This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them:
- Paved with good tea — What to do with all the waste from preparing zillions of cups of tea? Researchers in Malaysia propose converting some of it into infrastructure.Mohammad Al Biajawi at University Malaysia Pahang Al-Sultan Abdullah and his team outline both the problem and their plan to attack it: “The annual consumption of a country’s population of hundreds of tons of black tea results in considerable numbers of discarded teabags. These huge quantities are disposed in landfills… The aim of this study is to experimentally investigate the effect of [carbon nanotubes] from tea waste on the mechanical and fresh properties of cement mortars.” …
- Solar blades — Electricity-producing solar cells could go the way – well, a way – of razor blades. Layers of razor blades, rather than solitary blades, gave hairy-legged and hairy-faced people a more efficient way to get sunlight to interact with those legs and faces (benefitting those people by making their skin more clearly visible to admiring spectators). A great transformation happened several decades ago when double-blade, then triple-blade razors went on sale and quickly captured market share as well as hairs. Single-blade razors came to seem a bit passé. Now, plans are a-print to create solar cells that have multiple layers. …
- Individual alligators — Grown-up children, as well as young children, who like to impress their friends by making loud imitations of animal sounds can easily up their game – after they realise that alligators are individuals, not cookie-cutter soundalikes. Every alligator, like every chimpanzee, cat, dog, crow or most kinds of large animal (every human, too!), makes its own, personally distinctive sounds. A study by Thomas Rejsenhus Jensen and colleagues at Lund University, Sweden, chats up the ubiquity and the power of this noisy individuality….
- Ants for arteries — The scourge of atherosclerosis, like many other medical scourges, might sometimes succumb to attack by dining. Dietary discipline could carry the cardiovascular system to victory, so to speak. A study by Abdul Ademola Olaleye at Federal University Dutse in Nigeria and his colleagues highlights a health benefit of eating small bits of one kind of all-natural, but little-publicised foodstuff. Details are in their study, “Analytical evaluation of fatty acid, phospholipid and sterol profiles of five species of edible insects: Lipid composition in five species of edible insects” …