Suck it up
Reader Simon Leach responded to Feedback’s call for papers in which The Title Tells You Everything You Need to Know with a cheery “Well, you asked for it!”.
The “it” was a copy of a report published in the British Medical Journal in 1980 under the headline “Penile injuries from vacuum cleaners”.
“The title,” says Leach, “contains everything you need to know. However, the report answers every question that might occur to you as well. The last sentence summarises by saying ‘The present patients may well have thought that the penis would be clear of the fan but were driven to new lengths by the novelty of the experience and came to grief’.” Leach adds: “As junior doctors we may not have read the BMJ as assiduously as we should, but we all read this one!”
Feedback muses that, whether professionally or personally, one should love one’s vacuum cleaner wisely, but not too well. If you know of another published research study with a title this satisfyingly complete, please send it to: Telltale titles, c/o Feedback.
How to de-cyst
Shiheng Zhao and Pierre Haas grossly grab your attention with the title of their study: “Mechanics of poking a cyst”. That done, they shift into a less folksy tone.
Zhao and Haas are based at two of the three Max Planck Institutes in Dresden, Germany. They demonstrate how to shepherd a discussion so as to minimise the yucky and maximise the technomechanical.
“Just as one is wont to poke the fruity wares peddled in supermarkets to evaluate the immediacy of their comestibility,” they begin, “indentation of biological samples reveals mechanical properties that are intrinsically linked to their biological function.”
After that, it’s all about “the relation between the indentation force F and the displacement e of the indenter” and “calculation of the elastic deformation gradient”.
If you have a fascinating skin ailment but also have friends who cringe when you tell them about it, try using Zhao and Haas’s genteel phrasing. Cysts, they point out, are simply “spherical monolayers of polarised cells surrounding a fluid-filled lumen”.
Hamburgers on meat
Several hundred Hamburgers – residents of the city of Hamburg, Germany – answered surveys about three kinds of sausage. These were select Hamburgers, all of a certain age range.
The survey’s senders, Stephan G. H. Meyerding and Magdalena Kuper at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, limited their questions to these varieties of sausage: “Meat, plant-based or in-vitro salami.”
Meat-based is the most traditional of the three salamis, while the plant-based kind has grown in popularity in recent decades. In-vitro salami – made using stem cells – is the newest comer, still finding its way from laboratories to dinner tables.
The researchers’ aim? “Explaining food product choice of generation Y and Z in Germany through carnism and the core dimensions of the food-related lifestyle scale”.
The verdict, in their data, seems to them clear: “The majority of Generation Y and Z in Germany prefer vegan meat over real meat, and in-vitro meat is more popular than beef or pork meat.”
That verdict doesn’t seem as meaty as it might be if the study is done anew some years from now. “In-vitro meat,” say the researchers, “is still unknown and not yet on the German market.”
Eat your liver
The old complaint that kids don’t want to do what adults tell them to do has new confirmatory evidence. “Children don’t like eating what they’re supposed to eat…” according to the title of Vira Réka Nickel’s study about childhood nutrition.
Nickel is based at the Institute of Ethnology in Budapest and has gathered info about the past hundred years or so of “public catering for children in Hungary”.
During that time, eating and food preparation habits changed drastically in the nation, driven, says the study, by “the obligation to provide public catering and the general obligation to work”.
Nickel illustrates the they-don’t-like-it problem with photographs, one of which bears the caption “Fried, breaded luncheon meat with creamed split peas is one of the ‘classic’ school meals, although it has never been one of the most popular”.
There are certain meals that many children refuse to touch, a reluctance Nickel explores in some depth: “During our research, fried liver was one such meal. In Eger, the problem was addressed by serving only rice if the child did not want the liver. In Ózd, the children were not given this option. The catering manager in Ózd drew my attention to an important fact when we asked about the possibility of serving children only the part of their meal they wanted to eat: ‘it’s against the law. The parents have paid for it’.”
Statistics and baboons
“Can non-human primates perform linear regression on a graph?” ask Lorenzo Ciccione and colleagues in a study that refers to “the baboon as a statistician”. Their tentative answer: somewhat, to a degree that “varies among individuals”.
Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founded the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website is improbable.com.
Got a story for Feedback?
You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.
