Research — on any and all subjects — that makes people LAUGH, then THINK.
Counting moths is not as easy as it may seem. Jamm Hostetler, and collaborators at the University of Florida’s Natural History Museum, created a system to count moths more indefatigably than most people would be able to do it. It’s called AutoMoth. The heart and eyes of it are an Android app called BioLens. Biolens […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are the beginnings of each of them: Spacey superpowers — Some people have a superior knowledge, and maybe control, of space and direction. That is evident in the harvest from Feedback’s call to identify trivial superpowers – a person’s ability to reliably do […]
Much can be learned from a calculating study of cartoon animals behaving in ways that are natural to them. Here is a new example: “Tauberian identities and the connection to Wile E. Coyote physics,” Roberto Camassa and Richard M. McLaughlin, arXiv:2304.06127, 2023. (Thank to Mason Porter for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them: Helluva Twist — CHARLES DICKENS and his writings are still being “interrogated” (that’s the word in use) by scholars, at least one of whom is almost electrified by what might be there.Jeremy Parrott, an antiquarian bookseller […]
“Total body water was determined by deuterium oxide dilution in 17 normal male subjects with a range of 55.9% to 70.2% and an average value of 61.8% of body weight. Eleven normal females ranged from 45.6% to 59.9% with an average of 51.9%, or 9.9% less than the males. These total body water figures have […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Find the emperor’s heart — Holy Roman Emperor Otto the Great certainly wasn’t, in the purest medical sense, heartless. But now he is. The search is on to find his missing heart, though it isn’t abundantly […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them: Nihilism and hypergunk — Irreducibly collective existence and bottomless nihilism aren’t for everyone. Or maybe they are. Jonas Werner, a philosopher at the University of Bern, Switzerland, published a crisp, perhaps irresistible, 16-page-long jotting called “Irreducibly […]
The special WATER issue (vol. 29, no. 2) of the magazine is now out and about. The table of contents and several of the articles are online. As you might guess, it’s full of improbable research about water.
A careful choice of words can perhaps prevent a tragedy. Here’s an example. A minority of human cannibals might become overexcited when they see the title of this study: “Trends in Dietary Quality Among Adults in the United States, 1999 Through 2010,” Dong D. Wang, Cindy W. Leung, Yanping Li, Eric L. Ding, Stephanie E. […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Arachnonecrocapitalism — The death of a spider in Texas has led to the birth of a philosophical movement, with Rice at both ends. This life-and-death saga began with a recent, almost instantly famous experiment at Rice University […]