Great tits; Stronger Than Steel, no creep; Krill Kill

[Taro Toporific]

NYTimes.com > Science 2003/07/22/
Too Polite to Shout

...Great tits have three to nine song types, and are known to adjust their songs in response to interactions with neighbors. So perhaps it's unsurprising that they can modify their songs in response to noise. The researchers say this is the first evidence of how a human-altered environment can change the communication signals of a bird in the wild.

Stronger Than Steel

If you want to make concrete stronger, builders know, you add steel bars as reinforcement. What's less well known is that you can do something similar with steel -- add tiny particles to it to make it less susceptible to creep, the slow sagging that can take place in conditions of relatively low stress but high temperatures.

Creep-resistant steel is used in applications like the boilers and turbines in power plants. But making it is complicated and, in many cases, so costly as to be impractical. The particles have to be dispersed evenly within the steel matrix using special alloying techniques.

Now, researchers in Japan have found a way to make the steel with conventional processing methods. Nanometer-scale carbonitride particles are used, but rather than being evenly dispersed, they migrate to specific vulnerable regions --- boundary areas between other elements of the matrix.

The researchers report in Nature that the steel they have created takes twice as long to rupture as the most creep-resistant steel currently in use. Their finding may eventually lead to the production of less expensive high-strength steels.

Killing the Krill
There's little secret about the fate of much of the world's krill, those small crustaceans that exist in huge swarms in the Southern Ocean and elsewhere. They wind up sieved through the baleen of a whale ...