This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them: Cosplay coral-ation — Getting anyone, anyone at all, to notice what you have discovered is a problem for almost every scientist. (It’s a problem also for almost anyone anywhere who discovers almost anything.) Mark […]
The claims made in lawsuits – and the need to verify or disprove them – sometimes spark interesting research. The Acoustical Society of America’s Fall 2017 meeting included a report titled, “Sound pressures generated by exploding eggs”. Investigators Anthony Nash and Lauren von Blohn began this research thanks to a lawsuit: A restaurant had hard-boiled […]
Some say that the German Army General (retired), Ferdinand Adolf Heinrich August Graf von Zeppelin, was a man “who made the improbable probable.” For an example of this viewpoint, see the website of Zeppelin University (based on the shores of Lake Constance, Germany) “Graf Zeppelin was a manager at the end of the 19th century […]
Investigator Daniel Heller [pictured here] alerts us to something peculiar that pertains to a soon-to-be-published study he co-authored. The study is “Peptide secondary structure modulates single-walled carbon nanotube fluorescence as a chaperone sensor for nitroaromatics“, PNAS 2011 : 1005512108v1-6. Heller writes: “[Someone] seems to have translated an online post about our article into a foreign language and […]