This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them:
- Comparatively: People who own dogs or cats — Leah Michelle Baines and Jessica Lee Oliva at James Cook University in Australia say they have discovered that people who own dogs tend to be more resilient than those who own cats. They also report discovering that people who own cats tend to be more neurotic than those who own dogs….
- Measuring others’ satisfaction — Much of science depends on the question “how can I measure this thing (whatever this thing is) accurately, precisely and reliably enough to gain insight about it”. That question almost screams – maybe in ecstasy, maybe in agony, maybe in puzzlement – from a research paper that reader Nicolas Clairis brought to Feedback’s attention. “Do sex toys make me satisfied? The use of sex toys in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, France, and the UK” was published by Gert Martin Hald, Silvia Pavan and Camilla S. Øverup in The Journal of Sex Research….
- Coffee and kidneys — Nothing gets kidneys pumping quite the way coffee does — and nothing gets the hearts and minds of kidney researchers pumping quite the way the kidneys/coffee question does. Kidney International Reports sometimes treats its readers to boluses of opinion and fact about this, from researchers who seem emotionally primed and pumped. A two-part question drives this action: exactly how, and exactly how much, does coffee get kidneys pumping? A back-and-forth between two groups of US researchers began with the publication of “Coffee consumption may mitigate the risk for acute kidney injury“. Its authors say that “higher coffee intake was associated with a lower risk” of kidney problems….
- Coffee to prevent covid… — Coffee-drinking can have almost any desired medical effect on a person, to some degree. In some cases, that degree is zero. In other cases, it’s not. Chen-Shiou Wu at China Medical University in Taiwan and colleagues ran experiments that led them to publish a study called “Coffee as a dietary strategy to prevent SARS-CoV-2 infection“….