Chuff, chuff Rattle rattle. Dr Palumbi said that it was relatively recent - thousands rather than millions of years ago, and probably later than the last Ice Age about 10,000 years ago.The decline affected many species worldwide. The bigger the population became historically, and the longer it has existed, the bigger the diversity of the DNA within an existing whale population."Best estimates suggest past abundance was about 10 times higher than thought for humpback and fin whales, and was about three times higher for minke whales," Dr Palumbi said.The study also attempted to find out when the dramatic decline in whale numbers occurred. The oceans once teemed with many more now endangered marine mammals than previously thought, new genetic studies of whales suggest. Coby Schal, professor of entomology at North Carolina State University and an author of the study, says the faintest whiff will have the most starving roach come running. "The male will choose the sex pheromone over food, even though he may die on the way." The study found that when a minuscule quantity of the artificial pheromone was placed in one branch of a forked plexiglass tube, 60 per cent of a sample of cockroaches chose that branch and made their way to the sample in less than 10 seconds.For designers of coachroach traps, the substance is potentially the most most potent bait yet, capable of luring roaches by the millions to their doom But there is one small problem.
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In the lab test, 40 per cent of male roaches failed to respond to the pheromones, for reasons unclear It seems man's battle with the roach is not yet won.. So, if Carlyle sells its stake, it will have more than doubled its money in less than three years.Money raised through listing on the stock market will be used, according to Sir John, to fund acquisitions. Last year QinetiQ bought American companies Foster-Miller and Westar Aerospace & Defense for a combined $293m (£155m), and that transatlantic push is set to continue. "We are looking to increase our exposure to the US in defence and security. The US remains a fast-growing market that has a great propensity to buy exactly what we have to offer," he says.When QinetiQ floats, Sir John will also have to spend a lot of time with the City explaining what his company does, as there are few businesses to compare it with. This is something that troubles him: "There aren't tons of role models, certainly not in the UK." Britons, he adds, "are good inventors, but we are not good at turning our inventions into wealth".He puts some of the blame for this on the Government, which he believes should follow the US example of supporting science companies through its own investment programmes.
"My point is that, in physics-based sciences, it is not so much the invention that is important but the process that gets you from invention to exploiting it commercially. For this you need pull-through mechanisms, and one of the most powerful is the Government's own purchasing. In the US you have the tremendous power of the Department of Defense. My thrust is that the UK Government needs to pay more attention to that."He also believes that the Department of Trade and Industry and the Ministry of Defence don't offer enough grants to finance long-term research and development projects. "If you compare the funds in the UK to those available in France and Germany, they are very small. And if you compare what the MoD spends to what the US Department of Defense spends, it is also small."The issue of funding isn't a big one for QinetiQ, as it still receives the lion's share of its work from its biggest shareholder, the MoD. But Sir John is aggressively pushing the company's commercial operations as a source of future revenues.