Marc Abrahams, Author at New Ů��С��Ƶ

Can rain help a “human head” survive a lightning strike? Possibly

Marc Abrahams — Wed, 16 Oct 2024 18:00:00 +0000

Flash on the pate

While research in Ireland suggests that hats can protect scalps from the sun (see Feedback, 13 July), research in Germany suggests that letting rain soak your head might – just maybe – help you survive if and when lightning strikes your pate.

The researchers used a wetted artificial head, having chosen not to experiment with a wetted genuine human head. Their report, called , aimed to “measure the influence of rain during high-energy direct lightning strikes on a realistic three-compartment human head phantom”.

René Machts and colleagues say they found “a lower number of perforations and eroded areas near the lightning strike impact points on the head phantom when rain was applied compared to no rain”.

Homeopathic comeback?

Peter Billard showed his son-in-law some of Feedback’s collection of remarks by doctors as to whether their job sometimes involves entertaining the patient while nature does the healing. The son-in-law works in a paediatric ward in Germany. He responded that “often enough it is easier and faster to prescribe something than to explain and argue why nothing is needed. That is definitively true for antibiotics but also counts for anti-cough agents.”

Billard’s son-in-law mentions some risks that come with taking antibiotics – eventual antibiotic resistance, possible diarrhoea and other side effects, et cetera – then says: “However I have some understanding for colleagues… who sometimes follow the parental wish/push for antibiotics.”

Billard himself muses: “Wouldn’t it therefore be possible to just fob off concerned parents and patients by offering homeopathic remedies? It was obviously a good alternative when it was conceived at the turn of the 19th century – no effective treatment was a massive improvement over the conventional medical treatment back in those days. Perhaps it’s time for a comeback!”

Dishonesty questioned

If you worry about honesty, affix your seat belt and eyeglasses, and read this item.

Just eight days before Feedback commented on the difficulty of getting an honest appraisal of research about dishonesty (Feedback, 28 September), the Journal of Marketing Research (JMR) published an “expression of concern” which JMR published in 2008.

The letter explained – though in terse, not-exactly-easy-to-understand language – that a large group of researchers had examined the “dishonesty of honest people” paper, leading them to question its accuracy and honesty.

This brouhaha is a clash of award winners. Dan Ariely is the most prominent of the several co-authors of the disputed 2008 paper. In that same year, he was awarded an for a “demonstrating that high-priced fake medicine is more effective than low-priced fake medicine”.

The study criticising Ariely’s “dishonesty” study was done by an international group of researchers, two of whom – Bruno Verschuere and Laurent Bègue – had themselves been awarded Ig Nobel prizes. (Verschuere won his in 2016 for a “asking a thousand liars how often they lie, and for deciding whether to believe those answers”. Bègue won his in 2013 for a “confirming, by experiment, that people who think they are drunk also think they are attractive”.)

The study Feedback noted on 28 September () was published by František Bartoš, who was awarded an Ig Nobel prize this year for a showing, “both in theory and by 350,757 experiments, that when you flip a coin, it tends to land on the same side as it started”.

Bartoš’s “untrustworthy evidence” paper explicitly questions research done by Ariely. One of those papers was a 2020 follow-up, called to a 2012 paper called

Ariely’s 2012 signature-at-top-or-bottom paper was in 2021. Observers speculate as to whether his 2020 signature-at-bottom-or-top paper will be retracted in 2029.

That’s four Ig Nobel prize winners, with the three most recent questioning research published by the earliest. Ig Nobel prizes honour things that make people laugh, then think. Those criteria say nothing as to whether a thing is correct or incorrect, good or bad, important or trivial. Feedback is personally acquainted with all four of these Ig Nobel prize winners and can honestly report that all four are – as people – thoughtful, charming and warm. This four-threaded tangle epitomises the research-community condition: it is messy, contentious, sometimes funny, sometimes disturbing, very thought-provoking and very human.

Final item

Marc Abrahams has written the Feedback column every week for the past two years. This is his final Feedback column. You can follow his other writings and activities at

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You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.

Are dog people more resilient than cat people? Apparently so

Marc Abrahams — Wed, 09 Oct 2024 18:00:00 +0000

Cat or dog person?

Leah Michelle Baines and Jessica Lee Oliva at James Cook University in Australia say they have discovered that people who own dogs tend to be more resilient than those who own cats. They also report discovering that people who own cats tend to be more neurotic than those who own dogs.

, they say: “In contrast to our expectations, no other personality differences were found between pet owners…Findings suggest that personality factors might explain why people who choose to own dogs fare better than people who choose not to own dogs during challenging times of social isolation, which may be unrelated to the animal itself.”

Vegan pet food: Can cats and dogs be happy and healthy without meat?

