This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Best interests at heart? — Feedback is fascinated by the final eight words in this statement: “Disadvantages include the competitive element associated with racing, which creates a strong incentive to kill birds where this is not in […]
Tag: deaths
Can you hear the strains of an imaginary Bing Crosby?
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here’s how each of them begins: May your daze be merry — A recent study builds on more than half a century of experiments to see whether people think they hear Bing Crosby crooning White Christmas. Crosby’s recording of the song, released in […]
Estimated Insect Deaths Due to Collisions with Motor Vehicles
Building indirectly on Ig Nobel Prize-winning research, a 2015 study warns about the number of insects killed in collisions with cars, trucks, and other motor vehicles. The study is: “Road mortality potentially responsible for billions of pollinating insect deaths annually,” James H. Baxter-Gilbert, Julia L. Riley, Christopher J. H. Neufeld, Jacqueline D. Litzgus, and David […]
Totting up the deaths by this and that in Shakespeare’s plays
This pie chart shows the relative numbers of deaths — due to different causes — that happen on stage in William Shakespeare’s plays. In this tallying, death by being-baked-into-pie is as frequent as death-by-hanging. (The pie death occurs in Titus Andronicus.) The chart was, reportedly, assembled in connection with a new play in which all […]
Exit strangely, mathematician
Peruse, if you will, the Rutgers catalog of mathematicians who had strange and/or colorful deaths. Kellen Myers is the keeper of same. (Thanks to investigator Ginny Lewis for bringing this to our attention.)
The puzzle of rising diagnosis rates of certain nasty diseases
Marya Zilberberg [pictured here] discusses the whats and wherefores of a modern medical puzzle-that-may-not-be-all-that-much-of-a-puzzle. Certain diseases seem to be occurring more commonly — yet the percentage of the population that die from those diseases remains pretty constant. Zilberberg writes in her Health Care, Etc. blog (referring to a recent BMJ article and to her new book, both […]
Birds drops from the sky, explained
Kees Moeliker, who knows a thing or two about bird collision/deaths (he was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for documenting what is now perhaps the most famous bird collision/death in history — the collision was the prelude to the first scientifically documented case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck) explains the current crop of […]