This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them:
- Space politics — The UK is successfully playing catch-up with the US in boosting politicians who speak knowingly of the vast, mostly empty depths of the universe.The UK’s new space minister, Andrew Griffith – his official title is minister of state for science, research and innovation – granted an interview to Tali Fraser of The House magazine. Griffith apparently gave her a demonstration of how education happens: “He points to the suspended sphere in the Science Museum that switches appearance from planet to planet and declares ‘now we have got Mars!’ only for an employee to gently tell him it is, in fact, the Sun. Undeterred, Griffith exclaims ‘that one is Saturn!’ as the planet changes. The employee interjects: ‘No, no, that is Jupiter’.” …
- Bass notes — Andy Howe sings praise of a somewhat musical discovery about a fish that spends much of its time at the muddy sea bottom. Does Andy Howe find joy in the details? And how! He says: “I draw your attention to ‘Midbrain node for context-specific vocalisation in fish’ (published in the journal Nature Communications) which concerns the distinctly fishy noises of Plainfin Midshipman, the species which is also known as ‘Californian Singing Fish‘….
- Light amusement — Retired physician John Innes rallied to Feedback’s call (9 December 2023) for first-hand testimony that refutes or confirms the old saying “the art of medicine consists mostly of amusing the patient while nature cures the disease”. He first sets the scene…
- Loop soup — What is loop soup? Hard to say. Hard to say concisely, that is. Wojtek Furmanski and Adam Kolawa at the California Institute of Technology apparently injected the phrase into the physics world in 1987, in the middle of a 35-page paper called “Yang-Mills vacuum: An attempt at lattice loop calculus“, published in the journal Nuclear Physics B. They mention loop soup only once. …