This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them:
- Black hole bum— Roger Sharp adds another item to Feedback’s compendium of black holes that are findable on surface maps of our own planet (7 October). Visitors to the Maitai Esplanade Reserve in Nelson, New Zealand, may find relief upon entering the Black Hole Public Toilet….
- Needling the patient— How far is it probably OK to insert a needle a little too far into a person’s abdomen? Surgeons – 365 of them, in 58 European countries – expressed their opinions about that. Their thoughts, their desires, perhaps even their dreams are distilled in a study called “The relevance of reducing Veress needle overshooting“, by researchers in the Netherlands and Malta. These are needles used to inflate a patient before doing the look-around-inside and then the cut-and-manipulate activities that are the highlights of most laparoscopic surgery….
- Gangue in goaf — Unfamiliar scientific terminology can be a treat – especially when the words are dredged up from depths unfamiliar to most people. So it is with gangue and goaf. Feedback encountered them while reading a report by Zhanshan Shi and colleagues at Liaoning Technical University, China, called “Simulation test study on filling flow law of gangue slurry in goaf“. …
- Plank on wood — In the vast nominative determinism forest of people whose names are cheerily, almost eerily related to their work, some trees – that is, some people’s names – are especially fit to purpose. One is Marlin E. Plank, who was a research forest products technologist at the Pacific Northwest Research Station in Portland, Oregon. He spent much of his professional life estimating how much commercially useful wood can be obtained from this or that kind of tree. Stewart Harrison tells Feedback of his joy upon discovering Plank’s 1982 paper called “Lumber recovery from ponderosa pine in western Montana“….
- Eye spy countermeasure — Greg Rubin looks askance at fellow computer security professionals who warn that video screen info can be plucked from reflections on video chatters’ eyeglasses (28 October). He says: “This is something my community has known about for years. Sometimes we’ll even comment on the reflections we can see during video calls. Personally, I recommend using a simple defence strategy during long and boring conference calls. Just close your eyes and take a nap.”