This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them:
- On the origin of carrots — Do you know where your carrot, if you have a carrot, comes from? A new study from the University of L’Aquila in Italy outlines one approach to finding out. “It must be noted…” the paper explains, “that the methods proposed so far for tracing the geographical origin of carrots as well as for discriminating between organic and conventionally grown carrots, are somewhat scarce.” …
- Stick points — A humble stick can yield up many insights. Of which here are three. “The phenomenon of the ‘howling wind’… occurs as strong winds whip around bare tree branches and electrical transmission lines,” write Lutz Kasper and Patrik Vogt in a recent issue of The Physics Teacher. The two aimed to “create this sound in the lab by swinging sticks quickly through the air”….
- Howling and Howling — Annoying as noise can be, moaning and groaning don’t help to alleviate the problem. Howling does. So does Howling. Alan Howling and D. H . Howling. Christopher Howls, meanwhile, has an eye on acoustical catastrophes. Alan Howling at the Swiss Plasma Center tinkers with new technology to perform a fairly conventional acoustic service: active noise cancellation….
- The persistence of time — Peter Shaw tells of, and then shows, the strangeness of time. He wrote to Feedback at the end of January 2023: “Can any New Scientist readers beat this for a delay between writing and acceptance of a paper? Ours has just been accepted – in Austral Ecology – after 11 years and 15 journals! …