A Redressed Poet That Seems Living, How to Make Him Sing

How to Make Requests That Overcome Obstacles to Compliance

Speakers who request information from others often face potential obstacles to getting that information. Their addressees may not know the information, may be unwilling to give it, or may not remember it. In three experiments we show that speakers estimate the greatest potential obstacle to compliance and try to overcome it through their choice of indirect, or conditional, request. I f speakers...

How Do Birds Sing?

How to build robots that make friends and influence people

In order to interact socially with a human, a robot must convey intentionality, that is, the human must believe that the robot has beliefs, desires, and intentions. We have constructed a robot which exploits natural human social tendencies to convey intentionality through motor actions and facial expressions. We present results on the integration of perception, attention, motivation, behavior, ...

How to make a helix

lant stems twist and turn with the help of aberrant microtubule structures, according to results from Siripong Thitamadee, Kazuko Tuchihara, and Takashi Hashimoto (Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Ikoma, Japan). The insights come from studies of Arabidopsis thaliana , which normally grows straight. Hashimoto’s team isolated lefty1 and lefty2 —which have left-handed helical growth—as su...

How to make a lysosome

How to make a lysosome oated vesicles had been described as early as 1961. These small membranous structures were characterized by a highly organized layer of material on the cytoplasmic surface, “but no one knew their function,” says Marilyn Farquhar, whose lab at the time had become interested in how the Golgi complex helped produce enzymes. Roth and Porter (1964) had provided evidence that c...