This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them:
- Chasing the tale — Silvia Leonetti and colleagues in the Netherlands, Italy, Austria, the US and Denmark don’t quite explain why dogs wag their tails, but they do explain that it is hard to explain. In a paper called “Why do dogs wag their tails?” in Biology Letters, these dog-tail contemplators confront one, presumably easier, sub-question…
- Donald Duck dam jubilee — We are just a year away from the jubilee – the 50th anniversary! – of the publication of the most beloved technical report ever written by a deputy director of design and construction for the US Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Reclamation. That report, which perhaps needs no introduction, is “Construction of Grand Coulee [Dam’s] Third Power Plant”. Published in the Journal of the Construction Division in 1975, it was written by Donald J. Duck….
- Anti-covid tea gargling — The story of tea is now, in tiny part, the story of an attack – an attack by inanimate bits of tea on a virus that attacks humans: the coronavirus.It is the story of “SARS-CoV-2 viral particles resuspended in saliva”, where those particles are assaulted by one or another kind of tea commercially available in North America….
- Just a wee experiment — An ounce of prevention was not worth a pound of cure in Jorge Castro’s attempt “to find an easy to use, cheap, and universal substance to protect seeds against predators in forest restoration programs”. Restoration Ecology published Castro’s explanation of what went wrong. It is called “Human urine does not protect acorns against predation by the wood mouse (Apodemus sylvaticus): A field study with video recording”….