The 2005 devastation of New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina is broadly attributed to the powerful winds and waters that overwhelmed vast sections of the city's network of levees and floodwalls.

But new findings by a professor at Louisiana State University suggest the destruction had begun years earlier, and the culprit was considerably smaller: the Formosan subterranean termite.

Gregg Henderson, an entomologist, says he first detected termites in the seams of New Orleans' floodwalls in 2000, five years before Katrina struck. The seams of the floodwalls were made of waste residue from processed sugar cane, called bagasse, which is a known termite attractant.

After Katrina, Henderson went back to examine floodwall seams. He found significant termite presence and damage in areas where the floodwalls had failed.

Formosan subterranean termites originate in China, where they are well-known for damaging levees, digging and eating networks of tunnels (called piping) that undermine the levees' strength and structural integrity.

Henderson called for immediate action to eradicate — or at least reduce — the termites' impact before the next Katrina happens.

VERBATIM

We don't know what we will find when we run the LHC (Large Hadron Collider). If we did, it wouldn't be worth spending all that time and money on doing the experiment. The most exciting result would be something we don't expect. That has often been our experience in the past when we have pushed our studies to a new energy range.

— English theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking on the Large Hadron Collider, which is scheduled to begin full-scale operations next year

PRIME NUMBERS

52.55 — Percentage of American children living in counties where levels of polluting ozone rose above allowable EPA levels in 2006

25 — Percentage of published astronomy research papers since 1993 that are based upon Hubble Space Telescope data

1:8 — Most efficacious ratio of water to sand for building a sand castle

Sources: childstats.gov; Discover; "The Lore of Averages" by Karen Farrington (2004)

BRAIN SWEAT

This is official testing month for would-be American Mensa members. We're going to pass (in the sense that we're not going to take the test), but we offer here a few questions from Abbie Salny, Mensa's supervisory psychologist:

1. What is the 5-digit number in which the first, third and last digits are the same, the first digit is four less than the second, the last is four less than the fourth and the second and fourth are the same. (Hint: The sum of all of the digits is 33.)

2. Which of the following is not a tree: peach, plum, walnut, linden or banana?

3. What 11-letter word is almost always spelled incorrectly?

'TRUE FACTS'

Basketballs bouncing on a hardwood gym floor tend to land with a good, solid "thwack." Bouncing basketballs on concrete produces an altogether stranger sound: a thump followed by a high-pitched ring.

Physicist Jonathan Katz at Washington University in St. Louis offers this explanation: The initial contact between ball and concrete changes the ball's volume, sending out a sound wave in all directions that produces a first dull, thudding sound. As the ball bounces back, air inside the ball oscillates, causing the ball's outer skin to reverberate. That produces the ringing sound.

BRAIN SWEAT ANSWER

1. 59,595

2. banana

3. incorrectly

ANECDOTAL EVIDENCE

In 1928, Lewis Terman of Stanford University launched a study to identify geniuses. Terman pioneered the use of IQ tests, single-handedly defining a genius as anyone who scored higher than 140 on the test.

Among the children who applied to be part of the study were William Shockley and Luis Alvarez. Neither was deemed smart enough. Shockley later went on to win the 1956 Nobel Prize in physics for inventing the transistor. Alvarez won the 1968 Nobel physics prize for his work in elementary particles.

So far, none of the children who participated in Terman's study (nicknamed "Termites") has won a Nobel.

QUIRKS OF NATURE

The diameter of a mosquito's fascicle — the flexible needle in its proboscis — is just 20 micrometers. A human hair, by comparison, is 25 to 100 micrometers thick. So how does the mosquito manage to puncture your relatively thick skin with such a flimsy tool?

According to Melur Ramasubramanian of North Carolina State University, the blood-sucking insect's fascicle is wrapped in a sheathe called the labium, which stiffens the needle by a factor of five. As the fascicle enters the skin, the labium is pulled back like the sleeve of a sweater, preventing buckling.

Ramasubramanian says the fascicle design could lead to a new generation of medical needles that hurt less.

WHERE IN THE WORLD? ANSWER

The "Fountain of Basins" in the Saint-Marcel cave, Ardeche, France.

To find out more about Scott LaFee and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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