Vaccine shortages point to a shift in public opinion toward the hazards of the swine flu in Germany. Some people are facing waiting periods of weeks before vaccination will be available. 

Only two weeks after beginning a national vaccination campaign against H1N1, the intial skepticism over the vaccine has apparently vanished in Germany. The rise in cases and deaths within Europe is thought to be the reason for an apparent swing in public opinion about the dangers posed by swine flu.

In September a study found that 62 percent of Germans polled would not get vaccinated.

Now, due to high demand and supply shortages there are waiting lists to receive the swine flu vaccine. In some parts of Germany, those wating for vaccinations are facing a delay of several weeks.

n recent years, a growing number of teenagers have been dressing to articulate -- or confound -- gender identity and sexual orientation. Certainly they have been confounding school officials, whose responses have ranged from indifference to applause to bans.

Last week, a cross-dressing Houston senior was sent home because his wig violated the school's dress code rule that a boy's hair may not be "longer than the bottom of a regular shirt collar." In October, officials at a high school in Cobb County, Ga., sent home a boy who favored wigs, makeup and skinny jeans. In August, a Mississippi student's senior portrait was barred from her yearbook because she had posed in a tuxedo.

Other schools are more accepting of unconventional gender expression. In September, a freshman girl at Rincon High School in Tucson who identifies as male was nominated for homecoming prince. Last May, a gay male student at a Los Angeles high school was crowned prom queen.

Dress code conflicts often reflect a generational divide, with students coming of age in a culture that is more accepting of ambiguity and difference than that of the adults who make the rules.

"This generation is really challenging the gender norms we grew up with," said Diane Ehrensaft, an Oakland psychologist who writes about gender. "A lot of youths say they won't be bound by boys having to wear this or girls wearing that. For them, gender is a creative playing field." Adults, she added, "become the gender police through dress codes."

After well over a century of prim coverups, literal and metaphorical, of the sexual content of the greatest nudes in art, experts have been waking up to the erotic, even pornographic, potential. "I think it's essential that we understand them as objects in the context of men wanting to look at naked women," says Amelia Jones, a pioneer of feminist art history who teaches at the University of Manchester in England. Over the past decade or two, most of her colleagues have abandoned the genteel distinction Sir Kenneth Clark insisted on, in a famous lecture series in Washington in 1953, between the chaste "nude," cleansed by an artwork's aesthetic and philosophical ambitions, and pictures of the pruriently "naked," meant to get a rise out of viewers.

The new view: Flesh is flesh is flesh. Any culture that thinks "sex" when it sees naked bodies will still think "sex" when it sees pictures of them.

As usual, Marcel Duchamp had hammered all this out before others, as we can see in an important show now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It digs deep into the making of his "Etant Donnés," the wildly explicit peep show Duchamp left to the museum when he died in 1968. Duchamp's last work did for pornography what his urinal "Fountain" had done for men's-room plumbing back in 1917: It made clear that there's nothing so out of bounds in our culture that it doesn't have artistic repercussions.

But before considering Duchamp and his final word on lusty aesthetics, we need to go back to beginnings and take a more licentious look at Titian and Canova and their times.

New York -- This holiday season's biggest entertainment blockbuster likely will be a sequel to a popular franchise, with jarring depictions of war and an intricate story of good versus evil. It could easily rake in more than last year's record $155 million opening weekend for "The Dark Knight."

But this blockbuster is not a movie.

It is "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2," a video game that Activision Blizzard Inc. is releasing Tuesday. Fans worldwide are expected to spend at least half a billion dollars on the game in the first week.

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That would at least match last year's "Grand Theft Auto IV," which was the most successful video game release in history and might have been the top entertainment launch ever.

LABOUR is driving through laws that will give the Church of Scientology tax breaks on its British missions.

While thousands of businesses face higher tax bills from April and homeowners brace themselves for rises in council tax, the wealthy church will be exempt.

The change is being forced by a Bill from Equality Minister Harriet Harman, which, for the first time, puts Scientology on the same footing as the Church of England and Roman Catholicism.

Under British law, places of worship are exempt from business rates while homes of religious leaders receive council tax discounts. To qualify as a place of religious worship a building has to be used for worshipping a God or deity, not a philosophy.

Liberal Democrat Science spokesperson Evan Harris has written to the Home Secretary Alan Johnson, charging him with a "litany of errors" in his handling of the sacking of Professor Nutt, and demanding an apology for misleading the House of Commons.

Mr Harris said: "Neither Professor Nutt nor I have had a sniff of retraction or apology from the Home Secretary. I will now be raising this in the House tomorrow."

"The FBI says killer truckers are abducting prostitutes and other women at truck stops, raping them and leaving their bodies along the nation's highways."

Below is a "Time Video" news report, which states there are 500 known victims.

Your body is probably home to a chemical called bisphenol A, or BPA. It's a synthetic estrogen that United States factories now use in everything from plastics to epoxies -- to the tune of six pounds per American per year. That's a lot of estrogen.

More than 92 percent of Americans have BPA in their urine, and scientists have linked it -- though not conclusively -- to everything from breast cancer to obesity, from attention deficit disorder to genital abnormalities in boys and girls alike.

