This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Berate the refs — There is new evidence that it can pay to scream at referees in sports stadiums. That evidence appears in the study ‘Verbal aggressions against Major League Baseball umpires affect their decision making”… Your ice […]
Category: Extra-Improbable columns
Our columns in other publications — The ‘Feedback’ column in New Scientist magazine, beginning in September 2022, and the “Improbable Research”column that ran for 13 years in The Guardian newspaper.
Wins and births / Celebratory sex in cars / Time zones? / Unread and vanished
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Wins for kids — Spectator sports are good for children – good for creating children, that is – according to data in a study by Gwinyai Masukume at University College Dublin, Ireland, and his colleagues…. “With a few […]
Eating robots, Sliceable ketchup, Ketchup on glass, Financial smirks
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Who eats whom? — Will robots eat us? Or will we eat robots? Both technophiles and -phobes have hungered to learn which will happen first. The answer has now arrived, in a report from a team at […]
Gift mice, Politicians’ food and pee, Tarantula sucking, Tender youth, Cat dependence
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them: Time for love — Valentine’s Day celebrates coupling. Alan McWilliam tells Feedback about an offer he received, before the most recent Valentine’s Day, from a US-based biotechnology company. It couples charm with other qualities. Alan says: “I […]