Emerging research suggests vegan pet food may be able to keep dogs and even cats healthy and happy, reducing the massive impact that traditional pet food has on the environment

Sizing up satisfaction

Much of science depends on the question “how can I measure this thing (whatever this thing is) accurately, precisely and reliably enough to gain insight about it”. That question almost screams – maybe in ecstasy, maybe in agony, maybe in puzzlement – from a research paper that reader Nicolas Clairis brought to Feedback’s attention.

“” was published by Gert Martin Hald, Silvia Pavan and Camilla S. Øverup in The Journal of Sex Research.

How, Feedback has stayed up nights wondering, could one measure that kind of satisfaction in someone other than oneself? Measure it in a way that would make one feel confident that the answer is accurate and true?

Apparently unafraid of the problem, Hald, Pavan and Øverup went at it. They went at it more than a thousandfold. More than 10 times a thousandfold. They sought measurements of a sort from “11,944 respondents from six European countries”.

Feedback hesitates to go into detail here about how the team got and interpreted the 11,944 answers. If the temptation is too much for you to resist, go read the paper. Tell us whether you find its climactic conclusion to be satisfying.

Coffee controversy

Nothing gets kidneys pumping quite the way coffee does — and nothing gets the hearts and minds of kidney researchers pumping quite the way the kidneys/coffee question does. Kidney International Reports sometimes treats its readers to boluses of opinion and fact about this, from researchers who seem emotionally primed and pumped.

A two-part question drives this action: exactly how, and exactly how much, does coffee get kidneys pumping? A back-and-forth between two groups of US researchers began with the publication of ““. Its authors say that “higher coffee intake was associated with a lower risk” of kidney problems.

The team looked at data collected during a three-year span, in which 15,792 middle-aged people indicated how many cups of coffee they thought they had swallowed during the previous year – thus, 15,792 self-educated guesses. The study compares those guessed coffee-cup tallies with each person’s record, in later life, of what it calls “acute kidney injury events”, or AKIs.

A second group responded by pumping out a letter called ““. The drinks, or the failure to drink, can have overwhelming effects on the kidneys, the researchers suggest. They also suggest that the first group may not have fully considered that.

The first group disagreed, and pumped back a well-maybe-but-Killer response, citing a . That British study’s lead author: Sophie Killer.

Onward forth, and onward back, sloshes the discussion. More recently, a third group based in China, South Korea and the Czech Republic brought the flow of opinion again into its traditional middle-ground muddle. “In summary,” says the team’s report, “ of caffeine intake on kidney function have been reported”.

The surprising science of coffee and its effect on both body and mind

The latest research on caffeine reveals why coffee and decaf can be so good for your health, but energy drinks can be lethal

Coffee to prevent covid-19

Coffee-drinking can have almost any desired medical effect on a person, to some degree. In some cases, that degree is zero. In other cases, it’s not.

Chen-Shiou Wu at China Medical University in Taiwan and colleagues ran experiments that led them to publish a study called ““.

Their first experiment asked if coffee could impede the SARS-CoV-2 virus from infecting human embryonic kidney cells nurtured in a lab. Then they drew and did experiments on blood from 64 coffee drinkers. The cell work and the drinker work, combined, led to some optimistic suggestions.

The team reports that the ideal timeline for coffee to inhibit SARS-CoV-2 infection is within 6 hours. “Taken together,” they say, “drinking 1–2 cups of coffee [or even] decaffeinated coffee daily can potently reduce SARS-CoV-2 infection including wild-type, Alpha, Delta, and Omicron variants.” These likelihoods “can serve as a guideline for dietary health during coexistence with SARS-CoV-2”.

At most, this could be the effective, simple treatment that everyone has been seeking. At least, coffee is as efficacious against covid-19 as it is against most other diseases.

Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founded the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website is

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Do chickens blush? And if they do, what makes them blush the most?

Marc Abrahams — Wed, 02 Oct 2024 18:00:00 +0000

Blushing chickens

People — humans — blush. Chickens aren’t entirely inhuman in that they, too, show emotions on their facial skin. Delphine Soulet at the University of Tours, France, and colleagues how skin redness might be a reliable indicator of “the affective states of hens”. Reader Frédéric Darboux brought the project to Feedback’s attention.

This is the story, to the extent it is a story, of six hens in a wooded outdoor range covered with grass. They had free access to a hen house and to as much water and feed as they wanted, whenever they wanted it.

This is a story, also, that was essentially a reality TV programme. The chickens were given no script to follow. But they were placed in situations that almost forced them to react in ways that would induce compelling video viewing.

The adventure stretched over three consecutive summer weeks. Among the main events: a “Capture Test” that involved “individual hens being caught by the experimenter, who restrained the wings with two hands”. The hens also found themselves involved in a “Rewarding Test” that involved a glass dish containing mealworms and wood shavings “placed in the middle of the test arena”.

