56 | New Scientist | 6 March 2021
The back pages Feedback
Fresh mint
The UK’s Royal Mint has revealed
the new 50-pence coins it has
struck to celebrate Victorian fossil
hunter Mary Anning. But eagle-eyed
pedants (of whom we know a few)
have spotted a slight error.
One coin marks the discovery
of the first ichthyosaur, an extinct
marine reptile that looked rather
like a modern dolphin. It says
“Temnodontosaurus, Mary Anning
1811” and includes a picture of
a fossilised skull. But, a colleague
points out that, according to the
Natural History Museum in London,
she didn’t actually discover this bit
of the ichthyosaur. Instead it was
her brother Joseph who found it
in 1810. Mary dug up parts of
the neck in 1811, the museum’s
website says.
Who are we to split hairs,
though? Mary Anning was
constantly overlooked for her
work during her life. Her name
was often omitted from scientific
papers that mentioned her fossils,
including the ichthyosaur, and
the Geological Society of London
refused to admit her because
she was a woman. If we get
hold of one of these 50p coins,
we will be sure to treasure it.
Not so for a recently minted £2
coin that was made for the 75th
anniversary of the death of author
H. G. Wells, however. The coin shows
the invading Martian tripods from
War of the Worlds with four legs.
“The clue is in the name,” irate
sci-fi fans complained.
You have to pity the Royal Mint,
it just can’t please everyone.
Another recent controversy
came from a 50p coin struck to
commemorate Brexit. The coin
reads “Peace, prosperity and
friendship with all nations”, a
laudable enough statement, you
might think, but it failed to include
an Oxford comma after “prosperity”,
provoking fury among enthusiasts
for the controversial punctuation
mark. Author Philip Pullman said
the coin should be “boycotted
by all literate people”. Well,
at least it distracted people
from arguing about Brexit.she’s recommending are really not
the solutions we’d recommend in
the NHS,” he said. “We need to take
long covid seriously and apply
serious science.”Let them eat cake
Continuing the unconventional
advice theme, functional medicine
expert Will Cole has a new diet book
that sounds appealing. Although,
according to Wikipedia, functional
medicine has previously been
described as quackery, Feedback
wonders if Cole’s book on “intuitive
fasting” may be a turning point.
His suggestion is that we should
be more willing to listen to our body
and intuition. This sounds like a
very clever idea to which we have
only one question: what if it feels
right to eat large quantities of cake?
We can’t help but intuit that such
a diet may have some flaws.Perhaps, instead, we need
to experiment with a few other
approaches, to which we turn to one
of the UK’s most prolific TV health
presenters, Michael Mosley. He has,
at various points in the past few
years, advocated low-carbing, a
Mediterranean diet, the 5-2 method,
where you fast two days a week,
and a “clever guts” diet designed
to boost your microbiome. We
can’t help wondering whether
the earlier advice was wrong or if
we are supposed to follow all the
different regimes simultaneously.
After all of that you would need
a decent palate cleanser and what
better than a goat’s milk cleanse,
where you have nothing but goat’s
milk and herbs for eight days? As
Paltrow told Marie Claire: “We all
have parasites, and they love the
milk protein. So if you eat nothing
else, they all come out of the
intestinal wall and then you kill
them with the herbs.” Got it.Party pooper
Speaking of intestinal matters,
a reader’s attention was caught
by a rather graphic advert on the
side of a south London bus stop
asking: “How do you poo?”.
The ad urges people to match
the appearance of their stool to
different categories – smashed
avocado, “poo-doh”, the smooth
criminal and so on – with a
handy pictorial guide. It reminds
Feedback of our favourite nugget
of health-related trivia, the
existence of the Bristol stool chart.
This is an entirely serious
medical faeces classification
system, ranging from type 1
(severe constipation) to type 7
(severe diarrhoea), although it
is unclear how Bristol residents
feel about being associated
with this endeavour.
Digging deeper, the bus-stop ads
seem to be in aid of a campaign
to raise awareness of bowel health,
or to help a food company sell its
high-fibre snack bars, or possibly
both. All very worthy, but our
bus-stop correspondent wishes
he hadn’t been eating his breakfast
at the time of his encounter. ❚Superpowders
Hollywood star and purveyor
of peculiarly scented candles
Gwyneth Paltrow has graced the
pages of this magazine before,
when she went from flogging
pricey “lifestyle” accoutrements
(£41 for a water bottle, anyone?)
to offering alternative advice
that medical experts said could
carry risks to health through
her TV show The Goop Lab.
Now, as the world battles a
deadly pandemic, Paltrow has
popped up again to share how
she is defeating long-lasting
covid-19 symptoms with herbal
cocktails, kombucha tea and
detoxifying superpowders.
Spoilsport and national medical
director for NHS England, Stephen
Powis, wasn’t impressed with
Paltrow’s most recent pearls of
wisdom. “Some of the solutionsGot a story for Feedback?
Send it to [email protected] or
New Scientist, 25 Bedford Street, London WC2E 9ES
Consideration of items sent in the post will be delayedTwisteddoodles for New Scientist