This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them:
- Nut deficiency — What would happen if you removed most of the nuts from the bolts on three of the four sides of a tall electrical power pylon? New data speaks to that question. Newshub reported on 24 June that a pylon had fallen in Glorit, on New Zealand’s North Island, after a “maintenance crew” removed some nuts from bolts connecting the tower to a base plate….
- Hat deficiency — The “poor availability in Ireland of hats” – a phrase featured in a paper in the journal Clinical and Experimental Dermatology – refers not to all hats, just to some hats, specifically to sun hats. Marion Leahy and her colleagues at University Hospital Galway stuck that phrase into the title of their 2022 study about the perilous state of men’s heads, especially older men’s heads, in the west of Ireland….
- Spacey superpower — Bruce Stavert sends a reminder to Feedback’s growing collection of trivial superpowers that talent by itself doesn’t guarantee success. He says: “I thought I’d contribute to the discussion on spacey superpowers. My superpower sense of north becomes a superhindrance in the northern hemisphere, where I constantly find myself driving or walking in the opposite of my intended direction….
- Ghod dam water deficiencies — Bapu Deokar and colleagues lay out some Ghod Dam water bookkeeping basics in a paper in the Asian Journal of Environment and Ecology, “Estimation of water utilized for washing vehicles in Shrigonda town, India“. They explain that as the water level behind the dam plummets, the region’s car wash businesses respond by sucking up increased amounts of groundwater. “As a result,” the study warns, “the groundwater level is decreasing, leading to a shortage in the volume of groundwater.”