Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, November 11, 1995 TAG: 9511130028
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Short
Still, the gender gap is closing, slowly but surely.
In Tuesday's legislative races, all women incumbents of both parties - 12 in the House of Delegates, four in the Senate - won re-election, and the women's caucus grew by five: three new female senators and two new female delegates.
That adds up to 21 among the140 lawmakers. The new number is still far from proportionate to women's percentage of the population, but the trend line is moving in the right direction.
LOCUSTS, it turns out, do math. You know how they almost always hop away the split second before your foot lands on them? That, scientists have found, is because their little eyes and brains have noted the size of the approaching image, the speed at which its edges are widening and how much the image is speeding up. Before impact, they get a warning that sends them hopping.
It's the same process, the scientists say, that we humans use to cross a street safely. Now that we know that as this is going on, though, we fear we'll be flattened while thinking through all the computations. As if the math phobic needed something else to worry about, now the challenge is not to be outsmarted by an insect.
by CNB