The researchers captured video of “calm states”: resting, preening or feeding. Other footage showed “exciting and rewarding states”: dustbathing and exposure to mealworms. Inevitably, there were also “fear-related states”, most notably seen in the Capture Test.

The colourful data came from a process of “extracting redness from still frames from hen profiles”. In the old days, before digital technology was available for chicken-emotion research, this might have been a matter of subjective artistic appraisal. The 2020s method removes human emotion from that aspect of the data gathering. Electronic video processing extracted “the mean red (R), blue (B), and green (G) values for each bare skin region of the hen face (comb, cheek, ear lobe and wattle)”.

After analysing the data from the videos, the scientists reached a conclusion as to when the chickens had blushed most strongly. The hens, says the final report, “exhibited the highest degree of facial skin redness in negative situations of high arousal”.

Eclectically smectic

If, somehow, your interests are eclectic and you are cathectic (but not apoplectic) about exploring words that rhyme with dialectic, try “smectic” – as in the title of the study ““.

Written by Zala Korenjak and Matjaž Humar in a journal with the intriguing name Physical Review X, that paper explains how it doesn’t take much to make a soap bubble become a laser.

Or, for a mildly jolly burst of melancholy, reach back to 1987 for P. Oswald’s treatise in Journal de Physique, ““.

Tending towards entropy

Physics often gets portrayed as a field so abstruse that most people can’t understand or directly use it. A new study called “” shows how wrong some people feel that notion might be.

The researchers write: “The principle of ‘entropy increase’ is a universal law describing a natural progression from order to disorder. This paper is innovatively the first to take the principle as a theoretical basis for assessing how tourism influences human health from a sociomateriality perspective”.

Back in 2000, a collaboration between physicists in Italy, Brazil and the US tried to make sense of a different and borderline-unruly aspect of the concept of entropy increase. They published a paper called ““.

Tourism professionals both do and don’t like tourism to happen at the edge of chaos: they do for the excitement, but don’t for the danger, the danger being both corporeal and financial. Too much entropy over too short a period could intensify both kinds of danger.

A about the new tourism research does note that “Entropy is classified as the general trend of the universe towards death and disorder”. But other than that, the press release accentuates the positive. It says: “For the first time, an interdisciplinary study has applied the theory of entropy to tourism, finding that travel could have positive health benefits, including slowing down the signs of ageing.”

In theory – in this theory – people might believe that principles of physics, adroitly deployed, can help a person delay seeing wrinkles. Raise this to a literary plane, Feedback muses, and it becomes a reminder to read Madeleine L’Engle’s sci-fi novel .

That book’s plot involves travel. That book’s publication was reputedly delayed by publishers’ indecision as to whether the story was meant for adults or children.

Pointy reckoning

A couple more additions to Feedback’s collection of conversation-starting titles of research papers.

“” gave incisive knowledge to subscribers of BMJ in 2006, while “” supplied some fast and, in some respects, hard numbers to readers of the Archives of Oral Biology in 1995.

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Why does hair pulling hurt? Blame your myelinated nociceptors

Marc Abrahams — Wed, 25 Sep 2024 18:00:00 +0000

Hairy situation

Yes, when someone pulls your hair – if you have enough hair that someone can pull it – it hurts. But the truth of why that is, and some of the how much and some of the how, has only recently become evident, thanks to a team of researchers scattered across several countries. Reader Sarah MacIntyre brought their work to Feedback’s attention.

The researchers are – there’s no better way to say this – painstaking in how they describe their : “Single-unit axonal recordings revealed that a class of cooling-responsive myelinated nociceptors in human skin is selectively tuned to painful hair-pull stimuli.”

They took pains, also, to explain their work in a more human (rather than just technical) manner: “Together, we have demonstrated that hair-pulling evokes a distinct type of pain with conserved behavioral, neural, and molecular features across humans and mice.” And yes, we share this hair-pulling pain-specificity with our distant murine relatives.

Only humans, though, got examined verbally, as well as hair-pullingly. The scientists pulled hairs on the test subjects’ “forearm, hand, and foot regions”, then asked each hairy-armed, hairy-handed or hairy-footed person to indicate, via a questionnaire, whether the sensation was “throbbing”, “shooting”, “stabbing”, “hot-burning”, “aching”, “tender” or whatever. Some test subjects also had some head hairs pulled.

Hurts are not all equal. The study says that the amount of force required to produce a particular level of pain “was many times lower for hair pull compared to pinprick stimulation”.

Honestly?

If you want to know the truth about dishonesty, good luck to you. That seems the underlying message from František Bartoš at the University of Amsterdam.

