A s recently reported in Nature (June 11 , 1998), Tim Berners-Lee has received the 1998 Eduard Rhein Foundation prize for technology ($112,700), one of the most valuable prizes awarded in Europe. The prize recognizes his creation of the World Wide Web while working at the European Particle Physics Laboratory (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland.
VIRTUAL BANKING
Note from the co-editors: The following news item is an abbreviated version of an article of the same title appearing in the New Scientist (May 9, 1998).
"How long would you spend queuing in a bank before storming out? The American bank technology company NCR wanted to find out what really goes on in customers' heads when they enter a high-street bank. So it commissioned CyberLife to breed surrogate people that could wander around inside a virtual bank and test the layout of machines and services-without the time and expense of real-life tests. . . . CyberLife adapted its technology to create software agents complete with 'drives,' such as the desires to deposit or withdraw cash or consult a financial adviser. When an agent first enters a bank, it doesn't know where to go for money or a statement, so it wanders around and tries interacting with things. These things include virtual automatic cash machines, cashiers, and financial and business advisers. NCR records the activities of real bank customers on video cameras, and the information is used to evolve agents with the same characteristics as customers of individual branches. . . . CyberLife found that its agents queued and used the different services in similar ways to real customers in a real bank."
AN ENFORCED TRUCE IN SEXUAL WARFARE
Two years ago, William Rice of the University of California at Santa Cruz reported in Science (May 17, 1996) the results of experiments that clearly demonstrated the existence of a war between the sexes in fruit flies. These findings revealed that male and female reproductive strategies co-evolve in a constant struggle for dominance, but that they do so on a time scale of tens of generations.
Using tricks to produce generation after generation of female fruit flies with the same genes, Rice also permitted male fruit flies to optimize their reproductive strategies instead of co-evolving them with those of the females. Already extant trends-such as poisonous seminal fluid that kills the sperm of rivals, compounds that force the female to produce eggs faster, and chemicals that depress the female's sex drive-became extreme. The "super male" flies resulting from this unbalanced evolution achieved very high reproductive rates and killed their mates at an early age. This finding is reminiscent of the discovery that parasites tend to become more virulent in the presence of abundant hosts.
More recent work (Science, July 3,1998) has shown that outside forces can cool the evolutionary warfare among fruit flies. Under conditions of enforced monogamy, males adopted kinder, gentler strategies for reproduction. They decreased their chemical weapons assault on the females, and female countermeasures decreased as well. The males became less aggressive and females took a greater interest in the courtship of the males. This shift was detectable after a few tens of generations of mating between pairs of fruit flies isolated in individual vials. Testing the resulting nicer strain of fruit flies also revealed the high costs associated with evolutionary warfare. The fruit flies bred in isolation had 28% more viable offspring, even after they were placed back into competition with one another for mates. Thus, the evolutionary warfare among fruit flies hones reproductive strategies for relative individual success but reduces overall group reproductive success.
More information about this and related work undertaken in Rice's laboratory can be found at his laboratory Web site at www.biology.ucsc.edu/people/ricelab/ricelab.html.