This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Nit-picking literature — Little things bother some people. Elizabeth Kowaleski Wallace wonders why little things failed to bother Robinson Crusoe, the hero of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel, who spent 28 years documenting his plight as a castaway […]
“Hard, hard to be a baby—Baby animals like you’ve never seen them” is more or less the English translation of the French title of Brooke Barker’s book Dur, dur d’être un bébé—Les bébés animaux comme vous ne les avez jamais vus. The book is full of facts and drawings about many kinds and sizes of […]
If you gave a baby a pacifier [that’s ‘dummy’ in the UK] which was covered in (mildly) irritating bristles, what kind of psychological impact might that have? “Minimal” says the documentation for a newly patented invention that incorporates : “[…] bristle like structures which discourages continued use of the pacifier by a child of appropriate […]
Entitlements inspire this study of adults taking candy from babies: “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior,” Paul K. Piff, Daniel M. Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 109, no. 11, 2012, pp. 4086-4091. The authors, at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of […]
The inventors of Babypod, the insert-into-your-vagina device that helps a pregnant woman play music for her developing fetus, produced this video ad: The 2017 Ig Nobel Prize for Obstetrics was awarded to those physician/inventors—Marisa López-Teijón, Álex García-Faura, Alberto Prats-Galino, and Luis Pallarés Aniorte—for showing that a developing human fetus responds more strongly to music that is played […]
“Before 1992, the names ‘Hillary’ and ‘Hilary’ had been increasing in popularity for several decades. After 1992, however, their popularity dropped suddenly 10-fold.” – explains Stefano Ghirlanda who is Professor of Psychology, Biology, and Anthropology, Brooklyn College, CUNY, and Founder and fellow, Centre for the Study of Cultural Evolution, Stockholm University. With this in mind, […]
“The care of a newborn baby is virtually a 24 hour a day job, leaving very little time for new parents to engage in traditional exercise. The lack of exercise runs contrary to traditional and prevailing medical opinions.” Fortunately, inventor Scott Krass of San Diego, California, has invented (and just received a US patent for) […]
If you (yup, you) use a fake weapon to brutally beat a stranger, and then slit his throat, and then shoot him in the face, and then you assault a little baby, will your heart and blood pump like mad — even if you know that it’s all a trick and the man will suffer […]
“Crying babies are the source of great frustration for adults, particularly for their parents. Because they cannot speak, infants cry as their primary means of communication and they do it with great frequency. Babies cry as a means to communicate that they are in pain, unhappy, tired, hungry or generally in need of attention. Sometimes […]
Extracting a stuck wine cork from a bottle inspired this method for bringing a child into the world. Jorge Ernesto Odon of Argentina invented a new method for assisting the birth of a child, using an insertable, inflatable bag to grip the child’s head, in the same way one can extract a cork that has […]