Gearing up for happiness
Transitions sometimes start with a period of frustration. People can adapt to new ways â but the old ways are familiar, which make them feel comfortable in comparison with the new. Transmissions, too, sometimes start with a period of frustration. Tim Stevens reports in about how one automobile manufacturer is solving a problem some of its customers have in transitioning from a petrol-powered car to an electric vehicle (EV).
The news headline says it all: âToyota has built an EV with a fake transmission, and weâve driven it â Five minutes behind the wheel, and youâll be a believer.â
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This is for customers who love the ancient experience of driving with a gearstick. Toyotaâs new car has a joystick and a clutch pedal. Neither is connected to the carâs actual transmission. Stevens writes: âsomething strange happens: An engine fires up. Itâs a pretend one, exhaust humming only through the carâs sound system. Still, it sounds compelling enough. Step on the throttle pedal, and that pretend engine gains revs, screaming up to its limiter with simulated aggression. To be clear: Literally nothing is happening in the car at this point other than the sound changing pitch. Oddly, though, something was happening in me: I was smiling. For no logical reason, I suddenly was having a lot more fun.â
Feedback marvels at this new techno-twist on the old philosophical drive to answer the question âWhat is reality?â
A stink about beer
Beer enthusiast Bernd-Juergen Fischer of Berlin is peeved. He tells Feedback: âYour paragraph on beer foam aroma sceptics [21 October] set my head spinning: âif there are anyâ! And this in a journal out of Britain, where the greatest care is being taken by tappers to remove even the last vestige of foam off the beer before a-spilling it onto the table! When I complained to a publican about it, he responded: âIf you want a tasty beer, you can always go to the continent.â
âMy wife then explained to me what every child in the Anglo-Saxon world seems to know: âThe Brits like only what they dislike: take broccoli. Or the EU: when they began to like it, they left it.â This explains also why you had to leave such in-depth beer-foam research to the Japanese: There ainât any in GB.â
Bernd-Juergen might persuade publicans by giving them copies of a Mexican study, ââ. It suggests how to âmake the foam more attractive to the consumerâ.
Medical amusement
An old saying, iffily attributed to Voltaire, explains that âthe art of medicine consists mostly of amusing the patient while nature cures the diseaseâ.
Feedback invites any reader who is a practising, licensed physician to say whether â in your professional experience â that is substantially true. Send your note, accompanied perhaps by a few words of personal professional recollection, to âMedical Amusementâ, c/o Feedback. Please, for context, identify your own branch of medicine (family doctor, surgeon, cardiologist, neurologist, otolaryngologist, whatever).
Future for ducks
The future arrives faster than one expects. Or slower, depending on oneâs expectation.
Consider the recent study called ââ. One hundred years ago, this paper, had it existed, might have been regarded as science fiction.
Desislava Abadjieva, its lead author, is based at the department of immunoneuroendocrinology at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciencesâ Institute of Biology and Immunology of Reproduction.
Immunoneuroendocrinology! A 1992 spoke to the then future of a pursuit that, at the time, was little known. It said: âThe numerous interactions between the immune and neuroendocrine systems are being studied in a rapidly expanding interdisciplinary field called âimmunoneuroendocrinologyâ.â
During the 31 years since, the entire scientific community, worldwide, has published only about 40 papers that even mention the word immunoneuroendocrinology.
As to the future for Muscovy ducks, a new Brazilian report on its face implies bad news. It is called ââ. The details, though, give a helter-skelter view of what might happen.
What is currently bad news for the ducks could lead to catastrophically worse news, instead, for the monkeys. The report is a stark warning to any brown capuchin monkey who might find a way to read it â and a source of at least some hope for readers who are Muscovy ducks. It explains that, by preying on the ducks, the monkeys might bring on âretaliationâ by the humans who traditionally raise and devour those ducks.
This is nature again displaying the give and take that Stephen Sondheim celebrated in a song in his play . âThe history of the world, my sweet,â explains the title character as they cook up how to cook up some pies made of human meat, âis who gets eaten and who gets to eat.â
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 .
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