Before we get to the Wagnerian bit, here is an article in today’s Telegraph: Simon Singh: it is too late for me, but libel laws must change for the public good.  This was raised earlier on SciBlog in British Libel Laws - Good for Pseudoscience, but the present one is worth reading for its wider scope.

About once a week, my legges taken me (in a Middle English sort of way) over to lunch in the common room of our Department of Agriculture, where a kindly member of staff leaves copies of journals for us to read.  One that has taken my interest recently is the June 2009 issue of Trends in Ecology and Evolution, in which I have read two reviews whose contents I will summarize.  The first of these is:

The jellyfish joyride: causes, consequences and management responses to a more gelatinous future

by Anthony J. Richardson, Andrew Bakun, Graeme C. Hays and Mark J. Gibbons http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2009.01.010 

Have a look at these from the Times (link below):

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article6931417.ece?slideshowPopup=true&articleId=6931417&nSlide=1&sectionName=NewsEnvironment

As for the H20 clock, would Victor Meldrew have believed it?

It's now almost Midnight in Moscow, so it's already tomorrow in China.  Therefore may I take this opportunity to wish all readers of Scientific Blogging . . .

Blackboard qualitative proofs of the "existence" of, say, an equilibrium between demand and supply - beloved of economists trained in the maths of the department of mathematics rather than the maths of the departments of physics or engineering - are meaningless because they don't tell how big is big.

Now being at present in woolly monkey mode, I could a tail unfold about this comparison between the mathematics of mathematics and the mathematics of physics, but that would distract from the main point.

Scheikunde

is Dutch for Chemistry, and literally means "Separation Science".  Now, if one has a carpet made of 85% polypropylene and 15% wool, how does one go about separating them?

Have no fear!  Nature already has a solution.  I found these cocoons (about half a centimetre long) on the surface of said carpet, and decided to look at them under a video microscope.  This is what we saw:

VIDEO

As you can see, these caterpillars emerged from the cocoons and resumed their analysis, selectively removing the wool fibres from the polypropylene matrix.