Blushing chickens
People â humans â blush. Chickens arenât entirely inhuman in that they, too, show emotions on their facial skin. Delphine Soulet at the University of Tours, France, and colleagues how skin redness might be a reliable indicator of âthe affective states of hensâ. Reader FrĂ©dĂ©ric Darboux brought the project to Feedbackâs attention.
This is the story, to the extent it is a story, of six hens in a wooded outdoor range covered with grass. They had free access to a hen house and to as much water and feed as they wanted, whenever they wanted it.
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This is a story, also, that was essentially a reality TV programme. The chickens were given no script to follow. But they were placed in situations that almost forced them to react in ways that would induce compelling video viewing.
The adventure stretched over three consecutive summer weeks. Among the main events: a âCapture Testâ that involved âindividual hens being caught by the experimenter, who restrained the wings with two handsâ. The hens also found themselves involved in a âRewarding Testâ that involved a glass dish containing mealworms and wood shavings âplaced in the middle of the test arenaâ.
The researchers captured video of âcalm statesâ: resting, preening or feeding. Other footage showed âexciting and rewarding statesâ: dustbathing and exposure to mealworms. Inevitably, there were also âfear-related statesâ, most notably seen in the Capture Test.
The colourful data came from a process of âextracting redness from still frames from hen profilesâ. In the old days, before digital technology was available for chicken-emotion research, this might have been a matter of subjective artistic appraisal. The 2020s method removes human emotion from that aspect of the data gathering. Electronic video processing extracted âthe mean red (R), blue (B), and green (G) values for each bare skin region of the hen face (comb, cheek, ear lobe and wattle)â.
After analysing the data from the videos, the scientists reached a conclusion as to when the chickens had blushed most strongly. The hens, says the final report, âexhibited the highest degree of facial skin redness in negative situations of high arousalâ.
Eclectically smectic
If, somehow, your interests are eclectic and you are cathectic (but not apoplectic) about exploring words that rhyme with dialectic, try âsmecticâ â as in the title of the study ââ.
Written by Zala Korenjak and MatjaĆŸ Humar in a journal with the intriguing name Physical Review X, that paper explains how it doesnât take much to make a soap bubble become a laser.
Or, for a mildly jolly burst of melancholy, reach back to 1987 for P. Oswaldâs treatise in Journal de Physique, ââ.
Tending towards entropy
Physics often gets portrayed as a field so abstruse that most people canât understand or directly use it. A new study called ââ shows how wrong some people feel that notion might be.
The researchers write: âThe principle of âentropy increaseâ is a universal law describing a natural progression from order to disorder. This paper is innovatively the first to take the principle as a theoretical basis for assessing how tourism influences human health from a sociomateriality perspectiveâ.
Back in 2000, a collaboration between physicists in Italy, Brazil and the US tried to make sense of a different and borderline-unruly aspect of the concept of entropy increase. They published a paper called ââ.
Tourism professionals both do and donât like tourism to happen at the edge of chaos: they do for the excitement, but donât for the danger, the danger being both corporeal and financial. Too much entropy over too short a period could intensify both kinds of danger.
A about the new tourism research does note that âEntropy is classified as the general trend of the universe towards death and disorderâ. But other than that, the press release accentuates the positive. It says: âFor the first time, an interdisciplinary study has applied the theory of entropy to tourism, finding that travel could have positive health benefits, including slowing down the signs of ageing.â
In theory â in this theory â people might believe that principles of physics, adroitly deployed, can help a person delay seeing wrinkles. Raise this to a literary plane, Feedback muses, and it becomes a reminder to read Madeleine LâEngleâs sci-fi novel .
That bookâs plot involves travel. That bookâs publication was reputedly delayed by publishersâ indecision as to whether the story was meant for adults or children.
Pointy reckoning
A couple more additions to Feedbackâs collection of conversation-starting titles of research papers.
ââ gave incisive knowledge to subscribers of BMJ in 2006, while ââ supplied some fast and, in some respects, hard numbers to readers of the Archives of Oral Biology in 1995.
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