Cola: A swell tale
If you are a male mouse who drinks lots of Pepsi or Coca-Cola, and if you mainly enjoy reading manly adventure stories, get yourself a copy of the latest write-up from researcher Z. Gong, pour yourself a tall, cool glass of cola and hunker into your favourite reading chair for a hell of a good time. Kristine Danowski, who isn鈥檛 a male mouse, tells Feedback about the pleasure of reading the writings of Z. Gong and co-authors, who are at Northwest Minzu University in China, and who also aren鈥檛 male mice.
The unfolds in the pages of Acta Endocrinologica. It tells of five groups of mice. One drank lots of Pepsi for 15 days straight. Another drank even more Pepsi. Counterpart groups drank counterpart amounts of Coca-Cola. The fifth group drank only water.
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Gong and co. know how to tell a good story, seasoning their testosterone-boosting true tale with doses of pure horror. After 15 days, they 鈥渁septically collected鈥� the mice鈥檚 testes. That is the horror part. But there is a surprise happy post-ending, if you choose to think of it that way. All the mice had larger testes than they had had back in their pre-drinking-bout days. The cola drinkers had acquired more heft than the cola teetotallers. And yes, they all lost their testes, but that is how the ball bounces.
Learning to read a bicycle
A wonder-provoking diagram of a bicycle is parked on page 100 of 21st Century Skills: Learning for life in our times by Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel. The book, published in 2009, still gets attention, gaining appreciation in a recent study called .
This bike, explains the book, is 鈥渁 model learning vehicle designed to transport students toward the goal of becoming more successful 21st century learners, workers, and citizens鈥�.
The diagram (pictured above) shows a pair of wheels (labelled 鈥淪TUDENT WHEEL鈥� and 鈥淭EACHER WHEEL鈥�). Each wheel is divided into four. We see brake levers (鈥淧ACE/TIME MANAGEMENT鈥�), but no brakes, a label for a gearshift lever (鈥淟EARNING GEAR AND TOOLS鈥�), but no gears.
Eight pages of earnest explanation accompany the diagram, including this proud by-the-way: 鈥淲e have presented this model to educators around the world, and it always brings a smile.鈥� Feedback presented the diagram to a university educator, who appraised it and said: 鈥淚 don鈥檛 understand how bicycles work, so I don鈥檛 understand this diagram. If I did understand how bicycles work, I鈥檓 sure I would find this diagram even less helpful.鈥�
Head, Brain, Organ et al
A few months ago, Dr Organ 鈥� Dr Jason Organ 鈥� was named of the journal Anatomical Sciences Education. This added flesh to the nominative determinism tradition that is occasionally evident in body-parts-centric medical journals, starting (as far as Feedback is aware) with the publication Brain. Henry Head and Russell Brain , at different times, Head from 1905 to 1923, Brain from 1954 to 1967.
Those heads of Brain a sort of medico-literary ecstasy in the December 1961 issue of Brain. Readers could savour an article there titled 鈥淗enry Head: The man and his ideas鈥�, authored by Russell Brain. It was Brain head Brain on Brain head Head, in Brain.
Lots of life in salt
When people enliven a bland meal by adding salt, they are, in many (and maybe all) cases, adding life to that food. Tiny, maybe tasty, bits of life. Most commercial salt is home to microscopic species. Leila Satari, Alba Guill茅n, Adriel Latorre-P茅rez and Manuel Porcar, all at the University of Valencia, Spain, went looking for that life in six different kinds of table salt.
They found it, everywhere. Their report, , was published in Frontiers in Microbiology. The salts from oceans were home mostly to various species of archaea. Salts from other sources gave domicile mostly to varieties of bacteria.
These scientist are continually looking for life in low-rent places. Satari, Guill茅n and Porcar, with 脌ngela Vidal-Verd煤, were awarded the 2021 Ig Nobel ecology prize for .
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