This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them: Catochromatograph — Laboratories looking to purchase a highly efficient coiled parallel gas chromatograph could save money by instead adopting and adapting a cat. Perhaps. A study called “Domestic cat nose functions as a highly efficient coiled […]
“This Woodpecker Will Drill Into Your Skull And Eat Your Brains—If You’re a Baby Dove,” explains an article by Jason Bittel in Smithsonian magazine. It says: In 2015, Harold Greeney [pictured here, horizontal] trained his camera on a mourning dove nest stitched into the crook of a cactus. As an ornithologist, Greeney studies the love […]
Dr. Ivan Schwab explains why woodpeckers don’t get headaches, in this Discovery Channel video: He explains it in more detail, in this TEDx Talk: Dr. Schwab, of the University of California Davis, and the late Philip R.A. May of the University of California Los Angeles, were awarded the 2006 Ig Nobel Prize for ornithology, for exploring […]
If you have a hangover, and are tempted to eat a few stinkbugs (Encosternum delegorguei) as a cure, you might be concerned about their nutritional properties. Fortunately, there are a handful of scholarly papers available on the subject. May we recommend : • Nutritional and Medicinal value of the edible stinkbug, Encosternum delegorguei Spinola consumed […]
Joe Eaton reports in the Berkeley Daily Planet: Wild Neighbors: Woody Has the Last Laugh A few years back I wrote about the bestowal of the Ig Nobel Prize for medicine on UC-Davis ophthalmology professor Ivan Schwab [pictured here] for his explanation of why woodpeckers don’t get headaches…. Just last month, though, two UC-Berkeley researchers, […]