This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Blood spatter on high — “Be prepared!” This enduring motto of the Scout movement will come to mind for many readers of a paper called “Bloodstain pattern dynamics in microgravity: Observations of a pilot study in the […]
If you were to design wings for flying fruit, how best to optimize the wing shape? If you don’t already know the answer to that, you might begin your knowledge adventure by reading this study: “Curving to Fly: Synthetic Adaptation Unveils Optimal Flight Performance of Whirling Fruits,” Jean Rabault, Richard A. Fauli, and Andreas Carlson, […]
If you’re trying to make an alcoholic drink with the flavour of passion fruit and grapefruit, an obvious method would be to ferment passion fruit and grapefruit juices. But that’s not the only way. You could, for example, get hold of a fermenting New Zealand Sauvingnon Blanc as a base, and then bubble hydrogen sulfide […]
This year is (roughly) the 20th anniversary of the publication of EU Commission Regulation (EC) No 2257/94. So what better time to take another look at ‘Laying down quality standards for bananas’. The regulation caused, and continues to cause debate centering around the acceptable curvature of bananas – which some now cite as a standard example […]
Vi Hart plays with mathematics and her food—in this case a treat called Fruit by the Foot: BONUS: The book Cubed Foot Gardening
Organic Artist Andy Gracie is conducting a project for Biofilia – Base for Biological Arts, at Aalto University, Finland. “During his research period at Biofilia, Andy Gracie will be continuing work on his ongoing project ‘Drosophila titanus‘, in which the impossible task of breeding a species of drosophila fit for survival on Saturn’s moon Titan […]
Join us on a highly-magnified “[…] exhilerating [sic] journey through an apple.” [courtesy MeBioS, KU Leuven, The Netherlands] “This movie shows the microstructure of an apple and was rendered from (microfocus) CT images of an apple. The images of the entire apple were obtained with an X-ray CT system at K.U.Leuven (MTM) and the images […]
Perhaps it’s not all that widely appreciated that several members of Crocodylia (that’s the taxonomic order, not a thrash metal band) are quite partial to a bit of fruit now and again. In fact, reveals a new paper in the Journal of Zoology “ … there is little doubt that on occasion, fruit is deliberately […]
The thorny question of which types of forest fruits are preferred by Romanian university students has been largely resolved. “Students eat a large variety of berries, the most commonly consumed being the raspberries, walnuts, hazelnuts, blackberries, wild strawberries, blueberries, which are the most easy to find in the forests of Transylvania or in the surrounding […]