Gone with the wind
How do natural disasters affect intimate relationships? Feedback maintains a long list of questions we had never thought of asking, a fact that will surprise no one who knows of our predilection for impossible logic. So we are pleased to see this query now comprehensively answered in the paper .
The study involved 231 couples in Harris county, Texas, around the time of Hurricane Harvey in 2017, and is the âfirst to use longitudinal data collected before and after a natural disaster to examine its effect on relationship outcomesâ. This rather raises the question in our mind of how long the researchers were waiting, patiently observing, for disaster to strike â or perhaps it is merely a case of when, rather than if, in that part of Texas. Or maybe they have a button they can press, in which case we think we and the ethics board should be told.
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No matter: for anyone wondering whether a fortuitously timed tornado might put the whirlwind back into their romance, whether a wildfire can relight their fire or whether Earth moving makes the earth move, the answer is yes â but make hay while the sunâs not shining. Couples soon ârevert to their prehurricane levels of functioning as the recovery period continuesâ. For a longer-term boost, you will just have to move to somewhere more dangerous.
Block head
Feedback is excited to learn that an article in 51¶ŻÂț has been cited in the defence of Mike Graham, the presenter at talkRADIO â a UK radio station where the opinions can be as suddenly shouty as the name â who .
We fear the clues may be in the quotes in the headline, âLiving âconcreteâ made from bacteria used to create replicating bricksâ, and in the first line of the article, âA type of living concrete made from bacteria could one day help to reduce the environmental impact of the construction industryâ.
No, Mike and all: to the best of our knowledge, we cannot grow concrete. Mind you, with all the wonderful things we are learning you can do with cellulose, grasping at straws may prove to be a viable alternative.
Taking the low road
âThey got you covered, either wayâ, is Quentin Macilrayâs comment as he writes from Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic with a picture of a van advertising Camino Eterno, a combined ambulance and undertaking service. We canât better Quentinâs description of it as a quantum business governed by the collapse â or not â of the customerâs wave function. We are left wondering about the quality of the driving.
Menage au fromage
This weekâs prize for research that made us involuntarily choke on our cocoa is .
Our late-night stilton eating may never be as innocent again with the revelation that, far from living a life of monastic asceticism and reproducing purely asexually, the little blue-cheese-making blighters are â we know of no way to put this delicately â at it all the time. âThe screening of a large sample of strains isolated from diverse substrates throughout the world revealed the existence of individuals of both mating types, even in the very same cheese,â the researchers write, with what sounds like glee.
Investigating the sexual capabilities of cheese mould isnât something we had considered as a calling before. The affiliation of the team involved â the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, France â causes us to narrow our eyes ever so slightly, while giving the faintest of wise nods.
Whereâs my elephant?
Nick Parlow writes taking exception to a suggestion made in our thread on finding an elephant in the room (4 September and 2 October). âIâm sure that others have pointed out how ludicrous it is to paint an elephantâs toenails red and hide it in a cherry tree,â he writes. âThat amount of red nail varnish would be prohibitively expensive. Happily there is a far more practical method: paint the soles of its feet yellow, and hide it upside down in the custard.â
We are pleased to make this plain, Nick, given also that you reference the source âCunningham and Blake (1974), The Puffin Joke Bookâ, leaving us in no doubt that this is settled science and that the old ones are the best.
Elementary errors
While in the vein of nostra culpa, opprobrium â an alkaline earth metal, we believe â has rained down on the Feedback inbox following an ad for 51¶ŻÂț subscriptions in our 23 October issue. With the tagline âThatâs elementaryâ, it promised the gift of some rather surprising chemistry this Christmas. The non-metal selenium became a lanthanide, while both the transition metal rhenium and the excitingly short-lived halogen tennessine were Nobel gases.
No prizes there. Apologies to all who felt pH-imbalanced, and for all those asking what we intend to do with those responsible: barium.
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