This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them:
- Blood spatter on high — “Be prepared!” This enduring motto of the Scout movement will come to mind for many readers of a paper called “Bloodstain pattern dynamics in microgravity: Observations of a pilot study in the next frontier of forensic science”. Reader Sara Rosenbaum alerted Feedback to the explicitly stated first purpose of the research: “the investigation of eventual violent criminal acts that occur outside of Earth’s environment”. This is forensic science at its most future-is-almost-here-istic. And at its most efficiently British-American collaborative-crime-investigation-istic….
- Thinking: inside the box — … Sholei Croom, Hanbei Zhou and Chaz Firestone, all at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, explain in the journal PNAS how they tried to answer the question “Can one person tell, just by observing another person’s movements, what they are trying to learn?” They filmed volunteers who “shook an opaque box and attempted to determine i) the number of objects hidden inside, or ii) the shape of the objects inside”. They then had other people watch the videos and try to determine “who was shaking for number and who was shaking for shape”….
- Stick to fruit — Many scientists would be unable to say whether metal sticks to fruit. It does, generally speaking, if properly coaxed. News of this comes in a study called “Reversibly sticking metals and graphite to hydrogels and tissues”…
- Accidental genital glow — Faraz Alam sent us a study that he and colleagues at Imperial College London published in 2013 in the journal PLoS One, saying: “Here is the paper where I accidentally made genitalia glow in the dark.” …