This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Double standards— World Standards Day 2023 will arrive soon, two days after it arrives. As Feedback noted last year (17 September 2022), having double Standards Days is standard behaviour. This year, most of the world will officially celebrate […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Sheepish fears — … They performed experiments exposing sheep to a dog sitting in a window, and to the window without the dog. They tried giving the sheep drugs to reduce anxiety and giving them drugs to […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Multi-scare the birds — …Their report advises that: “At present, there is no bird control technique that provides maximum protection for crops, so it is recommended to use a combination of scaring methods at the same […]
Sheep facial recognition software is in the offing, suggests an October 22, 2019 news report in the New Zealand Herald: The world’s first sheep facial recognition software, developed in Dunedin, is set to be prototyped this year. Sheep NN, a project created by artificial intelligence and machine learning company Iris Data Science, has received a […]
“I was asked if, as an Ig Nobel laureate myself, I thought this recent Cambridge sheep study would be a contender for an Ig Nobel award, the prize for science that “first makes you laugh, then makes you think”. Celebrity-spotting sheep might sound funny but the science involved in this study actually isn’t sniggerable.” So writes Catherine Douglas […]
Danish artist and researcher Charlotte Grumm explores (amongst other things) the constitutive relationship between subjectivity and materiality and the mattering and un-mattering of reality. With this in mind, the artist relates what she did in 2015 as part of this exploration : “I, Danish artist Charlotte Grum, connected myself to a sheep for 5 weeks […]
“An Analysis of the Forces Required to Drag Sheep over Various Surfaces” is a research study that won the 2003 Ig Nobel Prize in physics for its co-authors — Jack Harvey, John Culvenor, Warren Payne, Steve Cowley, Michael Lawrance, David Stuart, and Robyn Williams, of Australia. John Culvenor, one of the authors, has just boarded an airplane (that’s him, there, […]
The 2011 Ig Nobel Physiology Prize was shared by Anna Wilkinson (of the UK), Natalie Sebanz (of the Netherlands, Hungary, and Austria), Isabella Mandl (of Austria) and Ludwig Huber (of Austria) for their study ‘No Evidence of Contagious Yawning in the Red-Footed Tortoise.’ (published in Current Zoology, vol. 57, no. 4, 2011. pp. 477-84.) Since then, […]
Nicole Sharp explains, in FYFD, how sheep are, more or less, a fluid: Not all fluids are, well, fluid. Traffic, flocks of birds, ants, and even sheep can behave like fluids. This video shows an aerial perspective on sheep being herded, and despite the four-legged nature of these particles, they have a lot of fluid-like characteristics.… […]
A physics experiment of sheep passing through a bottleneck, which we featured some months ago, has now been formally published, and the researchers have released a video of the experiment. The study is: “Flow and clogging of a sheep herd passing through a bottleneck,” A. Garcimartín, J. M. Pastor, L. M. Ferrer, J. J. Ramos, C. […]