This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them: The Kármán sutra — … The paper is almost Victorian in its voluminous discussion of possible regulatory mechanisms, but nearly complete avoidance of mentioning fornication. The highest moment of titillation comes in the following passage: “The […]
A cat named Félicette gets ever-widening recognition as being the first cat intentionally (and probably otherwise, too) launched into outer space. Félicette has many admirers, and has admired research into the history of the thing, and inspired artists, too. (Thanks to Brent Freeze for bringing this to our attention.) NOTE: The saga of Félicette should […]
History has shown* that astronauts, or more accurately lunarnauts, often like to skip about when they’re on the Moon. But, fun though it might seem, is skipping (in reduced gravity situations) an efficient way to get around? Research teams from the Laboratory of Physiomechanics of Locomotion, Department of Pathophysiology and Transplantation, University of Milan, Italy, […]
One of NASA’s best noses got a good writeup in 2003, in an official bulletin called “NASA’s Nose: Avoiding smelly situations in space“: Thanks to George Aldrich and his team of NASA sniffers, astronauts can breathe a little bit easier. Aldrich is a chemical specialist or “chief sniffer” at the White Sands Test Facility’s Molecular Desorption […]
An unplanned uncollaring led to an unexpected play session in space. This study tells what happened: “Object play in thick-toed geckos during a space experiment,” Valerij Barabanov, Victoria Gulimova, Rustam Berdiev, and Sergey Saveliev, Journal of Ethology, vol. 33, no. 2, May 2015, pp 109–115. The authors, at the Research Institute of Human Morphology, Moscow, […]
“In due course we may see the presence of thousands of human beings in Space. What copyright law will they take with them, and how will it be exercised and administered?” – asks extraterrestrial copyright specialist Adrian Sterling, who is a Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary Intellectual Property Research Institute, University of London. “It appears […]
Nancy Pedri, who is Associate Professor in the Department of English and Literature at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, is a comparatist. And, as such, is one of the few scholars to have examined the implications of empty photographic frames in multimodal narratives. “In its capacity to open up the possibility for variance in meaning, […]
This new study is an adventure in understanding understanding: “Can Rodents Conceive Hyperbolic Spaces?” Eugenio Urdapilleta, Francesca Troiani, Federico Stella, Alessandro Treves, arXiv1502.02435, February 9, 2015. Thanks to Mason Porter for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at SISSA in Trieste, Italy, explain: “The grid cells discovered in the rodent medial entorhinal cortex have been […]
Pretty much everyone asks, at one time or another, “How do astronauts pee?” Hunter Hollins [pictured here] exerted considerable scholarship to provide a good answer, which you can read in Hollins’s study: “Forgotten Hardware: How to Urinate in a Spacesuit,” Hunter Hollins, Advances in Physiology Education, vol. 37, 2013, pp. 123-128. The author, at the National Air […]
In 2001, professor Achille C. Varzi, of Columbia University, New York, very probably became the first philosopher to author a paper focusing specifically on the ramifications of holes in donuts (that’s ‘doughnuts’ in the UK), as we reported. But the paper wasn’t, in the literal sense, the last word on donut holes. In 2012 the subject […]