This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them:
- Mid-air collision — To learn whether air taxi passengers need worry about collisions with birds, a crash programme in Germany did some tests. What with the complexity and danger of having actual air taxis have congress with actual birds, perfection was out of reach. So the experimenters made do, dropping artificial “bird projectiles” onto a metal plate rigged to measure the impact force….
- Mid-collision track — Speaking of birds-and-air-taxis-ish experiments, have you heard the one about the moose and the bullet train? Yong Peng and his colleagues at Central South University in China have begun to examine what might happen when these heavyweights meet at high speed, in the paper “Analysis of moose motion trajectory after bullet train-moose collisions“….
- Feeling saucy — Slowly, sweetly, new sauce insights pour in from readers. These pertain to the off-label usage of ketchup and other sticky foodstuffs to make electrocardiogram (ECG) electrodes work well (Feedback, 25 May)….
- Star deaths stars — It’s surprising how few people are hailed as being a “celebrity pathologist”, isn’t it? The Associated Press brings news of the death of one of them: “Dr. Cyril Wecht, celebrity pathologist who argued more than 1 shooter killed JFK, dies at 93”. One of the first celebrity pathologists, Bernard Spilsbury (1877-1947), helped establish London’s reputation as the go-to place for entertainingly clever murder mystery investigations. The Royal College of Physicians made clear, postmortemly, that Spilsbury’s career was quite theatrical….