This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Blood spatter on high — “Be prepared!” This enduring motto of the Scout movement will come to mind for many readers of a paper called “Bloodstain pattern dynamics in microgravity: Observations of a pilot study in the […]
If you were to design wings for flying fruit, how best to optimize the wing shape? If you don’t already know the answer to that, you might begin your knowledge adventure by reading this study: “Curving to Fly: Synthetic Adaptation Unveils Optimal Flight Performance of Whirling Fruits,” Jean Rabault, Richard A. Fauli, and Andreas Carlson, […]
If you’re trying to make an alcoholic drink with the flavour of passion fruit and grapefruit, an obvious method would be to ferment passion fruit and grapefruit juices. But that’s not the only way. You could, for example, get hold of a fermenting New Zealand Sauvingnon Blanc as a base, and then bubble hydrogen sulfide […]
This year is (roughly) the 20th anniversary of the publication of EU Commission Regulation (EC) No 2257/94. So what better time to take another look at ‘Laying down quality standards for bananas’. The regulation caused, and continues to cause debate centering around the acceptable curvature of bananas – which some now cite as a standard example […]
