A knight鈥檚 tale
If you were a piece in a game of chess played to the death, what piece should you choose to be? It is the privilege of science to resolve such unanswered 鈥� dare one say unasked? 鈥� questions. Step forward (two squares on your first move, one subsequently) postgrad student Tom Murphy of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, with his paper .
Drawing from a database of more than 300,000 chess games, he models the attrition rates for each piece. The first lesson: uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. All non-draw games end with a king鈥檚 capture 鈥� and execution, one presumes 鈥� so being one gives you only a 50 per cent chance of survival. A similar fate befalls the queens, with the board鈥檚 most powerful pieces only seeing the endgame 45 per cent of the time.
Faring substantially worse, however, are the bishops (32 per cent survival rate) and the knights (right at the bottom at 27 per cent). Things are a little bit better for the rooks (54 per cent), but there is a surprise winner in the survival stake: the diminutive edgemost pawns, which make it all the way through an astonishing 70 per cent of games.
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Which just goes to show that, as in any war, the best way to survive is to avoid the fighting altogether. Plus, Feedback muses, being a pawn in someone else鈥檚 game and making it to the end of the board provides you with the enticing opportunity of being reincarnated as a queen. Check that, mate.
The Uncert Inn
鈥淭he size of macro objects shown to exhibit quantum superposition has increased dramatically recently,鈥� writes Graham Legg. 鈥淲alking past my local public house yesterday, it had two signs outside: one announcing 鈥楩ood served every day鈥�, and another stating 鈥楰itchen closed today'鈥�
Feedback feels Graham missed a trick in not passing through the inn鈥檚 portals to sample the multiverse within. Then again, the sudden onset of superposition effects after a few stiff drinks is a phenomenon with which we are all familiar.
Doggy dynamite
Attending an event in Hyde Park, London, Peter Duffell is warned by signage of an 鈥渆xplosive detection dog in operation鈥�.
鈥淚 couldn鈥檛 help but think of the mess that the dog makes when it detects something and then blows up,鈥� says Peter. This indeed takes doggy heroism to new levels 鈥� and gives a new, poignant meaning to cleaning up after your dog.
Taking the bisque
If you think that is scraping the barrel, you haven鈥檛 been to the Bangkok establishment of chef Nattapong Kaweenuntawong. Story reports that his restaurant Wattana Pnich has been selling the same beef stew for 45 years. Every night, the remaining broth is saved. Every day, the gigantic pan is filled and fired up again, resting comfortably in its home, a 15-centimetre-deep, half-century-old caldera of congealed stew spillage.
Something seems to be working as the dish has garnered awards and, as far as we know, no food poisoning lawsuits. Perhaps biologists might like to hotfoot it to Thailand to find out what undiscovered extremophiles may have evolved in this primordial soup. Meanwhile, we shall content ourselves, as every afternoon, with two victuals well known to improve with age: port wine and fruit cake.
Bread of the dead
Speaking of slow food, physicist and baking enthusiast Seamus Blackley has posted details on Twitter of his . Working with an Egyptologist and a microbiologist, Blackley has been hunting for the all-important ingredient: a starter culture of yeast.
By sampling ancient Egyptian clay crockery at Boston鈥檚 Museum of Fine Arts and Harvard University鈥檚 Peabody Museum 鈥� and a very stale loaf of Old Kingdom bread found on the Giza plateau 鈥� Blackley could recover viable yeast spores and feed them up into a bubbling culture. Latest reports include pictures of a round, brown, baked object looking very much like a loaf of bread, with a crumb Blackley describes as 鈥渓ight and airy, especially for a 100% ancient grain loaf鈥�. Well worth the 5000-year wait.
Fruit salad
Going the other way, meanwhile, we come to that staple of millennial cuisine, the avocado. that a heatwave in California, plus a seasonal lull in production, has sent prices soaring. Taquerias in California are now bulking out their guacamole with small green squash known as calabacitas.
Javier Cabral, editor of L.A. Taco, told reporters that it is 鈥渟cary how much this fake guacamole tastes like the real guacamole鈥�. Surely a cause for celebration?
Avocados wouldn鈥檛 be the first staple to be thus threatened. In recent years, it has variously been cocoa, coffee, bananas and olive oil, while Feedback remembers all too clearly the dark days of the .
Now a colleague leafing through the archive stumbles across a report from the 1990 Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science meeting. It warned that 鈥渒iwi fruit could vanish from supermarket shelves almost as suddenly as they appeared if New Zealand fruit growers do not start planning for climate change鈥�. Which makes us wonder: what was the earliest middle-class commodity panic?
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