This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them:
- Berate the refs — There is new evidence that it can pay to scream at referees in sports stadiums. That evidence appears in the study ‘Verbal aggressions against Major League Baseball umpires affect their decision making”…
- Your ice cream nozzle — Questions arise when things start growing on your nozzle – questions that grow less pressing if you diligently clean the nozzle after you use it to dispense a serving of ice cream. Because if you don’t clean a food machine’s nozzle and other parts, things get a healthy (from the things’ point of view) chance to grow on them….
- Your chocolate nozzle — Unexpected, vaguely related questions can arise when you consider what shape of nozzle to use for, say, 3D printing chocolate. A study in Frontiers in Psychology looks at one question that is surprisingly subtle and complex: how much chocolate is too much chocolate when it comes to matters of taste? The study is called “The influence of bouba- and kiki-like shape on perceived taste of chocolate pieces”….
- Your bevelled nozzle — Bevel your nozzles, if you insist on equipping your jet aircraft with turbofan engines – and if quiet is what you seek. Bevel them. That’s the word from Julien Christophe, Julien de Decker and Christophe Schram at the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics in Belgium. Writing in Flow, Turbulence and Combustion, they explain why…
- Crypto-emojis — If there is a competition for most jargon-dense research writing about sketchy financial undertakings, maybe put your cryptocurrency on a study called “Emoji driven crypto assets market reactions”, by Xiaorui Zuo, Yao-Tsung Chen and Wolfgang Karl Härdle. The word “pith” is sometimes defined as “the spongy white tissue lining the rind of oranges and other citrus fruits”. This study includes a pithy description of itself…