Apparently the tradition of great engineers not having college degrees goes back 2,500 years. Harvard classics researcher Mark Schiefsky has shown that many great technical innovations of antiquity, such as the balance and steelyard, were created by craftspeople with no theoretical training in mathematics. A steelyard is a balance with unequal arms, whose operation is based on ancient mathematician Archimedes' law of the lever. Schiefsky poo-poos the idea that you need a fancy law to make a steelyard, and in fact has proven that steelyards were in use long before Archimedes explained it.

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With fears of an avian flu pandemic on the rise, a group at Georgia Tech has made it easy for researchers in the field to identify and analyze the virus using nothing more than a laptop and a small suitcase-sized biosensor (demonstrated by scientist Jie Xu at left). Usually it takes several hours in a wet lab to identify strains of avian flu, but the new biosensor works in minutes. Now researchers can rapidly determine whether a sick bird is carrying the dangerous H5N1 strain of the virus that has occasionally jumped to humans.

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