Trolley trouble
It is the morning rush, the tram is full to bursting and Feedback wonders who to sacrifice for the greater good. Pulling an imaginary lever will prevent a crash and divert us onto a track with just one individual tied to it? Eminently reasonable.
This brand of thought experiment, first formulated in a 1967 philosophy paper by Philippa Foot, gets a video-game outing on developer Neal Agarwal鈥檚 website.
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Following a , Feedback visited the site and rattled through some classic trolley problems, only to be transported to some very strange territory indeed. For example, 鈥淥h no! A trolley is heading towards 5 lobsters. You can pull the lever to divert it to the other track, running over a cat instead. What do you do?鈥� As if Feedback would harm so solitary and self-sufficient a beast!
Where鈥檚 the beef?
It is as well we have something to distract us because we are jolly hangry this morning. This godless marriage between the words 鈥渉ungry鈥� and 鈥渁ngry鈥� may be with us for a while, now that 64 people, mostly from Austria and Germany, have helped researchers put some numbers on the soaring levels of anger and irritability, and plummeting capacity for pleasure, occasioned by missing a meal.
, explored on 快猫短视频鈥榮 website (6 July), were solid enough (being hangry is, it seems, a 鈥渢hing鈥�). However, the study鈥檚 second questionnaire included a section on eating styles and, 鈥渋nterestingly鈥�, discovered that only 23 per cent of respondents said they knew when they were full and then stopped eating. Feedback鈥檚 conclusion: when visiting central Europe, bring extra sandwiches.
Right now, Feedback could eat a horse (just under 300 kilograms, of which 60 per cent is muscle). Or a fellow passenger.
Actually, scratch that: according to a by James Cole at the University of Brighton, UK, humans are only 38 per cent muscle and not that nutritious. So you have got to wonder (a) which dinner parties in Brighton to avoid and (b) why hominids in the Palaeolithic bothered eating each other in the first place. You would need to cannibalise three humans a day to feed a 25-strong tribe.
Raising the bill
How picky should we be about nutrition? The endangered iguanas of the Bahamas are now so jacked on the grapes being offered to them by ecotourists, they are of diabetes.
A CNN report in Japan, on the other hand, informs us that its animal guests are more discriminating. Penguins are turning their beaks up at the inferior mackerel they are now being offered by their keepers, while the otters have been observed actually throwing the fish aside 鈥� in otter contempt, perhaps? Please send urgent donations of high-end 鈥渁ji鈥� horse mackerel.
An unwelcome solution
Actually, perhaps we don鈥檛 need any more fish-in-the-sky stories, now that Sharon Hill, an independent researcher from Pennsylvania, and Paul Cropper, an author from Australia, have solved the 鈥渟had rain鈥� mystery.
On 29 December 2021, gizzard shad fell from the sky onto storm-drenched Texarkana, in eastern Texas. Most assumed the unlucky creatures had been syphoned up in a waterspout. But, according to an , the skies that day, though thundery, weren鈥檛 up to sucking up lakes.
Was it a plane? No. There were no unusual cargos in the air. Was it a bird? Ah. Now we come to it. Hill and Cropper talked to local ornithologists and learned that a large number of cormorants had flown slap bang into the storm. Caught in the aerial equivalent of a spin cycle, they may have upchucked all over Texarkana.
Scaling the depths
Might the cormorant become a new unit of measurement for precipitation? Anything seems possible now that no less an organ than Physics Today has invited its readers to imagine 鈥渁toms so big that each of their protons and neutrons is the size of a blue whale鈥�. Reader David Renshaw was especially taken with the idea: by the same logic, electrons can now be represented as rabbits and neutrinos as fruit flies.
鈥� 鈥渁nd rinse鈥�
Wolfing down a late breakfast of half-digested shad is bad for anyone鈥檚 dental hygiene, so thank goodness there are visionary researchers out there looking to 鈥渄isrupt oral care technology鈥�.
A press release on offers a breathless portrait of the shapeshifting robotic microswarms 鈥渢hat may one day act as a toothbrush鈥�, so long as they continue to obey the diktats of two of their creators, Edward Steager and Hyun Koo at the University of Pennsylvania.
Steager, Koo and their colleagues have found a way to magnetically arrange iron oxide nanoparticle-based microrobots 鈥渋nto antimicrobial bristle- and floss-shaped arrays鈥�. They are 鈥渃onsidering different means of delivering the microrobots through mouth-fitting devices鈥�.
Say it softly, but might there be such a thing as too much disruption?
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