Daisy, a 10-year-old girl, was very sick when she presented for an office visit at her pediatrician’s office. she was running a high fever, was very lethargic, had swollen glands, and showed signs of dehydration because of the vomiting she had been doing the previous night. the doctor decided, after a comprehensive history and physical, that daisy needed to be admitted to the hospital for lab workup, rehydration, antibiotics, and monitoring. daisy’s pediatrician stopped in to the hospital that evening to evaluate her condition and check on lab results. medical decision making was high complexity.

Female luna moths (actias luna) attract males by emitting chemical signals that spread through the air. a male hundreds of meters away can detect these molecules and fly toward their source. the sensory organs responsible for this behavior are the comblike antennae visible in the photograph shown here. each filament of an antenna is equipped with thousands of receptor cells that detect the sex attractant. based on what you learned in this chapter, propose a hypothesis to account for the ability of the male moth to detect a specific molecule in the presence of many other molecules in the air. what predictions does your hypothesis make? design an experiment to test one of these predictions.