This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them:
- Science of love — “Losing and ending a romantic relationship is one of the most painful losses adults experience,” begins a BAS (bountifully acronymed study) by researchers in Germany and Iran, published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research. This is science at its most overtly romantic: electromagnetically stimulating the brains of suddenly lovelorn volunteers. This is also science at its most acronymic: tDCS (transcranial direct current stimulation), DLPFC (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex), VLPFC (ventrolateral prefrontal cortex) and LTS (love trauma syndrome)….
- Smoking out smells — Kevin Lee detects some possible cause and effect in the doings of London’s (and the world’s) perhaps-first celebrity pathologist. He writes: “I am a retired forensic pathologist, and as can easily be imagined, I have been asked innumerable times how I manage to deal with the smell….
- Slice of life — Body parts, alive (elbow), dead (hair), nominal (leg) and sliced, figure in this note from UK reader Gerald Legg: “Your recent piece ‘Splitting hairs’ (20 July) reminded me of my time at Manchester University. My PhD research involved a lot of microtome work using the old, but still functional, Cambridge rocking microtome [a specialist cutting device]. I was taught how to…”
- Remain nameless — When their students make tangible contributions to science, some teachers find a way to publicly acknowledge the who, what and where – especially if those students made unusual sacrifices. Such may be the case with a preprint study called “Investigation of bactericidal effect of earwax on Escherichia coli and Staphylococcus aureus isolated from skin and stool samples of undergraduate students, Federal University of Agriculture Makurdi, Benue State, Nigeria“….
- Simple pleasures — “Simplify, simplify, simplify” is an old rule of thumb, especially among scientists. To honour the adage, Feedback is compiling a document collection called “Simplify, Simplify, Simplify”. The assemblage’s first item is a report titled “Politicians’ uniquely simple personalities”….