Waste water preserves food WASTE water from olive oil production could be an abundant source of cheap natural preservatives for food and cosmetics, say researchers in Italy. Each year, Italy's olive oil industry generates more than 800 000 tonnes of waste water. Olive mills use huge amounts of warm water to wash the olive paste. So all the water-soluble … News
A stellar performance A COMBINATION of chance, unusual dedication, and growing antipodean cultural identity have led a New Zealander and an Australian independently to discover a nova—the rare event of an exploding star. One Saturday evening, Alan Gilmore of the University of Canterbury's Mt John Observatory on the South Island of New Zealand and Australian amateur astronomer Peter … Opinion
War of words HUMANS are quintessentially verbal creatures. Ours is a world of words—so much so that it is impossible even to imagine life without language. No wonder, then, that anthropologists are obsessed with finding out why and how language evolved, and, equally, linguists are obsessed with trying to understand how each of us comes to acquire this … Features
Reality check Pandora's Hope by Bruno Latour, Harvard, $19.95/£12.50, ISBN 067465336X (paperback) B-52 BOMBERS do not fly, Bruno Latour cordially insists. And if you ask Latour, who is Professor of the Sociology of Innovation at the School of Mines in Paris, whether microbes existed before Louis Pasteur discovered them in 1865, he may well answer that it … Books & Arts
Feedback SOME people seem determined to take all the fun out of fondling fruit. Engineering students at the University of Delaware have invented a computer-controlled sensor for testing how ripe water melons are. It could, according to William J. Watson, executive director of the US National Watermelon Association, result in huge savings for the water melon … Regulars