Extended abstract of a paper presented at Microscopy and Microanalysis 2012 in Phoenix, Arizona, USA, July 29 – August 2, 2012.

We carried out extensive field surveys in the dry forest portions of Madagascar to document the species of bats occurring in these regions. These data combined with information in the literature and museum specimen records indicate that 28 species of Chiroptera occur in this region of the island, of which we documented 27 during our inventories. The community composition at sites occurring in areas of water-eroded sedimentary rock is notably different from sites on alluvial substrates. In contrast to the majority of native land mammal species on Madagascar, much of the microchiropteran fauna is not dependent on large tracts of intact forest and anthropogenic perturbations of forests may have less direct impact on their long-term survival. Conservation strategies for Chiroptera in the dry regions of the island should focus on reducing various types of human disturbance of cave environments.

The current use of microwave technology in science creates a dichotomy. Is it the heat or is it the energy? One entire branch of science, chemistry, uses microwave energy to apply heat to a broad range of chemical processes, under pressure, to produce the desired end-products quickly and efficiently (1). The biological sciences, surgical pathology in particular, have tried to adapt the microwave oven to speed up a broad range of processes: fixation, decalcification, antigen retrieval, tissue processing for paraffin and plastic embedding, and histological staining, including special stains, immunolabeling, and in situ hybridization (2). The biologists have assumed that they are also applying heat to speed processing. However, recent improvements in the microwave suggest that the energy is the critical variable (9). We have designed fixation experiments to test the two views.

A recent reading of the reviews of Wilfrid Ward's Life of Cardinal Newman in 1912 has deepened a long-harboured suspicion that appreciation of Newman is very much a moral matter. Whether you agree or disagree with his conclusions, you will never do him justice until you yourself begin to feel some spark of his deep and self-disregarding love of truth. Just acknowledgements have yet to be made by the literary spokesmen of England to the titanic genius of this great Englishman; but the failure, if failure it can be shown to be, is mainly a moral one.

When his biography appeared in 1912 it was met by a cautious but unmistakable disparagement of the Cardinal’s intellect. None of the writers indeed stooped so low as some of those of the generation before, when Carlyle, with shattering imperceptiveness, had described him as possessing “the intellect of a moderate-sized rabbit’’. Lord Morley too, more sweetly but with hardly less critical obtuseness, had written: “Mill had none of the incomparably winning graces by which Newman made mere syren style (italics mine) do duty for exact, penetrating and coherent thought: by which moreover he actually raised his church to what would not so long before have seemed a strange and inconceivable rank in the mind of Protestant England. Style has worked many a miracle before now, but none more wonderful than Newman’s.” To trace the Catholic Revival in England to Newman’s style needs nerve enough. But only the conviction that his readers knew the writings of Newman as little as he, could have steeled honest John Morley to accuse the author of The Grammar of Assent of abandoning exact, penetrating and coherent thought for mere honeyed words.