This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Best interests at heart? — Feedback is fascinated by the final eight words in this statement: “Disadvantages include the competitive element associated with racing, which creates a strong incentive to kill birds where this is not in […]
Murder investigations have become more popular over the past hundred million years or so. Even very old unsolved murder cases sometimes arouse public interest. Here is a newly reported very old case: “Death by ammonite: fatal ingestion of an ammonoid shell by an Early Jurassic bony fish,” Samuel L. A. Cooper and Erin E. Maxwell, […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them: Black hole bum— Roger Sharp adds another item to Feedback’s compendium of black holes that are findable on surface maps of our own planet (7 October). Visitors to the Maitai Esplanade Reserve in Nelson, New Zealand, may find relief […]
Please join us on Friday, November 14, 2023, for this year’s Science Friday day-after-Thanksgiving Ig Nobel Prize special broadcast. To many people, the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony — each year honoring ten things that make people LAUGH then THINK — is an annual radio event, surprising stuff and people that pour out of the radio […]
There is abundant charm in this video about an experiment “to figure out where to best place a fan to optimally air out the house to cool it down at night”: (Thanks to Chris Hill for bringing this to our attention.)
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Off-putting hair advice — Cutting remarks of a literal kind fill a study called “Off with her hair: Intrasexually competitive women advise other women to cut off more hair”. The research potentially will inspire other kinds of […]
Philosophers often look for holes in arguments. Some philosophers sometimes also look for holes of any and maybe any kind. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a newly updated discussion of this bottomless concept. The discussion begins by saying: “Holes are an interesting case study for ontologists and epistemologists. Naive, untutored descriptions of the world […]
Joannasaurus gives firsthand testimony about why geologists lick rocks, in this one-minute video: The 2023 Ig Nobel Chemistry & Geology Prize was awarded to Jan Zalasiewicz, for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks. Zalasiewicz will explain his explanation as part of the Ig Nobel show at Imperial College London on Saturday, November […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them: Wrong, wrong, wrong — The Journal of Patient Safety has a new report called “Insurance claims for wrong-side, wrong-organ, wrong-procedure, or wrong-person surgical errors: A retrospective study for 10 years“. Something is a little off even with […]
This is a rare music video about using a diamond cutting disk to cut an entrapped metal penile ring. The music is Mozart’s piano concerto no. 21 in C major. The medical procedure is described in the study “Cutting of Entrapped Metal Penile Ring With Diamond Cutting Disk,” Brian Stork and Ehab Eltahawy, JU Open, […]