杏吧原创

FEEDBACK was in Paris recently, looking at an exhibition on women inventors in the Museum of Arts and Trades. It was frankly rather disappointing 鈥� mainly posters telling yet again how Hedy Lamarr helped invent frequency-hopping as used in the latest 3G cellphones, how Melitta Benz dreamed up filter coffee, and Stephanie Kwolek developed Kevlar at DuPont.

So we went across town to the European Centre of Photography and stumbled across something a lot more surprising, tucked away in a corner of the basement cafe. There, artist Clayton Campbell has a small exhibition of photos of children holding up signs that demonstrate how their vocabulary has changed since 11 September 2001.

He is also showing a tantalising taste of another exhibition which he has had to abandon. Although their contribution is seldom mentioned, several dozen women scientists worked at Los Alamos in the 1940s on the Manhattan project to build an atom bomb. Campbell thought it would be good to go back into the archives at Los Alamos and create a montage of the security photos that the women bomb makers had to carry as badges in 1945.

The Los Alamos PR people thought that honouring the forgotten women would be a nice idea. But suddenly a security officer got wind of the project and stepped in. Since 9/11, he decreed, security has to be unbending. So regardless of whatever common-sense arguments Campbell had to offer, it was absolutely out of the question for the US government to risk photographs of scientists taken some 60 years ago falling into the wrong hands.

Feedback is all in favour of security. And yes, perhaps it is just conceivable that terrorists might use the photos of these people 鈥� the youngest of whom must now be in their eighties 鈥� to make up fake badges and steal secrets of the atom bomb. But if so, why are there pictures of male 1940s bomb makers still on the home page of the Los Alamos National Laboratory website at

THE Dundee Courier and Advertiser in Scotland likes to make things clear even for its most arithmetically challenged readers, Colin McLeod tells us. It recently reported: 鈥淒rug wastage in Tayside is showing every sign of spiralling out of control. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of NHS funding in Tayside is going on pills and tablets prescribed by doctors that are not being taken by patients. The weight of drugs returned unused to local chemist shops in the 12 months to the end of August was 13,546 kg. That is a mountain of drugs for destruction equal in weight to 13,546 bags of sugar.鈥�

IRONY of ironies! Last week we told two spam stories 鈥� one about an improbable 419 spam involving a Nigerian astronaut, and another about a spam filter blocking the word 鈥渟pecialist鈥� because it has 鈥渃ialis鈥� in it. In the course of putting that column together, we emailed it to cartoonist Paul McDevitt and settled down to wait for his sketches. A few hours later he phoned to say he hadn鈥檛 received anything.

The reason, it turned out, was that our email to him had been blocked by our parent company RBI鈥檚 spam filter 鈥� either because it repeated half the text of the Nigerian spam, or because of that word 鈥渃ialis鈥� and the words of explanation which accompanied it, 鈥渟uper-Viagra鈥�.

Fortunately, RBI was able to release the email, and not long afterwards McDevitt鈥檚 cartoons duly arrived.

COULD this be the biology breakthrough of the year? Scott Agnew was finding out about the forthcoming Catalyst science programmes on Australia鈥檚 ABC TV and was impressed to read: 鈥淛onica Newby meets a group of scientists in Adelaide who are looking at sex and finding out it plays a much bigger role in pregnancy than we previously thought.鈥�

AS the blurb advertising the Overdrive antioxidant formula so rightly, if inelegantly, states: 鈥淓veryone needs a good antioxidant supplement to assist a difficult time such as in times of exercise, tiredness and times when extra effort is required.鈥�

But whether or not we need one with Overdrive鈥檚 ingredients is more open to question. They include 鈥渕agnesium, chromium, selenium, folic acid, bio-paranoids鈥�.

FINALLY, some readers have taken us to task for our recent endorsement of the Quackwatch website (24 April). We should, we now realise, have made it clearer that while this site does an excellent job of debunking many phoney and fraudulent therapy claims, it does so from a position of medical conservatism that dismisses all forms of therapy that fall outside the orthodox mainstream. This may delight some readers, but others find it unacceptably narrow. Be warned.

Now here鈥檚 a surprise. Reader James Joyce noticed this instruction on an old exam paper while revising for his maths exam: 鈥淔ull marks on this test may be obtained by correct solutions to all questions鈥