Here's the truth about AI. AI is only as powerful as the platform it's built into.

ServiceNow puts AI to work for people across your business, removing friction and frustration

for your employees, supercharging productivity for your developers, providing intelligent

tools for your service agents to make customers happier, all built into a single platform you can

use right now. That's why the world works with ServiceNow. Visit ServiceNow.com

slash UK slash AI for people. Welcome to Science Talk, the weekly podcast of Scientific American

for the seven days starting February 27th, 2008. I'm Steve

Mercky, and I got a big frog in my throat. It's one of those Beas, Bufo Ampingas, if you

were listening last week. Anyway, this week on the podcast, not frogs, but arachnids and altruism,

spiders and struggles. We'll talk with spider expert Greta Binford about what makes spiders tick.

And we'll also hear from Samuel Bowles about how war and altruism probably had to evolve together for either to exist.

Plus, we'll test your knowledge about some science in the news.

First up, Greta Binford and her student, Marjorie Weber.

Binford is a biology professor at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She studies spiders, especially the brown recluses and six-eyed sand spiders. And she was a technical consultant for the movie Spider-Man. We spoke after she talked to about 300 grade school kids a couple of weeks ago at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Boston.

Hi to both of you.

Hi, Steve. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Sure. Good to talk to you. We're going to talk about spiders, which are really endlessly fascinating.

Absolutely.

Tell me if this may be a hard question to answer because regions of the country are so different,

but I'll ask it anyway.

How many spiders can you estimate I might have in my house?

In your house?

How many different species and how many different individuals would you think?

...