This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them:
- Hardened children — “It is well known that the best means of preventing colds is hardening,” writes Sidikova Maryam Amankeldievna in the Journal of Medicine, Practice and Nursing. To prevent parents from going overboard, she warns that only healthy children “can be hardened with water procedures”. Hardening may be best, but it isn’t the one-and-only method of cold prevention….
- We all know that — If you are a rapid reader, it is easy to keep abreast of everything that is well known: just read the thousands of new research papers published every week. But not everyone is a rapid reader. As a service for slower readers, Feedback aims to round up some of the things that – as testified in scientific literature (see above) – are officially well known. Each is documented in a statement that begins “It is well known that…”….
- The fascist disease — Reader Jennifer Skillen tells Feedback how thinking about thinking led to a mother-son collaboration during one of their shared reading sessions, which began years ago with The Very Hungry Caterpillar and now encompass New Scientist, along with other more adult material. “The other day when I started reading the cancer section of ‘How to think about…’ [New Scientist, 25 May, page 42], my son said, ‘Mum, how about reading it substituting the word fascist for cancer.’ Well, nothing is too much trouble for me when it comes to my son, so I did,” says Jennifer….
- Eely gross — The question “What’s inside?” leads to many a surprise, sometimes involving an eel. Rohit Goel at Pondicherry Institute of Medical Sciences in India and his colleagues reveal one of those surprises. Writing in the The American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, the researchers describe “a rare example of an interesting postmortem artifact of the presence of moray eels within a corpse”….