His study called “” looks at lots of evidence. Then it heaves what appears to be a sigh: “In conclusion, caution is advised when relying on or applying the existing literature on dishonesty.”

Recent years have seen a stream of academic papers about how often people lie or cheat and under what kinds of circumstances.

Some of those papers go further, offering certain tricks that can induce people to behave more honestly. One dishonesty-research asked people to – just before doing a task on which they might feel tempted to cheat – write down the biblical Ten Commandments.

Bartoš tore into the statistics in 99 published dishonesty-research papers – papers that other researchers have identified as being worth an extra, gimlet-eyed look.

He reports that many of those papers include numbers that are suspiciously low or high, or “contain results that are ‘too-good-to-be-true'”.

Bartoš does note that his own research, of course, could be wrong. And he writes that “there is reasonable hope” that the general situation is improving. Why? Because, recently, more people have been scrutinising the studies they read, rather than just assuming that everything is done both carefully and honestly.

Self-crumbling satellite

Almost no one wants to have a satellite fall from its decayed orbit, plummet down, down, down and bonk them. That’s why a team of researchers has been playing with ways to make a self-crumbling satellite – building it partially of material that will automatically degrade as the thing plunges into the atmosphere, rendering the big solid object into little bits that burn to near-nothingness.

In glorious techno-lingo, the scientists call their approach “the use of thermites to aid spacecraft demise during re-entry”. They their progress at a conference in Orlando, Florida, under the heading “Thermite-for-demise (T4D): From material selection to test campaign”.

Some juicy detail: “The charges are expected to ignite spontaneously during the re-entry phase, supplying additional heat to components critical for the on-ground casualty risk.”

Progress in any engineering adventure tends to come in clumps, each with a new little or big puzzle begging to be solved. Most recently, the team managed to “explain the reasons of the unexpected pressure build-up observed during the tests involving a fraction of activated thermite”.

If reliable, the basic satellite-self-destruction-and-scattering technique will give a new, more widely dispersed metaphorical meaning to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s , “I shot an arrow into the air / It fell to earth, I knew not where”.

Dangerous coconuts

Two further additions to Feedback’s collection of research studies with titles that are useful either for starting or stopping conversations.

First up, “” dropped into an issue of The Journal of Trauma in 1984. And then “” was inserted into the journal Gastrointestinal Endoscopy in 2006.

If you find an equally striking example, please send it (with citation details) to feedback@newscientist.com.

Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founded the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website is .

Got a story for Feedback?

You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.

Ig Nobel prizes 2024: The unexpected science that won this year

Marc Abrahams — Wed, 18 Sep 2024 18:00:00 +0000

Ten unexpected things were honoured at the 34th Annual Ig Nobel prizes last week, each so extremely surprising that, in the event’s long tradition, it makes people laugh, then think.

The gala happened at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in a lecture hall filled with paper airplanes thrown by audience members respectful of the Ig Nobel tradition of recycling paper by bringing it along and turning it into disposable aircraft.

Peaceful pigeons

This year’s Ig-winning achievements span a wide range of human, botanic and other behaviour, some of it avian.

Before one commits to using live pigeons to guide the flight paths of missiles, one might want to do experiments to learn the feasibility of housing them inside a missile nose cone. In the 1940s, psychologist B. F. Skinner undertook such experiments. He was awarded, posthumously, this year’s Ig Nobel peace prize.

Skinner’s daughter Julie attended the ceremony, where she accepted the prize on his behalf. B. F. Skinner was a giant in the field of behaviourism. Years after the pigeons-in-a-missile experiments, he : “Something happened during the brief life of Project Pigeon which it has taken a long time to appreciate. The practical task before us created a new attitude toward the behavior of organisms.”

Plants’ sense of style

A similar major readjustment of attitude could result from the work of 2024’s Ig Nobel botany prize winners Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita. They found evidence that some real plants imitate the shapes of neighbouring artificial plastic plants. Details appear in their study .

Marjolaine Willems and her colleagues collected the anatomy prize, for studying whether the hair on the heads of most people in the northern hemisphere swirls in the same direction (clockwise or counterclockwise) as hair on the heads of most people in the southern hemisphere.

Details of that are in their paper ““.

Passing wind

Countless metaphors and turns of phrase relate to the research that earned the physiology prize for Takanori Takebe and his colleagues. The team that many mammals are capable of breathing through their anus.

Persistence paid off for the probability prize winners František Bartoš, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, Alexandra Sarafoglou, Henrik Godmann and about 50 colleagues, many of them students. Together they , both in theory and by 350,757 experiments, that when you flip a coin, it tends to land on the same side as it started.

Painful placebos

Lieven Schenk, Tahmine Fadai and Christian Büchel copped the medicine prize for demonstrating that fake medicine that causes painful side effects can be more effective than fake medicine that doesn’t cause painful side effects.

