This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them:
- Gearing up for happiness — … The news headline says it all: “Toyota has built an EV with a fake transmission, and we’ve driven it – Five minutes behind the wheel, and you’ll be a believer.” This is for customers who love the ancient experience of driving with a gearstick. Toyota’s new car has a joystick and a clutch pedal. Neither is connected to the car’s actual transmission….
- A stink about beer — Beer enthusiast Bernd-Juergen Fischer of Berlin is peeved. He tells Feedback: “Your paragraph on beer foam aroma sceptics [21 October] set my head spinning…
- Medical amusement— An old saying, iffily attributed to Voltaire, explains that “the art of medicine consists mostly of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease”. Feedback invites any reader who is a practising, licensed physician to say whether – in your professional experience – that is substantially true. Send your note, accompanied perhaps by a few words of personal professional recollection, to “Medical Amusement”, c/o Feedback. Please, for context, identify your own branch of medicine (family doctor, surgeon, cardiologist, neurologist, otolaryngologist, whatever).
- Future for ducks — … What is currently bad news for the ducks could lead to catastrophically worse news, instead, for the monkeys. The report is a stark warning to any brown capuchin monkey who might find a way to read it – and a source of at least some hope for readers who are Muscovy ducks. It explains that, by preying on the ducks, the monkeys might bring on “retaliation” by the humans who traditionally raise and devour those ducks….