This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them:
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- Find the emperor’s heart — Holy Roman Emperor Otto the Great certainly wasn’t, in the purest medical sense, heartless. But now he is. The search is on to find his missing heart, though it isn’t abundantly clear who could lay legal claim to it. It isn’t even clear whether the heart still exists.But maybe it does. And if Emperor Otto’s ticker is findable, the folks at the Monastery and Imperial Palace Museum of Memleben, Germany, want you to help them get their hands on it….
- Vibrant gut — A headline at the website Everyday Health brings vibrant hope for people who feel stuck. It reads: “New drug-free vibrating pill can bring relief for chronic constipation”. Lieven Scheire kindly brought this development to Feedback’s attention. Below the headline come these details…
- A new harvest of trivial superpowers — Some trivially superior people answered Feedback’s call to help us catalogue trivial superpowers (25 March). A trivial superpower is a person’s ability to reliably do some particular task – a task that seems mundane to them, but that most people find impossible to do except once in a while by sheer luck. Here are three super reports. Paul Clapham says: “I can solve anagrams in cryptic crosswords using subconscious thought. I first noticed this several years ago. A clue suggested the answer was an English author and that it was an anagram of a certain fourteen letters… And then a voice in the back of my head said ‘Rudyard Kipling’. And so it was. I notice that ability regularly now, so I don’t bother to work so hard on anagrams so much.” …
- Greenfieldwashing — The trivially superpowerful Kirsty Greenfield also says, about an unrelated data-gathering enterprise: “I wonder whether any of your other readers have experienced a rather selfish appropriation of nominative determinism of which I believe I have an example? My sister and I, having been born with a shared and unremarkable maiden name, but a deep love of the countryside, both went so far as to marry men with environmentally pleasing surnames….