Tiny black hole batteries
Following on from Feedback鈥檚 discussion about the Black Hole public toilet in New Zealand (25 November 2023) comes word of a plan called 鈥溾��, published in the journal Physical Review D.
Successful technologists, almost as much as unsuccessful technologists, are not so easily cowed by limits others believe to be insurmountable. The plan鈥檚 authors, Zhan-Feng Mai and Run-Qiu Yang at Tianjin University, China, keep their chins up and their minds cranking.
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They write: 鈥淭hough the black hole鈥檚 strong gravity forbids that the classical matters escape from it into outside, fortunately, the energy can be extracted from the black hole through quantum or classical processes.鈥�
They handwave away the swath of problems reputed to afflict anyone who suggests even going near a black hole. Their black hole, they specify, will be a 鈥渢iny black hole鈥�.
This kind of confidence inspires venture capitalists, a variety of humans who are experiencing a golden age here in the early 2020s. Many are looking for new big opportunities to raise funds and invest portions thereof after extracting appropriate fractions therefrom.
Black hole batteries could be their next big thing, following hard on the flighty footsteps of cryptocurrency and artificial intelligence, both of which flocks of investors have found to be as compellingly attractive as black holes.
Two-story superpower
Alison Litherland tells of a beneficially duplicitous trivial superpower.
She says: 鈥淵our mention of Rosemary Firman鈥檚 husband鈥檚 ability to read two different pages of braille at the same time (16 September 2023) reminded me of the trivial superpower I had when my children were little.
鈥淚 could read them a bedtime story out loud while at the same time silently reading a novel to myself. I have no idea how my brain managed to separate out the two stories, but it certainly helped with the tedium of reading the same bedtime story yet again.鈥�
Coffee with confusion
Ambiguity has a field day in this medical journal headline: 鈥溾��.
That title rides atop a letter to the editor from Anna Vittoria Mattioli and Alberto Farinetti at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy. The journal is Nutrition, Metabolism and Cardiovascular Diseases.
Mattioli and Farinetti explore some of the ambiguities in medical investigations 鈥� and medical pronouncements 鈥� about good and bad health effects of drinking coffee.
Some people in some places drink espresso, some drink other forms of coffee. Some drink filtered coffee, some unfiltered.
Some people in some places drink coffee 鈥渋n relation to a meal, thus influencing absorption and effect on the gut鈥�, some drink it standalone. Some people are men, others are not, with possible differences in 鈥渢he absorption of macro and micro nutrients and in their bioavailability鈥�.
Further studies, Mattioli and Farinetti suggest beneath their confusion-inducing headline, are required to 鈥渘ot create confusion鈥�.
Edge on edge
Sam Edge is vexed about a paper that featured in a previous Feedback column (4 November 2023) called 鈥溾��. Sam finds it hair-raising that the paper drew any attention.
He says: 鈥淭he old chestnut about drain circulation rears its head again, I see. Given the tiny volume and mass involved in a head of hair, coupled with the fact that people spend a significant amount of their time in a non-vertical pose and moving around, it鈥檚 ridiculous to suggest that the Coriolis force could be involved in hair whorling.鈥� The Coriolis force, you will recall, is a surprising twist in how things appear to move while something rotates.
Feedback hopes it won鈥檛 set Edge on edge to learn that there is a new version of that paper. Now titled 鈥溾��, it appears in the Journal of Stomatology, Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery.
The new version gives a twisty, this time distanced, nod to the Coriolis question: 鈥淥ther non-hemispheric factors should [be] assessed on samples from various Northern and Southern hemisphere locations, such as maternal health, maternal nutrition, and/or prenatal hormone exposure, before considering a potential effect of hemispheric environmental physical factors such as the Coriolis force.鈥�
Sheffield names harvest
Susan Frank doesn鈥檛 beat about the bush in conveying garden variety information.
She writes: 鈥淚 thought you鈥檇 like the names of two of our trustees associated with the Sheffield Botanical Gardens Trust, Barbara Plant and Christine Rose.鈥�
Feedback notes that the Sheffield Botanical Gardens Trust clarifies (by displaying the info specially within parentheses) that trustee Miles Stevenson, who is neither a plant nor a rose, is a chair.
Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and聽co-founded聽the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website is聽.
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