Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Looking for a strategy to feed the World over the next decade, the World Food Conference put together a comprehensive action pack—but not all its elements looked easily compatible and the conference called on science and research workers to bridge the gap. Robin Sharp who has attended numerous United Nations conferences as a journalist and now heads Oxfam's Public Affairs Unit was in Rome writing for PAN, the highly successful conference newspaper.
J. R. Sparkes, lecturer in economics at the University of Bradford, looks at the work of W. S. Jevons (below), who tried to relate sunspot activity and commercial crises a hundred years ago.
In both the technology and the aesthetics of extending high fidelity reproduction to surround-sound, reproduction of natural ambience is crucial. The ‘quadraphonic’ attempt to reproduce four stereo-blended tracks, derived from multi-microphone mix-down, cannot provide this. Complete spherical directionality can however be encoded on to a minimum of two audio channels to produce acoustically acceptable surround-sound systems. Limitations are set both by the number of available loudspeakers and by the number of channels.
The author suggests that evidence for lightning on a grand scale in astronomy is most convincing. It might explain stellar flares, cosmic jets, quasars, galactic evolution, and much more. In this model, electrical charges accumulate in apparently highly conducting atmospheres.