Louise Jacobson of the Washington Post reports on the emerging discipline of "synchrony". That's the fancy word for stuff happening together: fireflies flashing, heart cells beating, and even the moon always having the same face to the earth.

The story refers to a book that seems worth reading: Steven Strogatz's "Sync: The Emerging Science of Spontaneous Order". The basic premise, says Lissa Harris in her review for the Cornell Chronicle, is that order is not just possible, it is inevitable: Any system of coupled oscillators will self-organize.