make a nest in the mouth
Large museums are full of hidden and interesting items. The photo above shows one of his. A bird’s nest is placed in the mouth of a carved ancient large stone human face.
Feedback recently had the pleasure of accompanying the director of one of the Netherlands’ great natural history museums on his first visit to the National Roman Museum, an archaeological repository located in what was once Rome’s great ancient spas. I was so happy. A day earlier, a professor from University College London had visited the same location and noticed the unusual object-within-an-object and alerted his Dutch colleagues.
The professor said it was hung high on a wall in a dusty section of a large outdoor garden known as Michelangelo’s Cloister. It looked as if no one had looked at it recently, he said. Indeed, if the museum had realized there was a bird living inside the historic mask, the nest would have been removed immediately, he said.
The Dutch museum director suspected that this was the work of an Italian sparrow (passer italiae) and wanted the ruined nest to be purchased for their own museum instead of having it destroyed or discarded by the Roman Museum. He asked the employee, who was clearly a little shocked to hear of the nest’s existence. The official became visibly saddened and he said: “We have bigger problems. We also have a cat.”
They consulted several senior officials and quickly decided that everyone would be happy if the Dutch visitors removed the nests. They called for a ladder. This led to the arrival of a more senior official instead of Ladder. He immediately expressed what non-Italian visitors interpreted as strangling anger. Not a twig, not a pebble, he declared, and it should never leave the museum.
And the nest remained in the mask on the wall of the corridor.
Feedback will likely include reports from those who have ventured to the northernmost tip of Michelangelo’s Corridor and observed whether the nest is still there.
slightly bigger battery
In the spirit of “whatever they can do, I can do better,” Espen Garder Haug sent us a copy of a study he published in 2016 with Gianfranco Spavieri. high energy density physics:”Micro black hole cellular batteries: the ultimate limit in battery energy density”.
Haug said: “I see you wrote about Schwarzschild’s black hole battery (January 13, 2024). [Our paper] “A battery weighing just 1 kilogram can provide approximately 470 million times more energy than the most efficient 200 kilogram lithium battery at the time of writing.”
This paper considers the following possible futures:[This involves] A cellular battery composed of micro black holes… [It] It is not inconceivable that the development of battery technology could follow a similar trajectory as computer technology… [It] Breakthroughs of all kinds could double or even quadruple battery efficiency every few years. ”
Haug is deeply interested in the possibilities and value of the infinitesimal. In 2020, he published a solo paper on “.smallest possible monetary unit”. He writes: “We have shown that there is an absolute physical limit to how small the smallest unit of currency can be… [It] It seems to be directly related to the smallest unit of energy required to store one bit. ”
This is a small thing. No one is thinking universally big. So far, no papers have been published that identify the largest possible battery or money. (None of them have gotten any attention in the feedback anyway.)
Who?
“Who?” This question is clearly answered in all published research studies. The answer is “authors.” The authors are Danit. The authors wrote the study.But a new study seeks to answer a surprisingly different question: Who is who? did not do it Do it? How many famous people listed as authors are not actually authors?
scientific report I published this Authentic school detective story. Detectives are trying to determine how often academic titans receive full official authorship credit for research they did not conduct.
This is potentially troublesome. “The practice of [automatically] “Listing senior members of the department who did not qualify as authors as co-authors on all or most submitted papers can be an effective way to increase the scientific output of these individuals.” explains. After reviewing the evidence, the research team concluded that this event is “common in the health sciences, and those who acknowledge this practice almost always consider it to be unjustified.”
The feedback points out two colorful little facts about this study. First, unfortunately, there is no direct indication as to whether any of the authors are senior members of the department. Second, and reassuringly, the paper states that “all five authors…substantively participated in all stages of the study.”
Mark Abrahams hosted the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founded the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Previously, he was working on unusual uses of computers.his website is impossible.com
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