This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them:
- Nest: still abandoned — Brace yourselves. That abandoned bird’s nest is still seated in the mouth of the large, ancient, carved stone human face hanging high on a wall in the northernmost corner of the outdoor garden known as “Michelangelo’s Cloister” in the National Roman Museum in Rome, reports the University College London (UCL) professor who discovered it while visiting the museum this past April then reported it to a colleague who is the director of one of the Netherlands’s great natural history museums, who visited the National Roman Museum the next day and asked officials if he could remove the nest, saving them the trouble of destroying or discarding it, and bring it back to his museum in Rotterdam to add to a collection of biological curiosities, a request greeted with eager gratitude by two officials of the Rome museum but then refused with operatic rage by a third official who happened upon the scene when the first two officials fetched a ladder for the Dutch museum official to use to climb up and remove the until-then-unnoticed nest from the open mouth of the sculpture and who declared that not a twig, not a pebble, must ever leave his museum….
- Not your way – Reader Ashok Khushalani sends a contribution to Feedback’s collection of inspirationally commendable organisation slogans that, not necessarily obviously to the public, were supplanted, superseded or apparently abandoned (18 May). The classic examples are IBM’s “THINK” and Google’s “Don’t be evil”. Khushalani mourns the loss, in daily experience, of Burger King’s slogan “Have it your way”. This absence, he suggests, has implications….
- A limp theory – Two things – the North American fascination with rod-shaped items and the human habit of proposing theories then shooting them down – come together in a study called “Size matters? Penis dissatisfaction and gun ownership in America“….
- Sense of smell – Mention of a celebrity pathologist’s inability to smell smells (12 June) aroused reader John Adams to think about his own medical-professional journey….
- Telltale titles – Ideally, the title of a scientific report clearly summarises the whole thing. To encourage this practice, Feedback is compiling a collection called The Title Tells You Everything You Need to Know. Savour, please, two examples. “Man’s fractured sternum was probably due to snake’s weight when it fell” appeared in the British Medical Journal in 1997. “Experimental replication shows knives manufactured from frozen human feces do not work” graced the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports in 2019….