This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them:
- Splitting hairs — “Academics are often accused of ‘splitting hairs’,” David Taylor tells Feedback. “Well this year my team and I have done just that. We built a machine which can literally split a single hair from end to end. This is the first time that anyone has been able to split a hair in the laboratory under controlled conditions and thus quantify the phenomenon. Perhaps you were planning some exciting cosmetic treatment, like changing the colour of your hair or curling it? I can tell you whether it’s going to give you split ends or not.” He and his team wrote up their adventure in a paper called “The biomechanics of splitting hairs“, published in Interface Focus….
- Water from the remains — Researchers in Brazil looked for the remains outside a cemetery of the remains of people who are buried inside that cemetery. Their main question: are the decomposing bodies contributing nastiness to the region’s deep groundwater? Elias Saba and his colleagues wrote it all up with a ghoulishly geeky title: “Evaluating the impact of a cemetery on groundwater by multivariate analysis“….
- Drinking grandma — Off-water from our forebears isn’t a new concern. Perhaps the splashiest look at the question came in 2008 in the Journal of Environmental Health.Reader Russ Hodge sent Feedback a copy of the article, titled “Drinking grandma: The problem of embalming“, by Jeremiah Chiappelli, a lawyer, and Ted Chiappelli, a health sciences professor at Western Carolina University, North Carolina….
- Burying the hatchet — Nothing cuts the social ice in a strange pub quite as sharply as axe throwing. But the sport can bring hazards for some of the people who are exposed to it in a dutiful, professional way. Word is out, from researchers Kusha Davar, Arthur Jeng and Suzanne Donovan, that blastomycosis is one of those hazards. Blastomycosis is a fungal disease “manifested as pulmonary disease” that can also affect the skin, bones and genitourinary tract. Further detail is on display (including in colourful photographs) in the trio’s study, “Burying hatchets into endemic diagnoses: Disseminated blastomycosis in a novel occupational exposure“….
- Telltale titles — Here are two of the recent additions to Feedback’s collection called The Title Tells You Everything You Need to Know…