Feedback is New Scientist’s popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com
A sensitive topic
Feedback reads a lot of academic articles, and we are often distressed by their titles, which can be not so much meandering and unclear as digressive and circumlocutory. The only things worse are the ones that preface the academese with an allegedly humorous pop culture reference.
However, sometimes we run across research whose title is brisk and to the point. We are fond of the 2000 structural biology paper “The ribosome is a ribozyme“, which is an absolute model of efficiency (assuming you know what the two nouns mean). And then there is a February paper on bioRxiv brought to our attention by New Scientist contributor Chris Simms, titled “The coarse mental map of the breast is anchored on the nipple“.
That may, perhaps, need a bit of context. Some parts of the human body are more sensitive to touch than others. The face – especially the lips – and the tips of our fingers are highly sensitive, while our backs are much less so.
This is one of those classic experiments you can do at home. Get a chopstick or some other blunt tool and gently poke a willing partner. You will find that they can tell if you move the location of successive pokes, even by mere millimetres, if you poke them on the lips or fingertips. But if you poke them on the back, they will be terrible at determining whether you moved it. This is because your back has fewer touch-sensitive nerves there.
The authors of this new preprint spotted a gap in the literature. “While tactile acuity has been extensively studied on the limbs and face, acuity on the torso has received far less experimental attention… with the breast being largely ignored,” they write.
Let’s not drag out the suspense. It turns out breasts have very low tactile acuity, even worse than backs. Apparently, “touches needed to be between 3 and 4 times as far apart on the breast than on the hand to yield equivalent location discrimination performance”.
Feedback isn’t sure if this is quite what Caroline Criado Perez had in mind when she wrote Invisible Women, documenting the myriad ways women have been excluded from scientific research. But, as a piece of basic information, it seems like it might have its uses.
Feedback’s main takeaway is that we would like to have been a fly on the wall for the recruitment process. “You want to do what to my what with what?”
An even longer word
Back in early November 2024, Feedback was running a bit short of material due to a brief hiatus (long since over) in global idiocy, so we padded the column with a torrent of increasingly long words – or, as we said at the time, we engaged in sesquipedalianism.
Except it turns out we did it wrong. Francis Wenban-Smith wrote in to point out our mistake: “you were 2 letters short in your attempt to pad out your column with ‘floccinaucinihipilification’. The correct word is: ‘floccinaucinihilipilification’.”
If you can’t see the difference between those two blizzards of letters – and we wouldn’t blame you, because we evidently couldn’t – the second has an extra “li” just before the “pili”. Feedback would like to assure readers we have been given a stern talking-to.
In the process of confirming that we had indeed misspelled floccinaucinihilipilification, Feedback entered the two versions into a popular search engine. The correct version brought up a dictionary entry as the highlighted response. The incorrect version brought up our article (how embarrassing), above which was an AI summary of the fake word. Here are the opening lines:
“Floccinaucinihipilification is a long word that means to regard something as worthless or trivial. It was the longest word in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1982. Floccinaucinihipilification is a 29-letter word with 12 syllables. It contains nine i’s but no e’s.”
Readers who can count to 29, unlike the AI, will notice that all those claims about the number of letters and syllables are wrong, bar the one about the letter e. Feedback is proud to have contributed, in our own small way, to the ongoing pollution of the information ecosystem.
Unsafe dating
Like so much else in life, dating is becoming micro-targeted. You can still use huge apps like Tinder, but there is also a growing proliferation of ever-more-niche dating sites.
Perhaps the nichest of all is Unjected, aimed at those not vaccinated against covid-19. Or, to be more precise: “While we do not support vaccination of any kind, Unjected is specifically tailored for Covid-19 unvaccinated or any mRNA based injection.”
As technology analyst Benedict Evans put it on Threads: “Someone built a whole company around the Darwin Awards“.
Feedback has a lot of questions about Unjected, the most pressing of which is: how does the company decide who can join? Perhaps this is so basic it doesn’t need saying, but you can’t prove a negative.
Scouring the site’s FAQs, we found the answer: “Since the beginning, Unjected has believed the healthiest realtionships [sic] have a foundation of trust, and we have operated on an honor system. However, for our members who want the most safety and security in choosing their future partner, we recommend our ‘Unjected Verified’ upgrade. Unjected verified members attest to their unvaccination by affidavit.” Love, like SARS-CoV-2, is in the air.
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