56 | New Scientist | 13 February 2021
The back pages Feedback
Super spinach
Spinach is a disappointing
vegetable. Nana Feedback’s early
attempts to wean us on to the slimy
green stuff by pointing to Popeye
as a role model were undermined
by our discovery that its iron content
has regularly been overstated by a
factor of 10, chemist Erich von Wolf
having once fatally misplaced a
decimal point in the 1870s.
Hence our arched eyebrow at a
headline in Euro News, “Scientists
have taught spinach to send emails
and it could warn us about climate
change”. Indeed, this turns out to
be a limp reheating of research
from 2016, reported at the time
by New Scientist, of spinach plants
genetically engineered to fluoresce
when they encounter certain
chemicals in the soil. The emails
are sadly not directly typed, but sent
automatically by infrared detectors
trained on the spinach. Nice try.
Very fun and forward looking,
on the other hand, is a recent paper
in the journal ACS Omega linked to
in the Euro News story, “Spinach-
Derived Porous Carbon Nanosheets
as High-Performance Catalysts
for Oxygen Reduction Reaction”.
Xiaojun Liu at the American
University in Washington DC and his
colleagues used a recipe involving
spinach, melamine and salt – oddly,
three substances much in use in
Nana Feedback’s 1970s kitchen – to
fabricate porous carbon nanosheets
doped with spinach’s trace-metal
goodness. They suggest the
spinach-based sheets could be
layered into future metal-air
batteries, taking the place of
expensive platinum-based catalysts.
We wholeheartedly approve,
having read of wider movements
to mine precious metals from plants
recently in these pages (9 January,
p 42). Meanwhile, platinum-based
catalysts are just the thing to give
that lasagne an added zing.By any other name
As we pick the remnants of that
story from our teeth, Simon
Goodman from Griesheim,
Germany, arrives with dessert,Ethical animals
Feedback recently expressed
confusion as we tried to envisage
Australian printer cartridge waste
expressed in multiples of northern
hemisphere blue whales (30
January). As a magazine-backwards
reader, we weren’t to know of the
byzantine analogies being served
up just a few pages further on.
In a “Green and Ethical Checklist”
advertorial, Jan Rossiter points out,
payment provider EML committed
to cut plastic consumption in
payment cards by “the weight of
56 elephants, 10 humpback whales,
1,250 lions and the height of 5,000
giraffes across its global portfolio”.
Giraffes don’t tessellate well in
our recollection, and we join Jan in
straining to picture 5000 of them
stacked up. Moreover, while
accepting the portfolio is global, we
consider it neither feasible nor wiseto bring all those animals together
in the same place at the same time.This big boulder
Linda Jared draws our attention
to a no-nonsense approach to
matters of scale adopted by the
San Miguel sheriff ’s office in
Telluride, Colorado. “A large
boulder the size of a large boulder
is blocking the southbound lane
Hwy 145 mm28 in Stoner Creek
area of Montezuma County,” the
office tweeted on 5 February.
“Expect delays. #largeboulder.”
We note this follows on from
the same account tweeting on
27 January of a “Large boulder the
size of a small boulder” blocking
the same highway some 80
kilometres further on. Fortunately,
there is a picture of the offending
rock with a sheriff ’s car parked
close by for scale. Although we are
unsure whether it’s a large or small
sheriff ’s car. That rather depends
on the size of the boulder.Wandering whale
London-based singer Ebony Buckle
has garnered acclaim from the likes
of Earmilk and Atwood Magazine
to name a few, and we reject the
assertion that we aren’t cool
enough to know that and are just
reading from a press release.
Buckle’s latest work, Wonder, is
inspired by the story of Whale 52,
the “world’s loneliest whale”. Its
distinctive, unique 52-hertz song
was first heard in the north Pacific
in 1989 – although the last time
we checked in on the story, age and
the slackening of vocal cords had
lowered the call’s frequency to
47 hertz (19 March 2016, p 35).
We are unqualified to assess
Buckle’s spine-tingling vocals,
floating delicately atop minimalistic,
ethereal melodies, creating an
almost hypnotic effect. But the
visuals of an intergalactic floating
whale searching for its home planet
truly did, as advertised, transport us
to another dimension and leave us
there. What we’d really like to know,
however, is how big the whale is. ❚and a story about the chocolate
that is too chocolatey to be called
chocolate. The confectioner Ritter
has produced a new line called
“Cacao y Nada” whose sweetness
is derived entirely from the
mucilaginous pulp that surrounds
the beans within a cocoa pod. This
falls foul of Germany’s notoriously
strict food and drink regulations,
which stipulate that for a product
to be called chocolate, it must
contain sugar. So a “cocoa-fruit
bar” it is instead.
Admirably consequential,
in an inconsequential kind of
way. The Frankfurter Allgemeine
Zeitung quotes Ritter’s CEO
Andreas Ronken saying: “If
sausages can be made of peas,
chocolate doesn’t need sugar.
Wake up! This is the new reality.”
Sausages made of peas? That
really would be a wurst-case
scenario.Got 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