This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Cannabis for construction workers — A Nigerian study from 2015 hints at a cannabis boost to efficiency. Manasseh Iroegbu at the University of Uyo, Nigeria, is lead author of “Exploring the performance of mason workers in the […]
Echoing the cogitation that earned other people the 1996 Ig Nobel Prize for biodiveristy and the 1997 Ig Nobel Prize for astronomy, Ohio University Professor Emeritus William Romoser has announced a planetload of his own discoveries. The university celebrated Romoser’s recent findings, in a November 19, 2019 press release that says: Photos show evidence of […]
A 2014 paper published in the Scottish Medical Journal elucidated (for the first time) the acute effects of a Deep Fried Mars® Bars (DFMBs) on brain vasculature. Since then, research involving DFMBs has not ceased. A 2016 study from Dr Christine Knight at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, has (again, for the first time) examined coverage […]
Is wine as sweet (or as dry, or as whatever) if the grapes are grown in Martian soil? The Martian Terroir project aims or claims to aim to find out. The organizers explain: Terroir could be defined as the biology of a place. It is a concept that brings the geology, climate, and the life […]
Some people — some of whom are in the Mars Society — think it would be fun to go to Mars. Some people don’t. The singer Camille is (at least in this song) one of the latter:
Pat Robertson, who shared the 2011 Ig Nobel Prize in mathematics, has made a new prediction, this time about climate change. Robertson won his Ig Nobel for predicting the world would end in 1982, thus (eventually) teaching the world to be careful when making mathematical assumptions and calculations. His co-winners each made their own erroneous predictions […]
Nicholas Heavens [pictured below] is a postdoc in the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University. Heavens has turned his wond’ring gaze to what happens on our own planet and to the goings-on elsewhere. You might enjoy reading his take on Martian dust distribution: Heavens, N.G., Richardson, M.I., Kleinbhöl, A., Kass, D.M., McCleese, […]
Inspired by Mary Roach’s new book “Packing for Mars,” Alan Boyle, on Cosmic Log, essays some thoughts about a NASA-produced video: about half of all astronauts get the final frontier’s version of motion sickness in zero gravity. So it’s virtually guaranteed that some barf bags will be going into the trash. NASA researchers want to […]
“Plants grown in space have not produced fruit without astronaut intervention, which raises the question, how do you pollinate plants in space?” The answer maybe provided by the ‘Bees in Space’ project, organised by the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, Australia. According to their 2006 profile document ‘Bees in Space: Creating a buzz about space […]