Research

Investigations
> > The discovery of discovery, or our debt to Copernicus
Howard Margolis has made a bold move. Not only has the public-policy professor stepped away from his discipline by writing a book about science, but he's also departed entirely from the prevailing stance among science historians: that the Scientific Revolution didn't exist.
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> > Reading Clothes
In the punishing heat of the African Sahara, paleontologist Paul Sereno has uncovered the remains of a giant prehistoric crocodile that dwarfs its modern counterparts. Living during the Cretaceous period, Sarcosuchus imperator ("flesh crocodile emperor") grew to a length of 40 feet and weighed eight tons, twice as much as a full-grown elephant. In contrast, modern crocodiles rarely exceed 14 feet and weigh no more than half a ton.
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> > Touchy text
Leave it to a Brit to bungle the world's most famous sex manual. Explorer and scholar Sir Richard Burton's 1883 translation of the Kamasutra, says Wendy Doniger, contains "lots of little errors that really start to add up." Burton mistranslated passages on the G-spot, downgraded women's role in sex, and diminished the importance of their pleasure, argues Doniger-who sets the record straight this spring with a new translation from Oxford University Press, co-translated with Harvard University's Sudhir Kakar.
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> > Hand jive
Expressive talkers have an ally: Susan Goldin-Meadow, professor of psychology, believes grandma was wrong when she told you not to flap your hands when telling a story. "Talking with our hands may actually make thinking easier," says Goldin-Meadow, who recently studied such motions with Howard Nusbaum, associate professor and chair of psychology, Spencer Kelly, AM'98, PhD'99, and doctoral student Susan Wagner. The group reported their findings in the November Psychological Science.
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Coursework
> > The fruitless crown of tyranny offers rich food for thought
Two professors, two classic texts - Macbeth and Richard III - and a room of serious but not solemn students. The seminar room tucked under the eaves of Foster Hall has no doubt been painted once or twice since Robert Maynard Hutchins last roamed the quadrangles. The 1960s and 1970s have long since come and gone-leaving a trail of burnt-orange upholstery on the mismatched chairs circling the rectangular table that claims most of the room's square footage. The gathering students include a bleached blond (later in the quarter his cropped hair will be hennaed a dark auburn) and several persons with September-in-New-York stories.
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Citations
> > A big "nano-nano" to tiny wires
What happens when you coat a layer of two basic plastics with silver? Nanoscopic wires assemble themselves in numerous, parallel, and continuous lines. In the December 13 Nature, physics professor Heinrich Jaeger and Ward Lopes, SM'99, PhD'01, describe their discovery and a technique for precisely controlling the wires' growth.
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Syllabus
No surprises here. "The syllabus is simple," Ralph Lerner announces. "All we're reading is Macbeth and Richard III. The title is grander than the performance." Lerner and Nathan Tarcov, with whom he's team teaching Shakespeare on Tyranny, have a decided preference in texts. "We have an edition," says Lerner, holding up a yellow-and-red paperback. "It's this one. Get this one." Tarcov elaborates, "Reading a Shakespeare play in the Arden edition is really a different experience-you learn the play in a different way."
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