What Has God Done Lately? Satan, Buddha, Fate, Brown Sauce

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them:

  • God’s recent works — What has God done lately? Professionally, much of God’s work these days aims to help humans fly more safely, more efficiently and more profitably. As head of the Institute for Aircraft Cabin Systems at Hamburg University of Technology in Germany, Prof. Dr Ralf God is a respected presence in the field of aeronautics. God’s recent paper “A holistic aircraft cabin metamodel as an approach towards an interconnected digitised cabin lifecycle” – prepared in collaboration with colleagues – was presented a few months ago…
  • Satan, Buddha and Fate — But what of Satan? What of Buddha? What of Fate? On the public record, Satan has been unproductive recently. But in the 1980s, Jozef Satan applied his expertise at handling high heat. The result was documented by the government of Czechoslovakia in a patent called “Method of liquid waste organical matters liquidation”. The heat is key to…
  • Brown sauce adventures — When you chew a gob of delicious food, your mouth hosts a circus of mechanical and chemical activities. Dengyong Liu and colleagues at Bohai University in Jinzhou, China, have been teasing out what happens, moment to moment, to the bits and bobs and boluses of food and saliva as a person chows down on the Chinese dish stewed pork with brown sauce. From time to time, they publish a new research study…