There have been at least five deaths. Hanging By A Thread. In 1859 a Frenchman named Charles Blondin won worldwide acclaim by crossing Niagara's gorge on a tightrope 160 feet in the air. As many as 40,000 people saw him cross the wire blindfolded, carrying his manager on his back, and hoisting a stove on which he cooked an omelet. Jay Cochrane is planning a September tightrope crossing, the first in a century.
Science is a noble, pure enterprise.
At least that's what scientists would have you believe. To support their claim, researchers point to the process called peer review, the scientific version of the impartial jury of peers. The process of peer review is used to decide whether scientists get government grants and to weigh which articles should run in scientific journals. But last week, a paper published in Nature cast doubt on whether peer review is really the guardian of scientific integrity that it's reputed to be. Two female scientists in Sweden wondered why women applying for fellowships to Sweden's Medical Research Council were accepted less than half as often as men.