13 July 2019 | New Scientist | 53The back pages Feedback
Corr blimey
“Funny how #Homeopathy gets
ridiculed in the media, yet royalty
swear by it. They sure live to ripe
old ages...” So sayeth on Twitter Jim
Corr, the male quarter of celebrated
1990s Irish band The Corrs.
Indeed, there is something about
being born into a life of wealth and
privilege that seems to keep one
chipper. Must be (a very little)
something in the water.
Not feeling so chipper, though, is
Corr himself, if his Twitter timeline
is at all reflective of his mood. In
the past few weeks alone he has
collected a dizzying number of
stamps on his balderdash bingo
card, from pointing to the
“imaginary problem” of climate
change to retweeting opinions
about the dangers of 5G wireless
transmissions.
Despite protestations from fans
(of Irish music and science), Corr
also isn’t dropping his anti-vaccine
position – although he did manage
to meet critics halfway somewhat
by accident, musing aloud: “What if
we were actually meant to get mild
childhood illnesses like Measles
so as to help prime our immune
systems into fighting much greater
diseases in later life?”
An inoculation to ward off more
serious illnesses? A Corrking idea.
Seek and ye shall not find
Winning in the STEM skills stakes,
meanwhile, is blond bombshell
Boris Johnson, whose aspirations
to become the next UK prime
minister have, somewhat
indirectly, led him to confess to a
surprising hobby of constructing
model buses.
Arise conspiracy theories more
left-field than Jim Corr’s tick-box
efforts. A post on the website
of digital consultancy Parallax
suggests Johnson’s actions are
those of a Machiavellian political
operator of unparalleled genius
in search-engine optimisation.
A man not short of torrid
relationships, Johnson’s previous
with buses is proving particularly
vexing. During the UK’s Brexit
that, based on their experiment,
they would need 66 million
lemons to summon enough juice
to start a car. Which gives a whole
new meaning to the phrase “being
sold a lemon”.Eye watering sums
Talking of lemons, Feedback
previously pondered what the
costliest piece of equipment ever
trashed by a forgetful user is. Bids
began at $3billion, the price of the
Indian nuclear sub nearly scuttled
by an open hatch (22 June).
“The winner must surely be the
(eventually magnificent) Hubble
Space Telescope,” writes Herman
D’Hondt. At launch our orbiting
eye on the cosmos cost around
$5 billion, but proved unusable
thanks to a badly polished mirror.
“Adding mirror repair and other
fixes brings us to a total cost
estimated at about $10 billion,”
says Herman. Any advance?Hungry for love
The course of true love never did run
smooth, but if your date is spooning
chocolate pudding into your mouth,
you are probably on the right path.
So say Colin Hendrie and Isolde
Shirley at the University of Leeds,
UK. They have been watching reality
TV show First Dates, in which lonely
hearts are filmed meeting for the
first time in a restaurant. Their goal?
To see whether “courtship feeding”
is a sign that love is blossoming.
In their study published in the
journal Appetite, they reveal that of
792 dinner dates, participants fed
each other on 58 occasions. Women
most often shared their food,
typically a chocolate dessert. Of
those couples who participated in
courtship feeding, a mighty 93 per
cent said they would be willing to go
on a second date – compared with
just 43 per cent of plate-hoggers.
So now we know: the way to the
heart really is via the stomach. ❚referendum, he famously used
the side of a red bus hired by the
campaign to quit the European
Union to deliver promises about
the amount of money an exit
would bequeath the nation’s
public services – promises that led
to accusations that they were, in
fact, lies, and an attempt to take
him to court over the matter.
What better way to send those
earlier inconvenient headlines
plunging down the search
rankings than to invent a cock-
and-bus story?
Or indeed a story about a story.
Checking for the effectiveness of
the scheme by typing “Boris bus”
into a well-known search engine
on our mobile teleconnecting
device, Feedback discovers that
the first page of results is largely
devoted to stories about whether
the candidate is an evil cyber
genius for contriving to create
a story to displace other
inconvenient stories.
And now we’re adding to it. Sigh.
But sweltering in a traffic jam in an
unexpected burst of London heat,
we are at least glad to see the first
of our search results directs us to
the New Routemaster, a retro
model of London bus introduced
by Johnson in a former life as the
capital’s mayor. The double-decker
is infamous for roasting its
inhabitants in the heat of summer.
Sadly it seems some legacies are
less easily expunged.It’s a negative
It may be dehydration kicking in, but
Feedback thinks that if life gives you
lemons, make lemonade. And if life
gives you 1000 lemons, and you
are a mechanic, try making a battery
strong enough to jump-start a car.
Russian YouTube channel
Garage 54 did just that last month,
constructing a zesty power pack
capable of getting 13 volts from
60 kilos of lemons. Unfortunately,
the meagre current generated by
the device and the non-existent
charge-storage capacity of the fruit
meant the lemons would have been
better used for biofuel.
The intrepid engineers calculateWhat does Liana Finck?
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