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.”…