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Paraquat. The office dictionary calls it ‘a yellow extremely poisonous
soluble solid used in solution as a weedkiller’. It is so poisonous that
several countries ban it. ICI Agrochemicals makes it and, in Malaysia at
least, seems extremely proud of it.

‘Paraquat and Nature working in perfect Harmony,’ ran the headline on
large advertisements in that country during the spring. The chemical ‘is
not harmful to our wildlife’ and it ’causes no adverse effects to fish and
other forms of wildlife’, claimed the ad, which ended with the snappy slogan:
‘Paraquat for a greener Malaysia’.

The Consumers Association of Pinang was less than impressed. It pointed
out in its monthly journal Utusan Konsumer that researchers have linked
paraquat to deaths or long-term damage in young salmon, carp, honeybees,
mice, kestrels and other birds. What’s more, if not handled properly, paraquat
can be lethal to human beings, a point ignored in the advertisement. Workers
in contact with paraquat need to wear ‘extensive protection equipment’,
the CAP article claimed, adding that in hot countries like Malaysia, where
worker protection is in any case ‘minimal or nonexistent’, the use of such
equipment would be ‘unbearable’.

CAP called on the Malaysian government to prosecute ICI Agrochemicals
under the Malaysian Trade Description Act of 1972, arguing that contrary
to the import of the advertisement, paraquat is harmful to the environment
and to wildlife. The advertisement has since been withdrawn, although ICI
Agrochemicals denies that the CAP campaign had anything to do with this.

Meanwhile, ICI Agrochemicals in Britain has launched a primary school
teaching pack for the science National Curriculum. Called Farming Tales,
its cover shows a collection of mice, birds and insects cavorting in a wheat
field. Oh, and just visible in the background you can see what looks suspiciously
like pesticides (presumably not paraquat) being sprayed.

As ICI’s executive director Chris Hamp-son put it so eloquently in the
company’s latest environmental report: ‘Without the trust of the public
we face a difficult future’.

* * *

Tea break must be an unusual event at the chemistry department of Imperial
College, London. Researchers there report in a recent issue of Nature that
‘tea scum is a complex organic material derived from the oxidation of tea
solubles mediated by calcium salts and accompanied by calcium carbonate’.

They go on to give some helpful hints on how to remove the scum from
the tea (although we should point out that several of these could result
in damage to the tea drinker): drink your tea as quickly as possible –
scum accumulates over time; brew the tea in a nitrogen atmosphere; make
it with distilled water; add agents like EDTA to form soluble complexes
with the calcium carbonate; use more tea bags so that the extra polyphenols
in the tea reduce its pH; don’t use milk; treat the scum with hydrochloric
acid.

To which Feedback adds: think twice before accepting an invitation
to tea at Imperial’s chemistry department.

* * *

Back in October and November 1991, New Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ published a series
of letters about attempts to legislate the value of pi, including the much
loved myth that Indiana State in the US once ruled that pi should henceforth
be 3. (In fact, the bill proposing this was never passed.)

So we were delighted to hear from reader Wolfgang Faigle that the German
StraBenverkehrszulassungsordnung – the law that states how cars are to be
built – decrees that pi is no more and no less than 3.1416. And that’s
official.

* * *

Yet again, the fuss and fanfare over the Novel prizes has meant that
the equally important (in the eyes of many) Ig Nobel prizes have gone largely
unreported. The Ig Nobels are awarded every October in the US by The Journal
of Irreproducible Results and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Museum, to honour individuals ‘whose achievements cannot or should not be
°ù±ð±è°ù´Ç»å³Ü³¦±ð»å’.

Space forbids a full list of this year’s honours, but readers might
like to know that among the winners announced in a ceremony at MIT, John
Mack of Harvard Medical School and David Jacobs of Temple University in
Philadelphia received the Ig Nobel psychology prize for their conclusion
‘that people who believe they were kidnapped by aliens from outer space
probably were – and especially for their conclusion that ‘the focus of the
abduction is the production of children’.’

This year’s Ig Nobel for medicine went to James F. Nolan of the Guthrie
Clinic in Sayre, Pennsylvania, Thomas J. Stillwell in private practice in
Robbinsdale, New Hampshire, and John P. Sands Jr of the Naval Hospital in
San Diego, for their ‘painstaking’ research report ‘Acute Management of
the Zipper-Entrapped Penis’.

The Ig Nobel chemistry prize went to James Campbell and Gaines Campbell
of Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, the ‘dedicated deliverers of fragrance’,
who invented scent strips to apply perfume to magazine pages.

Finally, Feedback is resigned to the fact that it will be impossible
to congratulate personally the winners of the Ig Nobel literature prize.
In fact, the 976 medical researchers honoured for writing a 10-page paper
with almost 100 times as many authors as pages could barely have fitted
into the auditorium where the prize was presented, even if everyone else
had stayed at home. The paper was ‘An international randomized trial comparing
four thrombolytic strategies for acute myocardial infarction,’ (E. Topol,
R. Califf, F. Van De Werf, P. W. Armstrong et al x 972), published in The
New England Journal of Medicine.

* * *

Finally, congratulations to British Rail for its new botannical treatise
The Common Autumn Leaf, which is being handed out to commuters (sorry, customers)
who travel by Network SouthEast. Packed with interesting facts and figures,
it explains what a leaf is for those who don’t know and goes on to detail
the work by BR’s research teams to ‘minimise the effects of leaf fall’ on
railway lines. Sterling stuff.