(Their brings memories of, but doesn’t explicitly cite, a paper by Dan Ariely and his colleagues that won the for demonstrating that high-priced fake medicine is more effective than low-priced fake medicine.)

Jimmy Liao was awarded the physics prize, for demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of a dead trout. In a he writes about discovering this unexpected aspect of fluid dynamics.

Drunk worms

Worms can be sober. Worms can also, if they imbibe alcohol, become sloshed. Tess Heeremans, Antoine Deblais, Daniel Bonn and Sander Woutersen won the Ig Nobel chemistry prize for devising a to use chromatography to separate drunk and sober worms.

A prize for research in demography — the statistical study of human populations — went to Saul Justin Newman for his detective work as to whether demographers notice important details. Newman discovered that many of the people famous for having the longest lives lived in places that had lousy birth-and-death recordkeeping.

Newman wrote two papers about this. He gave each a title that tidily explains how conclusions get leaped to. One is called ““. The other is ““.

This year’s collection of Ig winners finishes with a bang. Fordyce Ely and William E. Petersen were posthumously awarded the biology prize for an they did in the 1940s. The duo exploded a paper bag next to a cat that was standing on the back of a cow, to explore how and when cows spill their milk.

Ely’s daughter Jane and grandson Matt came to the ceremony, where they accepted the prize and witnessed a demonstration that involved a toy cat, a human in a cow costume and five Nobel laureates exploding paper bags.

Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founded the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website is .

Got a story for Feedback?

You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.

Ig Nobel prizes 2024: The unexpected science that won this year

Marc Abrahams — Thu, 12 Sep 2024 22:00:31 +0000

Ten unexpected things were honoured at the 34th Annual Ig Nobel prizes today, each so extremely surprising that, in the event’s long tradition, it makes people laugh, then think.

The happened at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in a lecture hall filled with paper airplanes thrown by audience members respectful of the Ig Nobel tradition of recycling paper by bringing it along and turning it into disposable aircraft.

Peaceful pigeons

This year’s Ig-winning achievements span a wide range of human, botanic and other behaviour, some of it avian.

Plants’ sense of style

Details of that are in their paper “”.

Passing wind

Painful placebos

Jimmy Liao was awarded the physics prize, for demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of a dead trout. In a he writes about discovering this unexpected aspect of fluid dynamics.

Drunk worms

Newman wrote two papers about this. He gave each a title that tidily explains how conclusions get leaped to. One is called “”. The other is “”.

Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founded the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website is .

Got a story for Feedback?

You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.

Good news for those whose lipstick isn’t as soft as they hoped

Marc Abrahams — Wed, 11 Sep 2024 18:00:00 +0000

Lipstick in the brain

Lipstick interacts with the human brain mostly in indirect ways. Kazue Hirabayashi and colleagues have been modernising the search for some of those interactions.

Their stated goal is to find “a real-time brain-based product evaluation method which detects the incongruency between a product, in this case lipstick, and a consumer’s expectations”. The latest explorations led to a study called ““, published in Frontiers in Neuroergonomics. Reader Nicolas Clairis brought it to Feedback’s attention.

The experiment tried to measure the incongruency – the presumably disappointing mismatch – between the actual softness of a lipstick and the softness the lipstick customer had expected of that lipstick. The method being tried here was fairly novel for the cosmetics industry: using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) to measure activity in a lipstick-wearer’s right inferior frontal gyrus.

Some members of the team had done earlier explorations – also using fNIRS – of lipstick in the brain. In 2021 they reported discovery of ““.

Four years earlier, they reported an even more ambitious project. Its broad scope is evident in the title: ““.

Feedback has seen few better examples of lipstick-and-brain-centric interdisciplinary research.

Face value of lipstick

But here is perhaps one better example of lipstick-and-brain-centric interdisciplinary research: a study by Dhuha Hadiyansyah, Era Bawarti and Maria Ulfa at the Al-Azhar University of Indonesia.

The trio sought to determine how female students at the university “represented particular meanings through their choice of lipstick colours”. They contrast – an incongruity – between the students’ explicitly stated reasons for choosing colours and “the subconscious message they want to convey”.

That subconscious message, explain Hadiyansyah, Bawarti and Ulfa, “is quite complex, ranging from optimism, cheerfulness, joy, modesty, warm [sic], wanting to be the centre of attention, femininity, passion and love, to sensuality”.

The study, “Lipstick as female students visual communication strategy”, was presented at the 4th International Conference on Islamic Epistemology, which was conducted virtually. The published version contains no information as to lipstick-borne conscious or unconscious messaging by conference participants.

