“Moments after he had finished the poem and left the room, the roof of the hall collapsed, killing all inside.”

The bodies were so badly mangled that they were hard to recognise, but since Simonides had a clear memory of who had been sitting where, he was able to help the distraught relatives identify the dead. The loci method makes the most of the fact that our spatial memory — our memory for where things are — is usually much better than any other, Buzan explains. But why so, you may wonder. “Perhaps because our memories evolved in the first place to help us find our way through the wild and to locate food stores,” he reasons.

Engaging discussion.

Vitamin A deficiency causes half a million children to become partially or totally blind each year, yet traditional breeding methods have been unsuccessful in producing crops containing a high vitamin A concentration, rues Renu Swarup in one of the essays included in Plant Biotechnology: Methods in Tissue Culture and Gene Transfer, edited by R. Keshavachandran and K. V. Peter (Universities Press).

While many national authorities, therefore, rely on expensive and complicated supplementation programmes to address the problem, some progress is visible on the research front. “Researchers have introduced three new genes into rice — two from daffodils and one from a bacterium (Erwinia eurodovora). The transgenic rice exhibits an increased production of beta-carotene as a precursor to vitamin A and the seed is yellow in colour…,” Swarup reports.

Detailed presentation.

D. MURALI

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