This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them:
- Suck it up— Reader Simon Leach responded to Feedback’s call for papers in which The Title Tells You Everything You Need to Know with a cheery “Well, you asked for it!”. The “it” was a copy of a report published in the British Medical Journal in 1980 under the headline “Penile injuries from vacuum cleaners“….
- How to de-cyst — Shiheng Zhao and Pierre Haas grossly grab your attention with the title of their study: “Mechanics of poking a cyst“. That done, they shift into a less folksy tone. Zhao and Haas are based at two of the three Max Planck Institutes in Dresden, Germany. They demonstrate how to shepherd a discussion so as to minimise the yucky and maximise the technomechanical….
- Hamburgers on meat — Several hundred Hamburgers – residents of the city of Hamburg, Germany – answered surveys about three kinds of sausage. These were select Hamburgers, all of a certain age range. The survey’s senders, Stephan G. H. Meyerding and Magdalena Kuper at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, limited their questions to these varieties of sausage: “Meat, plant-based or in-vitro salami.”…
- Eat your liver — The old complaint that kids don’t want to do what adults tell them to do has new confirmatory evidence. “Children don’t like eating what they’re supposed to eat…” according to the title of Vira Réka Nickel’s study about childhood nutrition….
- Statistics and baboons — “Can non-human primates perform linear regression on a graph?” ask Lorenzo Ciccione and colleagues in a study that refers to “the baboon as a statistician”. Their tentative answer: somewhat, to a degree that “varies among individuals”.boons an