What a buzz

This bounty year for cicadas (see “A cicada double brood is coming – it’s less rare than you think“, ) has Feedback remembering a medical experiment that used cicadas to treat tinnitus.

Those with tinnitus hear annoying sounds at times and in places that people who don’t have tinnitus don’t. The sounds can vary from person to person, from day to day, even from moment to moment. Descriptions of them, when listed, sound like a chunk of a Foley artist’s to-do list: ringing, whining, blowing, roaring, buzzing, chirping, clicking, sizzling, crackling, white noise, static and so on and on and on.

Commonly, people say it is like the sound cicadas make.

And so, decided Mithila Durai and Grant Searchfield at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, why not use the fight-fire-with-fire approach? Fight tinnitus with cicadas – or, for efficiency and ease, recorded cicada sounds.

So they did. They tried other recorded sounds, too: surf and rain, and also some artificially generated noise. The treatments continued over several weeks. In 2017 they published a , in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, about this “mixed-methods trial of broad band noise and nature sounds for tinnitus therapy”.

None of it cured tinnitus. But some sounds – especially the cicadas – helped some people sometimes, lessening the intensity or the annoyance of the tinnitus. Or so the scientists say those people said. Alas, there is no technically sound way to directly measure the perceived sounds caused by tinnitus. The only available evidence – what people say they hear, is a second-rate kind of evidence. It is pure hearsay.

Measured policing

Feedback’s search for hiring restrictions specifying numbers that aren’t based on actual job-performance requirements stirred memories for reader David Curtis. He writes about some history in his country, Australia.

“Your request for job requirements based on measurements bring to mind an ad from the 1970s to increase female participation in the police forces. A picture was shown of a male and female in uniform asking the question ‘What is the difference between these two police officers?’ The answer was given as ‘6 inches’. “

Human memory is impressive, but notoriously unreliable. Feedback hasn’t verified the persuasiveness or the existence of this ad, or the precision of that measurement.

Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founded the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website is .

Got a story for Feedback?

You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.

Does this title say it all? “Penile injuries from vacuum cleaners”

Marc Abrahams — Wed, 04 Sep 2024 18:00:00 +0000

Suck it up

Reader Simon Leach responded to Feedback’s call for papers in which The Title Tells You Everything You Need to Know with a cheery “Well, you asked for it!”.

The “it” was a copy of a report published in the British Medical Journal in 1980 under the headline .

“The title,” says Leach, “contains everything you need to know. However, the report answers every question that might occur to you as well. The last sentence summarises by saying ‘The present patients may well have thought that the penis would be clear of the fan but were driven to new lengths by the novelty of the experience and came to grief’.” Leach adds: “As junior doctors we may not have read the BMJ as assiduously as we should, but we all read this one!”

Feedback muses that, whether professionally or personally, one should love one’s vacuum cleaner wisely, but not too well. If you know of another published research study with a title this satisfyingly complete, please send it to: Telltale titles, c/o Feedback.

How to de-cyst

Shiheng Zhao and Pierre Haas grossly grab your attention with the title of their study: . That done, they shift into a less folksy tone.

Zhao and Haas are based at two of the three Max Planck Institutes in Dresden, Germany. They demonstrate how to shepherd a discussion so as to minimise the yucky and maximise the technomechanical.

“Just as one is wont to poke the fruity wares peddled in supermarkets to evaluate the immediacy of their comestibility,” they begin, “indentation of biological samples reveals mechanical properties that are intrinsically linked to their biological function.”

After that, it’s all about “the relation between the indentation force F and the displacement e of the indenter” and “calculation of the elastic deformation gradient”.

If you have a fascinating skin ailment but also have friends who cringe when you tell them about it, try using Zhao and Haas’s genteel phrasing. Cysts, they point out, are simply “spherical monolayers of polarised cells surrounding a fluid-filled lumen”.

Hamburgers on meat

Several hundred Hamburgers – residents of the city of Hamburg, Germany – answered surveys about three kinds of sausage. These were select Hamburgers, all of a certain age range.

The survey’s senders, Stephan G. H. Meyerding and Magdalena Kuper at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, limited their questions to these varieties of sausage: “Meat, plant-based or in-vitro salami.”

Meat-based is the most traditional of the three salamis, while the plant-based kind has grown in popularity in recent decades. In-vitro salami – made using stem cells – is the newest comer, still finding its way from laboratories to dinner tables.

The researchers’ aim? .

The verdict, in their data, seems to them clear: “The majority of Generation Y and Z in Germany prefer vegan meat over real meat, and in-vitro meat is more popular than beef or pork meat.”

That verdict doesn’t seem as meaty as it might be if the study is done anew some years from now. “In-vitro meat,” say the researchers, “is still unknown and not yet on the German market.”

