A FRIEND working for the European Commission in Brussels had her Monday
morning brightened up by this circular in the internal mail.
“EU internal market ministers concluded four years of debate last week by
agreeing legislation which defines honey as a ‘natural sweet substance’ produced
by Apis mellifera bees.”
“Mellifera” means honey-making, so what the ministers took four years to
decide is that honey is made by honey-making bees. Similar accords are expected,
after an appropriate amount of time, to clarify the role of milk-yielding cows,
wool-providing sheep and pork-producing pigs.
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“My God, I love this place!” says our friend.
CREDIT where it’s due. David Spergel and Paul Steinhardt, the authors of a
recent paper in Physical Review Letters entitled “Observational
Evidence for Self-Interacting Cold Dark Matter”, needed time, space and the
right kind of environment to pool their ideas and kick-start their collective
thoughts.
An acknowledgement in their paper explains how this was provided: “We are
grateful to the West Anglia Great Northern Railway whose train delay provided
the opportunity for initial discussions.”
AN EXAMPLE of the awesome power of this column. On 29 July we published an
item about the flower beds in front of the London headquarters of the Department
of the Environment, Transport and the Regions. All the dwarf conifers in the
beds had been allowed to die.
Someone at the DETR must be a Feedback reader. Since we published the piece,
the dead plants have all been removed and replaced by live ones. And the last
time we passed, a DETR person was busily watering them.
EARLIER this year, Britain’s Consumers’ Association, publisher of
Which? magazine, tested hands-free headsets for cellphones and found that
the lead channelled radiation to the head. The Department of Trade and Industry,
which recently raised nearly £25 billion by selling licences for five new
mobile services, commissioned its own report. This says headsets “reduce
Dzܰ”.
The CA thinks the different conclusion comes from different methods of
measurement. The CA hung the connecting wire vertically, as if coming up from a
phone on a belt or in a pocket, while the government’s testers put the phones
higher (www.sartest.com). So the induction coupling between phone aerial
and headset wire was different.
“People don’t wear phones on their shoulders,” says the CA’s Antonia
Chitty.
The DTI’s so-called “e-minister” Patricia Hewitt released the department’s
report with a reassuring statement, but no press conference or briefing with
experts. The result was muddled reports throughout the international media
giving conflicting evidence and opinion.
The DTI said there was no briefing because the minister was “busy”. By a
stroke of good fortune, New Scientist’s Barry Fox was on a TV programme
for international news network CNBC with Hewitt. He asked her why she had been
too busy for a briefing when there is obviously so much confusion.
“There is no confusion,” Hewitt insisted, to the surprise of all in the
studio.
So now you know who to ask if you’re wondering whether or not it is safe to
use a mobile headset.
WE LIKED this statement of the far-from-obvious from NASA. A press
release last week enthused about the plan to send two large scientific rovers to
Mars rather than the original plan for just one.
It is, however, hard to work out the exact significance of this doubling up.
NASA assures us in the third paragraph of the release: “The rovers will be exact
duplicates, but that’s where the similarities end.”
ENGLISH people, as the world knows, can be polite to a fault, and nowhere
more so than in Huddersfield, where reader William Day spotted this notice on a
shop door: “This door is closed. We apologise for any inconvenience”.
Perhaps all closed doors should carry this notice to avoid upsetting those
for whom it isn’t already perfectly obvious. It would make a change from those
shops and cafes which carry a permanent “Open” sign, irrespective of whether
this is the case or not.
HERE is the title of a paper by Lili Zheng, Gabriela Sekerkova, Kelly
Vranich, Lewis G. Tilney, Enrico Mugnaini and James R. Bartles in a recent issue
of Cell: “The Deaf Jerker Mouse Has a Mutation in the Gene Encoding the
Espin Actin-Bundling Proteins of Hair Cell Stereocilia and Lacks Espins.”
Who are we to disagree?
FINALLY, we learn that every bottle of Olde Buzzard pale ale produced by the
Olde Buzzards Bay Brewery in Massachusetts has an attractive front label showing
a map of the state coastline, including the avian bay for which the brew is
named.
We are glad to report, however, that on the back of the bottle aspiring
seafarers are warned: “Chart on front not for navigational purposes.”
