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On the Cover

November-December 2007 Volume 95, Number 6

The tender leaves of this young spinach plant from King George County, Virginia, will make a tasty and nutritious salad for some lucky diner, but it's difficult to view them without thinking about recent headlines and nationwide recalls of spinach from three California counties. ...

FEATURE ARTICLES

Safer Salads

Jorge M. Fonseca, Sadhana Ravishankar

Contaminated fruits and vegetables are more common than ever. Why? And what can consumers do to protect themselves?

Breeding Better Buildings *

Rafal Kicinger, Tomasz Arciszewski

Civil engineers may be able to design more innovative and improved structures by borrowing from genetics

The Origins of Larvae *

Donald I. Williamson, Sonya E. Vickers

Mismatches between the forms of adult animals and their larvae may reflect fused genomes, expressed in sequence in complex life histories

The Other Evolution Wars *

David Kaiser

Creationists have long battled with geologists and biologists, but they have only lately taken on physicists and cosmologists

* access restricted to members and subscribers

SCIENTISTS’ BOOKSHELF

The Power of Symmetry

David W. Farmer

A review of Why Beauty is Truth: A History of Symmetry, by Ian Stewart. Stewart provides an entertaining historical account of mathematical symmetry from ancient Babylon to modern string theory, and of the people who did the math along the way

See all book reviews for this issue.

DEPARTMENTS

COMPUTING SCIENCE

Computing in a Parallel Universe

Brian Hayes

Multicore chips could bring about the biggest change in computing since the microprocessor

MACROSCOPE

From Steam Engines to Life?

Mark Haw

What is the state of thermodynamics on the 100th anniversary of the death of Lord Kelvin?

SIGHTINGS

Found Objects

Felice Frankel

The creator of an award-winning digital photograph of the seaweed Chondrus crispus discusses imaging of herbarium collections and the process by which this particular image was made

MARGINALIA

The Inimitable Caroline

J. Donald Fernie

The sister of British astronomer William Herschel was herself a capable and pioneering celestial observer

ENGINEERING

The Simplest Thing *

Henry Petroski

The story of the humble toothpick provides a paradigm for nearly every manufactured thing

SCIENCE OBSERVER

Penetrating Winds

David Schneider

Might wind turbines one day provide a large fraction of the electric power on the grid?