This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them:
- Publish but be damned — … The article explains that Luque, whose full name is Rafael Luque Alvarez de Sotomayor, has already published about 700 papers, and that “so far this year, Luque has published 58 studies at a rate of one every 37 hours”…. Impressive as that is, Luque still has a way to go if he’s going to catch and exceed Russian chemist Yuri Struchkov. Struchkov was awarded the 1992 Ig Nobel Literature Prize “for the 948 scientific papers he is credited with publishing between the years 1981 and 1990, averaging more than one every 3.9 days”….
- Handy for hanging — 1. Animals with hands and arms that make it easy for them to swing from tree branch to tree branch are likely to do a lot of travelling by swinging from tree branch to tree branch. 2. Humans have hands and arms that don’t make it easy for them to swing from tree branch to tree branch. That is why humans aren’t very likely to do a lot of travelling by swinging from tree branch to tree branch. Those are conclusions reached by researchers at the New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine….
- Handy for standing — 1. Older people swing their arms more than young people, as part of keeping their balance rather than frequently toppling over. 2. If everyone is forced to stand while keeping their hands clasped in front of their body, young people are less prone to toppling than older people. Those are conclusions reached by researchers at Coventry University and Imperial College London in the UK, the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany and the University of New South Wales in Australia.
- Punching up data — While brain scientists elsewhere study the accumulated effects of a lifetime of whacks to the head, a quartet have been watching how people respond to the sight of a fist fast approaching their face. An account of their action-adventure experiment jabs out from the midsection of the journal Human Movement Science….