Sleep inertia is a wonderful phrase, one I'm sure to add to my personal lexicon. "We found the cognitive skills of [some] test subjects were worse upon awakening than after extended sleep deprivation," researcher Kenneth Wright said. That's because in some of us, the cortical areas responsible for problem-solving take longer to wake up than other parts of the brain—as much as 12 hours, in my case.

One of my most pleasant memories from living in Santa Fe was cruising the back road to Albuquerque to visit Brian Damkroger for the first time in John Atkinson's classic Mercedes ragtop. Naturally, it started to rain and we had to pull off the road and wrestle his roof back onto the car. <I>All this Mercedes mechanical sophistication and we still have to do this by hand?</I> I thought.

Jon Iverson got the following email from one of our heroes, the Electronic Freedom Foundation's (EFF) Fred von Lohman.

Qwan Wen and Dmitri B. Chklovski, two theoretical physicists, have constructed a model that explains why vertebrate brains typically contain both gray matter and white matter. The gray contains local networks of neurons, wired by dendrites and mostly nonmyelinated local axons, while the white contains long-range axons that implement global communication via often myelinated axons.

An interesting treatise on anonymity in the Internet age. How much surveillance is too much? How much freedom from it is excessive? If we don't think these questions through for ourselves, somebody else might come up with answers that aren't palatable.

Rushing to get the last bits of the March issue out the door, with just "Letters to the Editor" left to proof, and:

You know that old bromide about science not being able to explain how a bumblebee flies? It's dead&mdash;they did it. As to how bumblebees manage to carry heavy loads, they apparently increase wing stroke amplitude without adjusting frequency, which is already high at 230bps&mdash;just like JA's beloved F1 race cars employ high revolution engines to power them to their mind boggling speeds.