Nest in mouth
Curious gadgets lurk unnoticed in giant museums. The picture above exhibits one in every of them: a chook’s nest seated within the mouth of a big, historical, carved stone human face.
Suggestions lately had the enjoyment of accompanying the director of one of many Netherlands’s nice pure historical past museums when he paid a primary go to to the Nationwide Roman Museum, an archaeology repository that occupies what as soon as have been Rome’s nice historical thermal baths. The day gone by, a professor from College School London had visited the identical website, observed this uncommon object-inside-an-object – and alerted his Dutch colleague.
The professor remarked that it was hanging excessive on a wall in a dusty part of a big, open-air backyard referred to as Michelangelo’s Cloister. It seemed, he stated, as if no person had even glanced at it in latest instances. Absolutely, he stated, if the museum had turn out to be conscious {that a} chook had homesteaded in that historic masks, the nest would have been eliminated instantly.
The Dutch museum director suspected it was the work of an Italian sparrow (Passer italiae) and hoped to accumulate the abandoned nest for his museum, in lieu of getting the Roman museum destroy or discard it. He inquired of an official, who was clearly somewhat shocked at listening to of the nest’s existence. The official grew visibly unhappy, and stated: “We have bigger problems. We also have cats inside.”
A number of larger ranges of official have been consulted, every shortly deciding that everybody can be delighted if the Dutch customer would take away the nest. They despatched for a ladder. This triggered the arrival not of a ladder, however of a nonetheless higher-level official. He immediately expressed what the non-Italian guests interpreted to be neck-wringing rage. Not a twig, he declared, not a pebble, should ever go away his museum.
And so the nest remained within the masks on the wall of the cloister.
Suggestions would now get pleasure from a report from somebody who ventures to go to the northernmost nook of Michelangelo’s Cloister to look at whether or not the nest continues to be there.
Little large battery
Within the spirit of “whatever they can do I can do better”, Espen Gaarder Haug despatched us a duplicate of the research he and Gianfranco Spavieri revealed in Excessive Power Density Physics: “The micro black gap mobile battery: The last word limits of battery power density“.
Haug says: “I see you wrote about the Schwarzschild Black Hole Battery (13 January 2024). [Our paper] goes a few steps forward: ‘a battery weighing just one kilogram could provide approximately 470 million times the energy of the most efficient 200-kilogram lithium battery at the time of writing’.”
The paper explores a potential future: “[This involves] a cellular battery composed of micro black holes… [It] is not inconceivable that battery technology development could follow a trajectory similar to that of computer technology… [It] is possible that battery efficiency could double or even quadruple every few years following different types of breakthroughs.”
Haug shows a fascination for efficiency and worth at tiny extremes. In 2020, he revealed a solo paper about “the smallest possible money unit“. He wrote: “we demonstrate that there is an absolute physical limit on how small the smallest money unit can be… [It] seems to be directly linked to the smallest possible energy unit needed to store one bit.”
That is small stuff. Nobody is considering universally large. As but, there aren’t any revealed papers by anybody figuring out the most important potential electrical battery or cash. (None, anyway, has come to Suggestions’s consideration.)
Whodunnit?
“Whodunnit?” is a query answered, starkly, in each revealed analysis research. The reply is: the authors. The authors dunnit. The authors wrote the research. However a brand new research tries to reply a jarringly completely different query: who didn’t do it? What number of distinguished individuals listed as authors usually are not, actually, authors?
Scientific Studies revealed this real-academic-life detective story. The detectives attempt to verify how usually tutorial large pictures seize a full share of official authorship credit score for analysis work they didn’t do.
That is probably nasty stuff. “The practice of [automatically] listing a senior member(s) of a department, who did not qualify for authorship, as a co-author on all or most submitted articles,” the sleuths clarify, “can be an efficient way to boost the scientific output of these individuals.” After contemplating the proof, the staff concludes that the goings-on “may be common in the health sciences, with those admitting to this practice finding it unjustified in most cases”.
Suggestions notes two vibrant, minor information about this research. First, disappointingly, there isn’t any direct indication as as to if any of its authors are senior members of a division. Second, reassuringly, the paper specifies that “all 5 authors… participated substantially in all research steps”.
Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founded the journal Annals of Inconceivable Analysis. Earlier, he labored on uncommon methods to make use of computer systems. His web site is unbelievable.com
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