This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them:
- Love ostriches — The known risks – corporate, financial, personal, sexual – of starting an ostrich farm are perhaps not so well known in New England as in old England….
- Coffee aromatherapy — Praewpat Pachimsawat, Manita Tammayan, Thi Kim Anh Do and Nattinee Jantaratnotai devised a fairly simple way to deliver aroma to dental students. Opting not to infuse an entire room with a general miasma, they sought to achieve “personal coffee aroma distribution”. Personal coffee aroma distribution, desirable though it is, wasn’t the ultimate purpose….
- Dental stress — Another reason dental students can feel stress becomes evident when one sees the title of the study “Influence of dental students’ dietary habits on tooth color” by Ayse Tugba Erturk Avunduk, Hande Filiz and Esra Cengiz Yanardağ….
- Circumcision for nudists— Feedback congratulates the anonymous author of a news release from Brandon University in Canada for persuading their editor to run the item that bears this all-caps headline: “BU PROF RECOGNIZED FOR OUTSTANDING RESEARCH ON ANTI-CIRCUMCISION DEBATES”. The first sentence may have been irresistible once it entered the writer’s mind….
- Pharma drama — Feedback savours the panoply of emotions delivered to television viewers by an ad campaign for a drug that has the non-evocative name Bimzelx….