56 | New Scientist | 30 January 2021
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Feline frenzy
“Are you a cat or a dog person?”
Feedback is often asked. To which
we reply, “no”.
Catty? Perhaps. Yet even our
heart is softened by the unbounded
joy expressed by a feline rubbing
against a catnip plant (Nepeta
cataria, to get in there before our
ever-vigilant subeditors do). The
suspicion that hardcore drugs are
involved has now been confirmed
by a study pinning down how
nepetalactol, an organic compound
first isolated from catnip, activates
the feline opioid reward system.
Reiko Uenoyama at Iwate
University in Japan and her
colleagues reached this conclusion
by testing the effect of nepetalactol
on 25 laboratory cats, 30 feral cats,
an Amur leopard, two jaguars and
two Eurasian lynx. We hope the claw
marks are on their way to healing.
We also appreciate the further
insight from the study that, besides
an opioid rush, self-anointing with
nepetalactol has the practical effect
of repelling mosquitoes. “Our
findings suggest that nepetalactol
may be a new natural candidate
repellent to help reduce mosquito
problems in human society,” the
authors write. We can think of a few
potential drawbacks – especially if
you’re not a cat person.Sustainable whales
The Australian High Court has
recently asserted a “right to reuse”,
allowing third parties to refill and
resell expensive patented printer
ink cartridges. Despite living in a
stationery cupboard at a resolutely
northerly latitude, we can only
approve. No more night-time
visits to the backstreet cartridge
retrofitter, desires wordlessly
expressed in a series of faded
A4 printouts.
Quite how big a deal this is
takes some working out, discovers
reader Michael Paine. The website
choice.com.au informs him that,
including printer cartridges, “in
2019, Australia produced about
539,000 tonnes of e-waste, which
is more than the estimated weightBring coffee
A mildly jittery colleague clutching
a homeschooled infant in one arm
and a quadruple espresso in the
other draws our attention to a
new paper in the journal Progress
in Neuro-Psychopharmacology
and Biological Psychiatry, titled
“Coffee effectively attenuates
impaired attention in ADORA2A
C/C-allele carriers during chronic
sleep restriction”.
Pausing only to note that this
paper, dated 13 July 2021, appears
to come from what we hope is a
happier, less sleep-deprived future,
we turn to an accompanying press
release. “Drinking coffee may help
temporarily offset the negative
effect of chronic sleep loss on
working memory, attention and
reaction-time,” it trills. “The study
explored coffee’s effects during
a simulated busy work week, inwhich the 26 participants involved
underwent sleep restriction,
sleeping a total of only five hours
each night for five days.”
This, apparently, is what goes
on behind the closed doors of
the “state-of-the-art Institute of
Aerospace Medicine, in Cologne
Germany”. Sadly, while positive
effects of caffeination were
observed during the study’s first
three to four days, by the fifth
day, no difference was observed
compared with a control group
being fed decaffeinated coffee.
Feedback is tempted to growl
“tell us something we didn’t know”.
But it was a disturbed night, no
one’s been round to service the
office coffee machine since March
2020, and... sorry, what were we
talking about?Blockchain blues
We probably weren’t talking
about blockchain. Reuters
reports that two UK hospitals
are “using blockchain technology
to keep tabs on the storage and
supply of temperature-sensitive
covid-19 vaccines”.
Blockchain, Feedback readers
will no doubt be aware, is a
distributed ledger technology
designed such that any attempt
by one party to explain what it is
or how it works causes the eyes
of a second party to glaze over,
thus ensuring total security
about what’s actually going on.
Accordingly, opinions about
this new development are divided
in the windowless basement of
New Scientist Towers housing
our technology staff. “There’s
literally nothing blockchain can do
that a spreadsheet can’t,” says one.
Another points out that at least a
blockchain can’t run out of rows –
a snafu that caused Public Health
England to lose some 15,000
records of positive covid-19 tests
last year (24 October 2020, p 56).
If you say so. Feedback is
inclined to shrug: what, after
all, is the worst that can happen?
Actually, don’t answer that. Better
still, answer it on a blockchain. ❚of all of the northern hemisphere’s
blue whales combined”.
We screw up our eyes, 10 per
cent in confusion at the familiar
blue whale measure resurfacing
in a more complex guise, 10 per
cent in perplexity at the strangely
globetrotting nature of the
comparison, and the remainder
in a strained attempt to envision
what all the blue whales living in
the northern hemisphere look like.
The weight of these blue whales,
it turns out, is a majestically
large number multiplied by a
lamentably small one. But, we
muse, this comparison has a lot
going for it as a measure of
sustainability. We can imagine no
better future than one where the
mass of our waste diminishes as
the mass of an imperilled species
rises, with the one expressed as
progressively smaller multiples
of the other.Got a story for Feedback?
Send it to [email protected] or
New Scientist, 25 Bedford Street, London WC2E 9ES
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