This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them: Down, with texting — Want to guess what might happen if someone walks while texting? If you prefer a formally educated guess to an autodidactic supposition, Paulo Pelicioni and his colleagues at the University of New […]
The physicist who won an Ig Nobel Prize for analyzing whether buttered toast usually falls on the buttered side has now examined the similar question: what happens when you drop a mobile phone? The Digit web site reports: Why do phones always seem fall with their screen facing down? While most people would be satisfied […]
Richard Lehman writes (in his journal reviews column, in BMJ), about a standout article about standing up for standing up, in The Lancet: I do wish the world was run by New Zealanders. Unassumingly tough, kind and sensible, uninterested in adopting other people’s bad habits and neuroses, they are just wonderful at getting on with life. […]
What happens when Helmeted Guinea Fowl, out walking, encounter an unexpected pothole? Do they fall over? That depends, in quite an improbable way, on whether they see it coming or not … In 2005, a research team at Concord Field Station, the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, US, endeavoured to clarify things by encouraging […]
