., Suite C, Peterborough, NH 03458.

Play sports? Want to win your game? Wear red.

If you believe the results of a study by Russell A. Hill and Robert A. Barton (University of Durham, England), athletes wearing red uniforms experience a slight advantage over those wearing other colors.

As reported in Scientific American, Hill and Barton analyzed the outcomes of four sporting events in the 2004 Summer Olympic Games: boxing, tae kwon do, Greco-Roman wrestling, and freestyle wrestling. (The participants were randomly assigned either red or blue outfits.) The results? The athletes in red won 60 percent of the time.

The sporting events mentioned above are all one-on-one competitions. Does "wearing red" also affect large team sports? Apparently so!

The scientists also analyzed results from the Euro 2004 international soccer tournament. The teams that had red shirts as one uniform of choice performed better, and scored more goals, when playing in red versus when sporting white or blue uniforms.

What's so hot about the color red? Hill and Barton believe that the link between red and success is itself linked to the evolutionary psychology of color. For a variety of animals, the authors note, red coloration correlates to male dominance and heightened drive. An athlete wearing red, then, may psychologically feel superior (and therefore behave more confidently) than an opponent wearing a more submissive color. The reverse is true for the opponent, who might subconsciously feel inferior.

Of course, more research needs to be done, but one thing is for sure: If their survey is conclusive, all teams might in the future select to wear red uniforms. That would be pretty confusing, even though the playing field would be more even.

Yes, soon our shoes might tell us when it's time to watch TV.

It's true! Gillian Swan, a British senior majoring in design at Brunel University in London, has developed sports shoes that calculate whether their owner has done enough exercise to warrant time in front of the television.

Swan created the shoes, which she dubbed Square Eyes, as a final-year design project. As reported in New Scientist, the shoes contain an electronic pressure sensor and a tiny computer chip to record how many steps the wearer has taken in a day. A wireless transmitter passes the information to a receiver connected to a television, and this decides how much evening viewing time the wearer deserves and will be allowed to watch.

The design was inspired by a desire to combat growing obesity among British teenagers. Once a user has used up his or her daily allowance of television gained through exercise, the TV automatically switches off. The only way to watch more TV is to, well, get in step! How many steps? Swan says that every 100 steps recorded by the Square Eyes shoes equate to precisely one minute of TV time. So you do the math!

How do you solve the United States' dependency on foreign oil?

Turkey droppings!

Yes, a company in Benson, MN, is close to finishing the construction of a new power plant that will burn 90 percent turkey dung and create clean power for 55,000 homes. It will be the first large-scale plant of its type in the country and the largest in the world.

The 55-megawatt plant will burn 700,000 tons of dung a year and produce fertilizer as a byproduct. What's more, the production of power will not create any more carbon dioxide than would otherwise be emitted if the dung decomposed naturally.

In case you're wondering, Charles Grecco, of HH Media, LLC, an investment bank that helped arrange $202 million in financing for the plant, says that turkey dung is prized over pig excrement and cow chips. Why? Well, isn't it obvious? Turkey dung is drier, so it burns better. And, Grecco says, "there's a lot of it."

Some 2,000 years ago, 10 people lost their heads at Mexico's Pyramid of the Moon. No, they didn't turn luny They literally lost their heads -- as in decapitation. So say archaeologists who found the gruesome tomb at Teotihuacan, the first major city built in the Americas.

Saburo Sugiyama, a lead scientist at the dig, says that the discovery represents the remains of a ceremony that "created a horrible scene of bloodshed, with sacrificed people and animals." The researchers found not only 10 headless bodies, thrown haphazardly and carelessly in the tomb, but also the bound carcasses of eagles, dogs, and other animals. It looks as though Mexico's famous Pyramid of the Moon -- one of the leading tourist attractions in the area -- may have been the site of horrifically gory sacrifices.

"It is hard to believe that the ritual consisted of clean, symbolic performances," Sugiyama said. "This foundation ritual must have been one of the most terrifying acts recorded archeologically in Mesoamerica."

Why here? Sugiyama says that the Pyramid of the Moon was a significant site for celebrating state power. The sacrifices, he believes, were carried out during a time of expansion, suggesting the government wanted to symbolize growing sacred political power.

Interestingly, the site, which lies about 35 miles northeast of Mexico City, recently experienced some modern growing pains: Wal-Mart built a new store a half-mile away from the recently discovered tomb. Talk about a close shave.

After studying pyramid structures for some 20 years, French Egyptologists Gilles Dormion and Jean Yves Verd'hurt believe that there's a previously unknown chamber in Egypt's Great Pyramid at Giza. Now the researchers want to bore new holes in the 4,600-year-old structure -- in the hope that they are right. But Zahi Hawass, director of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities (who stands guard over the pyramid) doesn't want any more drill-happy theoreticians near the famous monument.

Dormion and Verd'hurt describe the hidden chamber in their book, The Room of Cheops. Apparently, in 1988, the team used radar to discover what appears to be a passage and a system of closures, which may lead to a secret chamber. Now they want to verify their findings.

But Hawass has yet to budge. "There are 300 theories concerning hidden rooms and other things inside the pyramid," he says, "but if I let them all test their theories, they will do untold damage to the pyramid, which was built with the blood of Egyptians."

Dormion and Verd'hurt haven't given up hope, though, and dream of the chance to investigate their theory. What would you do? Let them dig or not? Send your thoughts to "Dig It?," ODYSSEY, 30 Grove St., Suite C, Peterborough, NH 03458.

Let's begin at the beginning. In 360 B.C., a Greek philosopher named Plato wrote about Atlantis -- an island in the Atlantic Ocean where an advanced civilization developed some 11,500 years ago. He also tells us that Atlantis sank beneath the surface of the sea, apparently, the result of some cataclysmic natural disaster. For thousands of years now, researchers of all types have debated the existence of Atlantis. Was it a legend? Was it real? If so, where is (or was) it? @dept2:Atlantis exists anywhere and everywhere (especially in the minds of believers). It has been “located” at thousands of different sites, including under the Sahara Desert, 900 miles west of the Portuguese coast, at the bottom of the Caribbean Sea, and in southern Spain.

Now a Swedish geographer, Ulf Erlingsson (University College, Galway, Ireland), says that Atlantis is Ireland!

That's right, Erlingsson is just about certain that the Emerald Isle is the lost world. He bases his theory on geographical data, claiming that the measurements, geography, and landscape of Atlantis (as described by Plato) match those of Ireland almost exactly. Atlantis was 300 miles long; Ireland is 300 miles long. Atlantis was 200 miles wide; Ireland is 200 miles wide. Atlantis had a central plain surrounded by mountains; Ireland has a central plain surrounded by mountains.

How, then, did the myth that Atlantis sank come about? Erlingsson has the answer -- or so he believes. Around 6,100 B.C., he says, a monstrous wave flooded Dogger Bank, an isolated shoal in the North Sea that connected Britain and Denmark. What does that have to do with Ireland? Well, nothing really, except that Erlingsson believes that the Irish, over time, confused the sinking of the shoal with the sinking of Atlantis.

Still don't get it? Don't feel bad. Mark Hennessy, an Irish geographer from Trinity College in Dublin, says that Erlingsson's theory is "extremely far-fetched." And Colin Breen, a lecturer in maritime archaeology at the University of Ulster, says, "We know what the seabed around Ireland looks like. If there were a lost city there, we would know about it."

But if you believe that Erlingsson is right, send your reasons to "Aer-lantis!," ODYSSEY, 30 Grove St., Suite C, Peterborough, NH 03458.

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