Eat your liver

The old complaint that kids don’t want to do what adults tell them to do has new confirmatory evidence. according to the title of Vira Réka Nickel’s study about childhood nutrition.

Nickel is based at the Institute of Ethnology in Budapest and has gathered info about the past hundred years or so of .

During that time, eating and food preparation habits changed drastically in the nation, driven, says the study, by “the obligation to provide public catering and the general obligation to work”.

Nickel illustrates the they-don’t-like-it problem with photographs, one of which bears the caption “Fried, breaded luncheon meat with creamed split peas is one of the ‘classic’ school meals, although it has never been one of the most popular”.

There are certain meals that many children refuse to touch, a reluctance Nickel explores in some depth: “During our research, fried liver was one such meal. In Eger, the problem was addressed by serving only rice if the child did not want the liver. In Ózd, the children were not given this option. The catering manager in Ózd drew my attention to an important fact when we asked about the possibility of serving children only the part of their meal they wanted to eat: ‘it’s against the law. The parents have paid for it’.”

Statistics and baboons

“Can non-human primates perform linear regression on a graph?” ask Lorenzo Ciccione and colleagues in a study that refers to “the baboon as a statistician”. Their tentative answer: somewhat, to a degree that “varies among individuals”.

Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founded the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website is .

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Could this be the way to get your children to eat their greens?

Marc Abrahams — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 18:00:00 +0000

Bold as brassica

What would be the effect on young adults and young children of seeing positive expressions on the faces of strangers who are eating raw broccoli?

Katie Edwards at Aston University, UK, together with colleagues there and at the University of Birmingham, also in the UK, tried to find out.

The journal Appetite published a first-hand account of that adventure, along with the title ““.

No need to mince words or broccoli about what they found. In their words: “contrary to the hypotheses, models’ facial expressions whilst eating broccoli did not significantly influence initial willingness to try broccoli”.

Circles of life

In the 1960s, young intellectuals in Western countries urged each other to adopt the philosophy and ways of Zen (Zen Buddhism). To have a thoughtful, wise, good life, people were encouraged to “go the ways of Zen” and to “be at one with the universe”.

Six decades later, thoughts and chatter have advanced.

Although no replacement has been widely adopted in the West as a counterpart in the 2020s, Feedback suggests Venn (Venn diagrams).

Venn, like Zen, aims for a simpler understanding of matters that seem complex. Venn masters sometimes describe their practice this way: a Venn diagram uses overlapping circles or similar shapes to illustrate the logical relationships between different kinds of items.

Adopt the philosophy and ways of Venn. Perceive and cultivate the overlaps in your life. Draw a Venn diagram of the qualities of every person, place and thing from your entire life, from birth until now. The overlaps in the Venn diagram will reveal the commonalities. Embrace them. Be at one with the few.

Go Venn.

Talent for titration

Superpowers, trivial or otherwise, have the reputation of being all or nothing. John Hancock tells Feedback of an exception – maybe a partial exception – to that.

He says: “It seems I am able, consistently, to pour out almost exactly half of a 339 ml bottle of beer, such that 2 identical glasses have the same level of beer within 1 or, at most, 2 mm. This is done in one pour without any aids – I just seem to know when to stop pouring!”

(Feedback notes that Hancock’s name is familiar to citizens of the US. On 4 January 1776, a previous John Hancock signed the Declaration of Independence, a document that told Britain to go suck eggs. That Hancock wrote in lettering so big and bold that his name became a synonym for “a person’s handwritten signature”. In the US, people still tell each other to “sign your John Hancock”. That earlier John Hancock, unlike this current John Hancock, disdained half measures.)

Questionable discomfort

There is another recent addition to Feedback’s collection called The Title Tells You Everything You Need to Know.

“” perhaps brought surprise to readers of the journal Perception in 1993. It also won the 1997 Ig Nobel peace prize for its author, Harold Hillman at the University of Surrey, UK.

If you find an equally striking example, please send it, with citation details, to Telltale titles, c/o Feedback.

The Teflon diet

Teflon, much appreciated as a “non-stick” coating on frying pans and other cookware, could become an everyday additive to food, especially in weight-control diets.

Readers of a 2022 study called “Engineering properties of Teflon derived blends and composites: A review” get a quick hint of that in a single, slightly cryptic sentence: ““. That sentence refers to a paper published in 2016 in the Journal of Diabetes Science and Technology.

The 2016 paper has an intellectually yummy title: ““. The authors, Rotem Naftalovich, Daniel Naftalovich and Frank Greenway, in the US, explain that polytetrafluoroethylene – also known as PTFE or Teflon – is a plastic. They propound its merits: “Animal feeding trials showed that rats fed a diet of 25% PTFE for 90 days had no signs of toxicity and that the rats lost weight.”

