Intentional cattiness
When cats are compelled to endure a crush of mass consideration from an adoring public, do they proceed to behave of their well-known, endearing, imperious “cat-like” methods? Simona Cannas and her colleagues on the University of Milan in Italy produced some information that will deliver consideration to the query.
Their research, “Assessment of cats’ behavior during a cat show“, published in the Journal of Veterinary Behavior, focuses on 82 cats at a cat show. (The researchers, using professional lingo, say the event was “a feline exposition”.)
They gathered the information meticulously: “the observer stood in front of the cages once an hour, from 10 to 17 [minutes past], for a total of 8 times for each cat”.
They noticed what they noticed: “Analysis of behaviors exhibited by cats during the exposition day revealed that most of them were sleeping (93.9%), resting (62.2%), and looking at their surroundings (92.7%).”
The researchers’ conclusion leaves room, nonetheless, for debate as to what these cats had in thoughts. The research says “the cat show environment represents a situation full of stressful stimuli for the cat; despite this, our results have identified few behaviors of discomfort or stress… Further studies are required to confirm and deepen our results.”
What a yarn
Very lengthy, skinny issues range rather a lot in what their mathematician’s-eye-catching length-to-thinness ratio makes it doable for them to do.
A press release from North Carolina State University hails the creation of “yarn-shaped supercapacitors”, so referred to as as a result of the units are thread-like and might behave as capacitors, controllably storing and disbursing electrical cost. The press launch quotes Wei Gao, a co-inventor of the expertise.
She stated: “Imagine you can make a yarn, just a regular textile yarn, that you also make into a battery. You can basically hide it in your clothing. If you can do that, you can add so many more functions to your clothing.”
We could also be getting into a technological Age of Thin Things.
As Feedback has famous (1 October 2022), a brand new metropolis deliberate as a part of Saudi Arabia’s Neom challenge is designed to be 170,000 metres lengthy by 200 metres extensive. Could the North Carolinian yarn-shaped supercapacitor tech be included into the Saudi metropolis’s exoskeleton? That could be a drastic leap to the longer term for a rustic that insists it needs to maneuver past its present financial reliance on oil.
This suddenly-almost-plausible risk reveals the prescience of Wallis Simpson, former Duchess of Windsor, who is claimed to have stated almost a century in the past: “One can never be too rich or too thin.”
Measuring dependancy
The old saying “If you can measure it, it must be important” haunts the various analysis efforts to clarify why you will need to measure two of the 5 fingers on a person’s hand. Specifically, the second and fourth fingers. The two-finger quest kinda, sorta resembles an dependancy. Sometimes this quest appears at dependancy itself as being, possibly, one thing you’ll be able to higher perceive by measuring fingers.
Typically, finger-ratio explanations develop in some obscure means from the notion that hormone ranges within the uterus earlier than beginning one way or the other clarify the relative lengths, years later, of a person’s fingers.
Finger-ratio-centric analysis research are quite a few and imaginative. They range extensively – almost wildly – within the sorts of essential mysteries the researchers search to clarify.
How different? Here are a number of of the topics addressed in recent years in revealed digit-ratio research: “voice behavior in bankers”; “hunting success among Hadza hunters”; religiosity in college college students; “parental income inequality and children’s digit ratio”; creative capacity; “age at first marriage in semi-nomadic people from Namibia”; “psychological features in a sample of cavers”; chew accidents occurring in fistfights; “managerial skills of managers employed in public and private organizations of Udaipur City”; and “number of sex partners”.
And dependancy. Mehmet Gürkan Gürok and colleagues at varied establishments in Turkey have not too long ago written a paper referred to as “Second and fourth (2D:4D) digit ratio in heroin and cannabis addicted patients“. They published it in the Journal of Ethnicity in Substance Abuse. Like most finger-ratio studies, this one was done with great care: “We obtained the lengths of 2D and 4D of the subjects by using sensitive calipers and calculated the 2D:4D.” And as is customary, it is filled with promise: “Our findings can be considered promising as to whether prenatal hormonal factors are important in the etiopathogenesis of addiction.”
The Denver sniff take a look at
When one thing – and its headline – smells humorous, possibly it’s value wanting into. People who occur throughout a sombre research by environmental scientists within the US would possibly react first to the anomaly of its title: “Evaluating the environmental justice dimensions of odor in Denver, Colorado“.
Was that title meant to be solemnly critical? Deadpannedly humorous? Both? Whatever the intent, Feedback salutes its authors. Their wording triggered the olfactoric-linguistical sensibilities of Mason Porter, who alerted us to it.
Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founded the journal Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he labored on uncommon methods to make use of computer systems. His web site is improbable.com.
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