This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are the beginnings of each of them:
- Earthquake snack — The traditional excuse “the dog ate my homework” has a new counterpart: “the earthquake chewed my data.” …
- Strained fishy pun — Andrew Knapp and colleagues have added to the history of strained biological puns. Knapp is a postdoctoral researcher at the Natural History Museum, London. His co-punners are scattered across the UK and the US. In concert, they wrote a paper called “How to Tuna Fish: Constraint, convergence, and integration in the neurocranium of pelagiarian fishes”. It occupies several pages in the journal Evolution….
- Parsnippety Bonobos —Parsnips have become a go-to tool for testing and manipulating the emotions of bonobos. Jonas Verspeek and Jeroen Stevens at the Royal Zoological Society of Antwerp in Belgium recorded video of 38 sessions in which they handed bonobos either a grape, which was delicious, or a parsnip, which was OK, but not as delicious. Verspeek and Stevens had earlier judged the relative deliciousness, to bonobos at least, of grapes and parsnips…
- Fashionable Superpower — Feedback continues its search for trivial superpowers – abilities to perform tasks that may seem mundane to their wielders, but impossible to most other people. Some such powers may be innately colourful, and two examples pop out from the swirl of responses to Feedback’s invitation to help catalogue them. The innately colourful Diane Tunnell says: “I have the ability to carry a colour shade accurately in my head so I don’t have need for swatches when looking for a match.” …
- Stoney Superpower — Dianne Scetrine, too, claims mastery of a rare trivial superpower. She says: “I discovered I am possessed of a trivial superpower some years ago when my ex husband told me he and his brother would throw a beach pebble into the air away from them and then throw another and try to hit the first. They never succeeded. I tried and repeatedly hit the first pebble with the second….