HOW ASPARAGUS BEETLES AFFIX THEIR EGGS TO THE PLANT Wax is slippery stuff, a characteristic that many plants employ to keep nasty things off them. The needlelike branches of asparagus plants, for example, are covered with wax crystals, which make the branches practically unwettable and keep things from sticking. Or so one would think. Yet the asparagus beetle, Crioceris asparagi, manages to glue its eggs to these branches. And it does it the hard way: the oval eggs are perpendicular to the branch, with only the smallest area of contact. Scientists in Germany who study biomaterials have now figured out how the beetle does it. Dagmar Voigt of the Max-Planck Institute for Metals Research in Stuttgart and Stanislav Gorb of the University of Kiel say it secretes a compound, probably containing proteins, that has surfactant qualities -- it spreads out rather than beading up. The compound forms a composite with the wax crystals, and as it dries it forms a glue that keeps the egg stuck. The findings are reported in The Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. Voigt said the long-term goal of the research was to protect plants. Knowing how insects glue their eggs may lead to the breeding of plants with different surface characteristics, or to the development of sprays that could dissolve the glue so the eggs fall off. PLUME OF POLLUTANTS FROM A SMALL AIRPORT For people who live near an airport, noise is a major concern. But air quality can be an issue, too: after all, aircraft engines produce emissions on the ground as well as in the air. Air quality around airports has not been studied much, however, and when it has, the focus has been on larger airports, which usually have buffer zones separating them from neighborhoods. A study by Shishan Hu and Suzanne E. Paulson of the University of California, Los Angeles, and colleagues is one of the first to analyze the air at a small airport nestled in a neighborhood. The researchers sampled air around Santa Monica Airport, a general aviation field near Los Angeles that averages 80 arrivals daily of propeller planes and corporate jets. As they report in Environmental Science and Technology, they found high concentrations of ultrafine particles of organic carbon and sooty black carbon in a plume extending more than 2,000 feet downwind of the airport. The plume was longer than those typically found around highways in daytime. Paulson said that while epidemiological studies had shown that there were health risks with these kinds of emissions by vehicles, there had not been similar analyses done around airports. 'Without epidemiological data, it's hard to really know what those are doing to people in the neighborhood,' Paulson said. 'That said, I wouldn't personally choose to live there.' PEOPLE HEAR WITH THEIR SKIN AS WELL AS THEIR EARS We hear with our ears, right? Yes, but scientists have known for years that we also hear with our eyes. In a landmark study published in 1976, researchers found that people integrated both auditory cues and visual ones, like mouth and face movements, when they heard speech. That study, and many that followed, raised this fundamental question about speech perception: If humans can integrate different sensory cues, do they do so through experience (through seeing countless speaking faces over time), or has evolution hard-wired them to do it? A new study that looks at a different set of sensory cues adds to a growing body of evidence that suggests such integration is innate. In a paper in Nature, Bryan Gick and Donald Derrick of the University of British Columbia report that people can hear with their skin. The researchers had subjects listen to spoken syllables while hooked up to a device that would simultaneously blow a tiny puff of air onto the skin of their hand or neck. The syllables included 'pa' and 'ta,' which produce a brief puff from the mouth when spoken, and 'da' and 'ba,' which do not produce puffs. They found that when listeners heard 'da' or 'ba' while a puff of air was blown onto their skin, they perceived the sound as 'ta' or 'pa.' Gick said the findings were similar to those from the 1976 study, in which visual cues trumped auditory ones -- subjects listened to one syllable but perceived another because they were watching video of mouth movements corresponding to the second syllable. In his study, he said, cues from sensory receptors on the skin trumped the ears as well. 'Our skin is doing the hearing for us,' he said. Gick noted that it would normally be rare that someone actually sensed a puff of air produced by another, although people might occasionally sense their own puffs. Either way, he said, the stimulus is very subtle, 'which suggests it is very powerful.' 'What's so persuasive about this particular effect,' he added, 'is that people are picking up on this information that they don't know they are using.' That supports the idea that integrating different sensory cues is innate. Gick said the finding also suggested that other sensory cues might be at work in speech perception -- that, as he put it, 'we are these fantastic perception machines that take in all the information available to us and integrate it seamlessly.' 