… asks Peter C. Sundt, BSc. in the June 2010) of the journal Elevator World (page 114). Although the article is ‘subscribers only’, an earlier essay by the same author on broadly the same subject (with the same title) is available online here, via The Structural Engineer.

“Most agree that the Great Pyramid at Giza, the last remaining Wonder of the Ancient World, was an amazing job of construction. It’s a great pity, though, that the Egyptians left little or no records of how they did it.”

How might real dogs react to robotic dogs? 

The Sony Corporation has been investigating. Researchers at its Computer Science Laboratory in Paris, which “… engages in fundamental research in cutting edge areas of science that are relevant for pushing the state of the art in computing.” tested the ground by exposing real dogs to AIBO – their now-famous computer-controlled semi-autonomous dog-bot.

Is ‘a pair’ big enough to be called ‘a group’? The tricky subject of dyads has recently been causing considerable professorial debate in the journal ‘Small Group Research’. (Note: the word ‘dyad ‘ is derived from the Greek ‘dýo’, meaning ‘two’.)

“…what happens if a person who prefers to kiss with the head turned to the right attempts to kiss a person who prefers to kiss with the head turned to the left.“?

This potentially awkward social situation is the subject of a new scientific analysis from researchers at the MOVE Research Institute based at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, in the Netherlands.

Although boredom very rarely escapes the notice of those suffering from it, constructing a purely technical instrument for reliably recognising boredom in humans is currently rated as a non-trivial task.

But recently, a team from George Mason University, the University of North Carolina, the Georgia Institute of Technology and the Naval Research Lab, Washington, DC have between them devised a provisional system for doing just that.

“The practice of having Ph.D. graduates employed by the university that trained them, commonly called ‘academic inbreeding’ has long been suspected to be damaging to scholarly practices and achievement ” says a 2010 report in the journal Management Science.