This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them:
- Nest in mouth — Curious items lurk unnoticed in large museums. The photo above shows one of them: a bird’s nest seated in the mouth of a large, ancient, carved stone human face. Feedback recently had the joy of accompanying the director of one of the Netherlands’s great natural history museums when he paid a first visit to the National Roman Museum, an archaeology repository that occupies what once were Rome’s great ancient thermal baths. The previous day, a professor from University College London had visited the same site, noticed this unusual object-inside-an-object – and alerted his Dutch colleague….
- Little big battery — In the spirit of “whatever they can do I can do better”, Espen Gaarder Haug sent us a copy of the study he and Gianfranco Spavieri published in High Energy Density Physics: “The micro black hole cellular battery: The ultimate limits of battery energy density“….
- Whodunnit? — “Whodunnit?” is a question answered, starkly, in every published research study. The answer is: the authors. The authors dunnit. The authors wrote the study. But a new study tries to answer a jarringly different question: who didn’t do it? How many distinguished persons listed as authors are not, in fact, authors? Scientific Reports published this real-academic-life detective story. The detectives try to ascertain how often academic big shots grab a full share of official authorship credit for research work they did not do….