Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 28

Beneficial bird deaths? Clap for the man. No wait for weight. Disco astronomy.

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them:

Best interests at heart? — Feedback is fascinated by the final eight words in this statement: “Disadvantages include the competitive element associated with racing, which creates a strong incentive to kill birds where this is not in their best interests.” The statement appears in a study called “The ethics of pigeon racing” by Jan Deckers and Silvina Pezzetta, both at Newcastle University in the UK.Clap for the man — To learn how to treat gonorrhoea in people (rather than, say, in mice), scientists want to study a new infection from its very earliest moments. The only real way to do that is to deliberately, aforethoughtfully infect a patient. Marcia Hobbs and Joseph Duncan at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill did the uncomfortable work of creating a protocol for how to infect a man with gonorrhoea. (The protocol specifies that “Experimental gonorrhea is restricted to male subjects; women are excluded due to potential reproductive complications from ascendant gonococcal infection”.) …No wait for weight — The next step in shoe technology promises good news for obsessive weight watchers. Or bad news. Lots of news, anyway, supplied continuously. Foram Sanghavi and her team at Tufts University in Massachusetts envision a stream of data emanating from each foot as a person strides, strolls or ambles along – or stands or sits – providing that the person is wearing shoes. Shoes with special sensors….Cheap disco astronomy — You – yes, little (compared with the sun) you – can make your own sun spots. Robert Cumming and a team of scientists in Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland and France teach how to do it in a paper called “Why every observatory needs a disco ball“, which they have submitted to the journal Physics Education. Disco balls are also called mirror balls. The paper explains that “Disco balls are collections of what are known as pinhead mirrors, each the reflective equivalent of a pinhole camera aperture.”…

CSI Very Cold (Millions of Years) Case Triumph

Murder investigations have become more popular over the past hundred million years or so. Even very old unsolved murder cases sometimes arouse public interest. Here is a newly reported very old case:

“Death by ammonite: fatal ingestion of an ammonoid shell by an Early Jurassic bony fish,” Samuel L. A. Cooper and Erin E. Maxwell, Geological Magazine, vol. 160, no. 7, 2023. (Thanks to Tom Gill for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at Universitas Brawijaya, Malang, Indonesia, report:

“A remarkable specimen of the actinopterygian fish Pachycormus macropterus from the Early Jurassic (Toarcian) Posidonienschiefer Formation of Germany exceptionally preserves an unusually large ammonite inside its gut…. The fish’s stomach provided a microenvironment protecting the aragonite from chemical dissolution.”

Black hole toilet / Needling the patient / Gangue in goaf / Plank on wood

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them:

Black hole bum— Roger Sharp adds another item to Feedback’s compendium of black holes that are findable on surface maps of our own planet (7 October). Visitors to the Maitai Esplanade Reserve in Nelson, New Zealand, may find relief upon entering the Black Hole Public Toilet….Needling the patient— How far is it probably OK to insert a needle a little too far into a person’s abdomen? Surgeons – 365 of them, in 58 European countries – expressed their opinions about that. Their thoughts, their desires, perhaps even their dreams are distilled in a study called “The relevance of reducing Veress needle overshooting“, by researchers in the Netherlands and Malta. These are needles used to inflate a patient before doing the look-around-inside and then the cut-and-manipulate activities that are the highlights of most laparoscopic surgery….Gangue in goaf — Unfamiliar scientific terminology can be a treat – especially when the words are dredged up from depths unfamiliar to most people. So it is with gangue and goaf. Feedback encountered them while reading a report by Zhanshan Shi and colleagues at Liaoning Technical University, China, called “Simulation test study on filling flow law of gangue slurry in goaf“. …Plank on wood — In the vast nominative determinism forest of people whose names are cheerily, almost eerily related to their work, some trees – that is, some people’s names – are especially fit to purpose. One is Marlin E. Plank, who was a research forest products technologist at the Pacific Northwest Research Station in Portland, Oregon. He spent much of his professional life estimating how much commercially useful wood can be obtained from this or that kind of tree. Stewart Harrison tells Feedback of his joy upon discovering Plank’s 1982 paper called “Lumber recovery from ponderosa pine in western Montana“….Eye spy countermeasure — Greg Rubin looks askance at fellow computer security professionals who warn that video screen info can be plucked from reflections on video chatters’ eyeglasses (28 October). He says: “This is something my community has known about for years. Sometimes we’ll even comment on the reflections we can see during video calls. Personally, I recommend using a simple defence strategy during long and boring conference calls. Just close your eyes and take a nap.”

Science Friday day-after-Thanksgiving Ig Nobel Prize special broadcast

Please join us on Friday, November 14, 2023, for this year’s Science Friday day-after-Thanksgiving Ig Nobel Prize special broadcast.

To many people, the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony — each year honoring ten things that make people LAUGH then THINK — is an annual radio event, surprising stuff and people that pour out of the radio on the day after Thanksgiving.

The ceremony itself actually happens a little earlier in the year — the first four years (1991-1994) at the Massachusetts Institute of technology (MIT), the next 25 (1995-2019) years at Harvard University, and these past four pandemic years (2020-2023) happening entirely on the internet. We have high hopes that next year, 2024, we can return to having the ceremony in a large theater.

(Fun fact: Science Friday began doing a day-after-Thanksgiving Ig Nobel Prize special broadcast in 1992. This year’s broadcast of the 33rd First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony will be the 32nd annual Science Friday day-after-Thanksgiving Ig Nobel Prize special broadcast.)

