Chopped Finger Food, AI and Troublesome Sheep, Stomach Flushing in San Marino

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

Corporate determinism — Nominative determinism occurs not just to people, but also to companies. This is evident from an Associated Press report about a lawsuit aimed at a firm named Chopt Creative Salad Company: “The lawsuit filed Monday by Allison Cozzi of Greenwich, Connecticut, alleges that she bought a salad at a Chopt location in Mount Kisco, New York, on April 7, 2023, and realized while eating it that ‘she was chewing on a portion of a human finger that had been mixed in to, and made a part of, the salad.’ According to the suit, a manager at the restaurant accidentally severed a piece of her left pointer finger while chopping arugula.” …AI and troublesome sheep — Pertinent to recent discussions of whether computational image-processing systems are good at counting sheep (Feedback, 29 July 2023), a question arises: What about unruly sheep? A study called “An image detection model for aggressive behavior of group sheep” claims victory, to a degree, in spotting troublemaking sheep….Spill your guts — Stomach flushing is at the heart of one of the few scientific research reports about life in San Marino. The tiny republic is landlocked in the mountains of northern Italy and is home to about 30,000 people. “Using the harmless technique of stomach flushing,” the researchers explain, “we inspected the stomach contents of 67 individuals….A flush of turtles — Stomach flushing has its limits. A 2008 experiment by scientists in Brazil and Italy tried to compare the munchies that came into turtles and what came out of those turtles. Their report about it is called “Stomach flushing vs. fecal analysis: The example of Phrynops rufipes (Testudines: Chelidae)“. “We successfully stomach flushed all 31 adult turtles captured and collected feces from ten of the flushed turtles,” they say. “Our results show…