For love, some would twist the laws of physics. Short of doing that, mantis shrimp communicate with the other sex by spinning light waves, biologists find. The feat seems to be unique to this animal.

Alone in the animal kingdom, mantis shrimp may use the physics phenomenon of circularly polarized light to signal their presence to—and to see—potential mates.

Light is made of electromagnetic waves. These are electric and magnetic fields that wiggle perpendicular to each other and to a light ray's

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High-school students here rarely get more than a half-hour of homework a night. They have no school uniforms, no honor societies, no valedictorians, no tardy bells and no classes for the gifted. There is little standardized testing, few parents agonize over college and kids don't start school until age 7.

Yet by one international measure, Finnish teenagers are among the smartest in the world. They earned some of the top scores by 15-year-old students who were tested in 57 countries. American

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