INSECTS WINNING RESISTANCE BATTLE — Insects appear to be winning the costly battle — $500,000 is spent each year on control — to keep them in check. Resistance to insecticides is now virtually nation-wide according to results of an extensive study.… Resistance can take many forms, research has shown. Some of these are: slow rate of absorption which prevents the insect’s getting a lethal dose of insecticide ... or, avoidance of the insecticide such as is seen by some insects changing their normal habitat. The chemical industry, which produced some 575,000,000 pounds of pesticides in 1958, is constantly attempting to develop effective new insecticides and devise stronger formulations.

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Jovian scars Page 8 of the August 29, 2009, Science News shows a dark impact scar on Jupiter’s surface. Similar dark areas appeared when Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 hit. Why are they dark? Clearly, we are not seeing any “subsurface dirt.” Also, the color cannot be due to some dark underlying gas. Could it be an enormous depression in the cloud cover, the bottom of which the light does not reach? Raul Pettai, Montville, N.J. Glenn Orton of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., responds: Hard as it is to believe when you live on a planet where the dark stuff is almost always below you and where chemical clouds only seem to exist in Pittsburgh, dark stuff is in the atmosphere at impact sites on Jupiter. The particulate debris from Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was dark in the visible range of the electromagnetic spectrum ... and consisted of a combination of ma...

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November 23–24 Global health experts and researchers meet in Toronto to discuss swine flu. Visit new-fields.com/isfc_canada December 5–9 The American Society for Cell Biology hosts its annual meeting in San Diego. See www.ascb.org/meetings December 7–18 World leaders and U.N. representatives meet in Copenhagen to hash out a global climate agreement. Visit en.cop15.dk

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