Now it turns out it's in our food.

Consumer Reports magazine tested an array of brand-name canned foods for a report in its December issue and found BPA in almost all of them. The magazine says that relatively high levels turned up, for example, in Progresso vegetable soup, Campbell's condensed chicken noodle soup, and Del Monte Blue Lake cut green beans.

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The Food and Drug Administration, which in the past has relied largely on industry studies -- and has generally been asleep at the wheel -- is studying the issue again. Bills are also pending in Congress to ban BPA from food and beverage containers. ...

Ulf Leonhardt is riding high these days, with a new award from the Royal Society of Great Britain to further develop his ideas on how to make things in plain sight disappear.

Metamaterial cloakA metamaterial cloak (outer ring) steers light.

....

Leonhardt's role in the cloaking field's rise to respectability did not get off to an encouraging start. The details of his initial frustration and eventual triumph illustrate the swiftness with which the field entered the mainstream -- even surprising some experts. "I began my work at a time when invisibility was not fashionable at all," he says. That was about a decade ago. After years of quiet work with a few colleagues, he wrote a paper titled "Optical conformal mapping." The abstract's first words come right to the point: "An invisibility device should guide light around an object as if nothing were there."

In 2005 he sent the paper to Nature, which rejected it, and to Nature Physics. Editors at Nature Physics, Leonhardt recalls, took just two days to reject the paper as well. So, he says, he sent it to Science. There, it lasted two weeks before the heave-ho. In early 2006 he tried again, this time with Physical Review Letters, or PRL. Another no-go. One reviewer said the mathematics, while classical (the calculations refer to Maxwell's and Newton's equations of light and to other mathematical constructs credited to such titans as Fermat, Lagrange, Euler, Descartes, Euclid, Kepler, Einstein and Feynman), did not offer enough new physics. Ouch.

But it was another PRL reviewer's rebuke that opened Leonhardt's eyes wide. It said he was not alone. The assessment, routinely shared with Leonhardt, indicated that the reviewer had been to two meetings in the previous months "in which John Pendry discussed his group's efforts on the same issue, calling it a cloaking device or their Hogwarts project in reference to the cloak of invisibility associated with the Harry Potter series." Pendry and his colleagues, the assessment added, "supposedly have filed a patent related to this work." Hence, the anonymous reviewer declared, the work was not new and did not merit publication in PRL.

It came as a surprise to Leonhardt that he had been in unwitting competition with Pendry, one of the most distinguished scientists in Britain. Pendry is not merely professor of theoretical physics at Imperial College London -- he is Sir John. The queen knighted him in 2004 for his services to science. Much of his reputation is based upon achievements in optical theory and in metamaterials that refract light in a fashion -- even backward -- not found in natural substances. Leonhardt was pleased to have a rival of such eminence but furious over his paper's treatment. Because Pendry's team had not published its work, Leonhardt argued in a letter to PRL, the journal should publish promptly -- not reject --his own paper. Further, Leonhardt averred that a pending patent provides no ethical reason to reject independent work by an outsider.

Then, abruptly, his fortunes took a 180-degree turn. Science, he recalls, wanted to publish his paper after all. The journal had just received a paper from Pendry's team, which includes his close collaborator David Smith, an electrical and computer engineer at Duke University in Durham, N.C. Titled "Controlling electromagnetic fields," the work was strikingly similar in its overall message to what Leonhardt had already offered. In late May 2006 the two papers came out (SN: 7/15/06, p. 42). They were sensations. Dozens of groups around the world set to work to build devices that, however crudely, tested the elegant new mathematical prescriptions.

Racing at speeds of up to 350 mph, the Soviet-made military jet made several low-altitude passes at the Santa Monica Pier, seemingly keying on the popular Ferris wheel as frightened onlookers scattered, some screaming. Emergency calls poured in to police as the aircraft flew about 50 feet off the ground, then spiraled skyward in a series of tight rolls, smoke trailing from its tail as if it were an aerobatic plane. The lifeguard in Tower 26 said the jet passed so close that she felt a wall of heat.

For a few minutes on that November day a year ago, it seemed the pier was under attack. Instead, officials learned, the startling aerial display was a stunt arranged by a local pilot, convicted felon and production company executive to promote an unfinished movie about a maverick squadron of Americans and Russians on a secret mission to Iran.

The pilot, David G. Riggs, lost his license and faces a misdemeanor criminal case in Santa Monica. A court hearing to set his trial date has been scheduled for Monday. Riggs declined to comment. His attorney said he did nothing wrong. But Riggs' escapade has focused attention on a little-known aspect of aviation: the use of high-performance military jets by civilian pilots and the hazards they can pose to people in the air and on the ground.

The incident has prompted the Federal Aviation Administration to take a harder look at hundreds of experimental exhibition aircraft in its Western Pacific region: California, Arizona, Nevada and Hawaii. There are about 5,600 planes with that designation in the United States, including aircraft like Riggs' 1973 Aero Vodochody L-39 Albatros, one of the most popular Soviet bloc trainers during the Cold War.