One can imagine a biological need for plants and animals to respond to changing climate. So as it gets warmer, for example, evolutionary pressure might favor birds that lay their eggs sooner in the spring. But Daniel Nussey and a team at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology and the University of Edinburgh's Institute of Evolutionary Biology found a much more interesting and subtle thing happening with a Dutch population of Parus major - the great tit.

For Parus major, climate change is a problem. As Elizabeth Pennisi explained in the Science news piece, the birds time their egg-laying so the chicks hatch when there are gobs of caterpillars to eat. With climate warming, that happens sooner in the year.

One can easily imagine a rather simple drift resulting, favoring earlier egg-layers. But the researchers found something more complex going on. The birds were evolving toward a greater "plasticity" in their egg-laying behavior. Rather than a fixed genetic switch that allowed them to lay eggs earlier, evolution was favoring birds that seemed to have more flexibility in their egg-laying in response to changes in climate. As Pennisi put it:

Most of the birds did not adapt and maintained their original schedule, and the numbers of surviving offspring have begun to decline. But there were some exceptions. Even in the 1980s, some individuals altered their behavior in accordance with the climate, laying eggs earlier in the warm years and later in the cool years. These climate-attuned females have twice as many surviving offspring.

To Bryan Eastin, Albert Einstein's most interesting idea may be one that was wrong.

It was 1935, and Einstein and two colleagues were trying to make sense of the world of quantum physics. They failed— but in such an interesting way that physicists today still wrestle with the questions they raised.

The year 2005 has been declared the "World Year of Physics" in honor of work Einstein did a century ago. They call 1905 Einstein's annus mirabilis— the miracle year. Four papers written in rapid succession that year laid the foundations for modern physics.

In the years that followed, Einstein's brilliance made him an icon, his name synonymous with genius.

To really understand the depth of Einstein's insight, it is instructive to wander into Eastin's cubicle in a ramshackle wing of the University of New Mexico's old Physics and Astronomy building.

There, in a tattered three-ring binder, Eastin is working out the implications of what might be considered Einstein's great mistake. Such was the power of Einstein's intellect that a new branch of physics— "quantum information theory"— has developed around it.

Eastin, a 27-year-old UNM graduate student, is working on his doctorate in quantum information theory.

Following Einstein down the rabbit hole, Eastin and his colleagues are pointing the way toward a remarkable new type of "quantum computer," far more powerful than the ones we use today.

"Even when he was wrong," said Carl Caves, Eastin's UNM faculty adviser, "he was better than the rest of us."

It always seemed naively obvious to me that there must have been someone who got there first with the information, before the market reflected it, and made a killing. The question really seemed to be - how do we get to be the one who gets there first?

I was reminded of this today by James Annan's economist joke:

Two economists are walking down the road, and one says to the other "Hey, do you see that? It looks like a 10 pound note in the gutter over there. I'm going over to get it". The second replies "Don't bother, if it really was a tenner someone would already have picked it up".

The Orlando Sentinel reports on an effort four years ago to eliminate citrus canker, a disease that was plaguing Florida's lucrative citrus orchards:

Researchers worked with a rabbi and a cardiologist to test "Celestial Drops," promoted as a canker inhibitor because of its "improved fractal design," "infinite levels of order" and "high energy and low entropy."

But the cure proved useless against canker. That's because it was water -- possibly, mystically blessed water.

The initial push came from (Katherine) Harris, now a U.S. House representative and candidate for U.S. Senate. Harris, the granddaughter of legendary citrus baron Ben Hill Griffin Jr., said she was introduced to one of the product's promoters, New York Rabbi Abe Hardoon, in 2000.

I love to write about interesting people, and Bob Cordwell is one of the most interesting people I've run across in a while:

"Think of a circle with a lot of points on it— in fact, 79 points." Eighteen-year-old Bob Cordwell stands at a chalkboard heading cheerfully into terrain that would make most of us uncomfortable.

For Cordwell, though, mathematics is a familiar landscape, like the keyboard for a piano prodigy, or the hardwood for a teenage basketball star.

"That's a fairly sad circle of points," he said with a laugh at the lopsided orb he drew, picking at it to smooth out the curve.

Points on a circle, and the lines joining them, are central to a mathematical proof the recent Manzano High School valedictorian worked out last summer.

"Obviously," Cordwell said, "there have to be copies of every edge length."

Well, no, it isn't obvious to most of us. But Cordwell's gift, and his charm, is that it is to him.

The United States' current approach to maintaining its nuclear arsenal "looks increasingly unsustainable," according to an internal report by senior officials at the nation's three nuclear weapons labs.

The nuclear weapons program's future costs exceed the available budget, and the effort to maintain aging warheads is forcing the nation to retain a larger nuclear arsenal than would otherwise be needed, the report concludes.

Completed last month, the report's findings mirror in some respects those of a key House of Representatives subcommittee.

The House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee issued a report last month calling for a sweeping reorganization of the U.S. nuclear weapons complex as part of its proposed 2006 Department of Energy budget.

You should go to Amazon and buy this book, because Richard Preston says it is "beautifully researched and sharply intelligent." I haven't read it yet, but I do know that Al's a little homely, but sharply intelligent.

Here's a blog entry in which the author of one trashes the other.

Freakonomics, the blog, seems promising.