They go on to hypothesise “that increasing the volume of food by mixing the food with PTFE powder at a ratio of 3 parts food to 1 part PTFE by volume will substantially improve satiety and reduce caloric consumption in people”.

Polytetrafluoroethylene, they write, “contributes no flavor (evident by its use in tongue piercings) and hence does not detract from the eating experience”. It is also “extremely inert… so it will not react within the body”.

It is thus “an ideal material for use as a nonmetabolized food volume bulking agent” – and in food that definitely won’t stick to your ribs.

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Looking for morbid romance? There’s a study for that

Marc Abrahams — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 18:00:00 +0000

Morbid dating

If one craves morbid romance, one could, if one wished, write an algorithm to select an attractively morbid prospective mate or a recreational date.

Coltan Scrivner, the curiosity-driven inventor of the Morbid Curiosity Scale (Feedback, 19 November 2022), has looked into a new use for his tool. He and two colleagues, in a new , explain that “Behavioral attraction predicts morbidly curious women’s mating interest” in men with dangerous personalities.

They cite earlier research showing that those “women are aware of potential costs associated with such men”. The new research aims to aid said women. It says: “Despite the potential costs of high-dark triad men, it could benefit morbidly curious women to upregulate their preference for such men to satisfy short-term mating goals.”

The research doesn’t pursue the obvious business potential here. Feedback envisions a new era of specialised morbid tool-making and tool use. Cheery days lie ahead, maybe, for the industry that originally was called “computer dating”.

(For the curious, Scrivner has also created an easy way for you to measure where you lie on his scale: a free online . Before starting it, you will be informed that “‘morbid’ does not mean the curiosity is bad – it simply refers to the fact that the topic is related to death in some way”.)

Limits of curiosity

What are the limits of your curiosity? Is there a reliable, simple way to find out? Here is one possible test.

Feedback has a copy of a paper that Subhash Chandra Shaw and his colleagues published in Medical Journal Armed Forces India. The title of that research might tell you – by your reaction to it – something about yourself.

The paper is called ““.

Chatting politics

A few politicians seek success by being ultra-glib. In so doing, they achieve momentary plausibility.

Feedback notices a similarity between those politicians’ shiny, hollow speech and the shiny, hollow text generated by ChatGPT and similar artificial intelligence computer programs.

Michael Townsen Hicks, James Humphries and Joe Slater at the University of Glasgow, UK, did a study called ““, which appears in Ethics and Information Technology. They argue that “describing AI misrepresentations as bullshit is both a more useful and more accurate way of predicting and discussing the behaviour of these systems”. The team mentions a prime example of bullshit: a political candidate saying particular things only because the words might “sound good to potential voters”.

Feedback admires the skill, if little else, of those politicians who, like ChatGPT, can utter endless streams of easy-to-swallow-though-not-to-digest patter. A few of the most successful of those ChatGPT-ish politicians, in several countries, also display a visual counterpart to their words – a just-fleetingly-plausible physical aspect of themselves. They adorn their heads with hair, or stuff that momentarily plausibly passes for hair, of ChatGPT-ish quality. There is, as yet, little published research about why and how that happens.

Not so trivial

Feedback continues the quest to compile a list of trivial superpowers. Aline Berry confesses and professes to having a trivial superpower that potentially isn’t trivial.

She writes: “I believe I have a super power which I have taken for granted all my life. When someone complains that they have been looking everywhere for something, I usually find it within 5 minutes. Somehow, like Sherlock Holmes, I eliminate the obvious which they must have looked at and zero in on the missing item, which may be out in view but camouflaged in such a way that it is overlooked.

“In one instance lately, a friend had been frantically looking for her car keys ‘all morning’ and asked for my help. I stood looking around, realising it would be useless for me to go over everything, and asked her if she had looked in the refrigerator. Her eyes lit up. She had put her keys on top of something cold to remind her to take it with her and had promptly forgotten about it.”

Another ability manifested in childhood: “I came to a new school several weeks late and was presented with a geometry problem. I had not previously taken geometry and did not know any of the rules, so I looked at the graph and put down the answer. It was correct. The teacher accused me of cheating and gave me a problem she had drawn, which no one could have seen before. I put down the correct answer again. She punished me by giving me 10 problems which I had to do the ‘proper’ way. Since I did not know what the proper rules were, I was glad when I got the news I would be going to another school.”

Swirl of interest

Here is an exercise in dimensional scaling. Which is more powerful: a) a storm in a teacup or b) a tempest in a teapot? Experiment is the real way to settle the question. Please survey your colleagues (minimum of 50), then submit your tripartite findings (number of respondents, storms and tempests) to: Swirl of interest, c/o Feedback.

Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founded the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website is .

Got a story for Feedback?

You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.