WHEN: Friday, November 24, 2023. This will be hour 1 of the week’s two-hour Scifri broadcast — in most cities that will be at 2 pm. [But check the time on your local public radio station schedule.]

Persistence in Experimenting with a Fan

There is abundant charm in this video about an experiment “to figure out where to best place a fan to optimally air out the house to cool it down at night”:

(Thanks to Chris Hill for bringing this to our attention.)

Off-putting hair / Old Zeppelin / Effect of weight-loss drugs on plastic surgeons / Impossibility results

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them:

Off-putting hair advice — Cutting remarks of a literal kind fill a study called “Off with her hair: Intrasexually competitive women advise other women to cut off more hair”. The research potentially will inspire other kinds of cutting remarks. A team of seven researchers, all women, at Charles Sturt University and Federation University, Australia, asked women to provide “advice to female clients in a hair salon as though they were the hairdresser, as to how much hair the client ought to have cut off”….Zeppelin communiqué — …  [Richard Ives says:] “I only know this because I am really old and, as I didn’t do drugs then, I remember the Sixties. The tendency of authors to make such obscure references is to be regretted as another form of discrimination against young researchers.”A weighty matter — …Feedback fears that these fears themselves might redirect substantial amounts of biomedical research funding: away from the tortoise-ploddy pursuit of better human health, and towards the hippity-hop flight down lightless holes rumoured to contain buried treasure. The problems raised by Ozempic are already raising other problems. Doctors Clinton D. Humphrey and Anna C. Lawrence published an “alert” urging their peers to face up to the “Implications of Ozempic and other semaglutide medications for facial plastic surgeons“.Know thyself — Anything is possible, some of us like to think. Mario Brčić and Roman Yampolskiy say they think otherwise. They present evidence of this in a jargon-packed 24-pager called “Impossibility results in AI: A survey“. Brčić, at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, and Yampolskiy, at the University of Louisville, Kentucky, categorise a bunch of mathematical theorems about tasks that – if those theorems are correct – aren’t possible to accomplish using their own intelligence or (in their words) “artificial intelligence, especially the super-intelligent one”….

Holes, from a Philosophical Perspective

Philosophers often look for holes in arguments. Some philosophers sometimes also look for holes of any and maybe any kind. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a newly updated discussion of this bottomless concept.

The discussion begins by saying:

“Holes are an interesting case study for ontologists and epistemologists. Naive, untutored descriptions of the world treat holes as objects of reference, on a par with ordinary material objects. (‘There are as many holes in the cheese as there are cookies in the tin.’) And we often appeal to holes to account for causal interactions, or to explain the occurrence of certain events. (‘The water ran out because the bucket has a hole.’) Hence there is prima facie evidence for the existence of such entities. Yet it might be argued that reference to holes is just a façon de parler, that holes are mere entia representationis, as-if entities, fictions.”

The publications list you see above is part of a part of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s reference list.

 

“Why geology leaves a bad taste in your mouth”

Joannasaurus gives firsthand testimony about why geologists lick rocks, in this one-minute video:

 

The 2023 Ig Nobel Chemistry & Geology Prize was awarded to Jan Zalasiewicz, for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks.

Zalasiewicz will explain his explanation as part of the Ig Nobel show at Imperial College London on Saturday, November 18. Several other Ig Nobel Prize winners will be there, too, each explaining the things that won them their prizes.

 

Wrong Body Parts / Sinus Fiction / Possibility Studies

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them:

Wrong, wrong, wrong — The Journal of Patient Safety has a new report called “Insurance claims for wrong-side, wrong-organ, wrong-procedure, or wrong-person surgical errors: A retrospective study for 10 years“. Something is a little off even with that title….Sinus fiction — Sinus problems afflict many people, yet sinuses receive not nearly as much literary or scientific acclaim as hearts, brains, lungs, hands, feet, genitals and other body regions. Their uncelebrity perhaps affects how much acclaim and research funding is applied to sinuses and sinus issues. Fiction books explicitly about sinus problems are rare. The most clearly labelled book of this kind is a 59-pager called Sinus by Naema Gabriel, published in 2013. … Possibility studies — In the premier issue of the new scholarly journal Possibility Studies & Society, the managing editor, Vlad P. Glăveanu, gives what he says is “a manifesto” about what is possible in the journal. He manifestoises about the “shift of focus from being to becoming, from what is to what could be”. The work is a jargon-filled festival, brimming with the locus of possibility, the relational space of action, new affordances, sociogenetically long histories, radical open-endedness, the imperativeness of an ethics of possibility, and other alphabetical phrases….

Cutting of Entrapped Metal Penile Ring With Diamond Cutting Disk and Mozart

This is a rare music video about using a diamond cutting disk to cut an entrapped metal penile ring.

The music is Mozart’s piano concerto no. 21 in C major.

The medical procedure is described in the study “Cutting of Entrapped Metal Penile Ring With Diamond Cutting Disk,” Brian Stork and Ehab Eltahawy, JU Open, vol.1, no. 11, November 2023, article e00060. The study’s authors, at the Department of Urology at the University of Michigan, report:

“The total operative time was 112 minutes. There were no surgical complications. The total time from ring placement to removal was 17 hours. The patient stayed overnight for observation. Ten days later, the patient reported only mild symptoms of penile pain. On examination, he was found to have small remaining skin abrasions and mild penile ecchymosis. He had not attempted any further sexual activity and denied any voiding complaints. The patient has since been lost to follow-up.”