FEEDBACK congratulates NASA on safely landing at least one Mars rover. This despite the fears reader Mike Mellor had, prompted by an interview with Jim Garvin, lead scientist for Mars exploration at NASA in the Astronomy Now 2004 Yearbook.
There Garvin states: “I had a science group evaluate how we should image planets from their surfaces. They concluded that if you don’t take cameras at least a metre off the ground and ideally higher, you are really going to be severely limited scientifically. You really want to get 5 to 6 feet off the ground to see. That’s been our goal and that’s what we’ve done.”
The introduction to the interview points out that one of the two Mars Explorer probes in 1999 crashed because of confusion between metric and imperial units used by different teams. This time, thankfully, they’ve managed to avoid shooting themselves in the metre.
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NASA may be the ideal customer of the Canadian firm whose website is , which sells a pocket-sized solar battery charger called the iSun®. The site’s FAQ list includes: “Can my iSun® be left outdoors without a protective covering?” The answer is: “Yes, the iSun® is weatherproofed and may be left outdoors. However, the iSun® is not waterproof and should be brought indoors in the event of rain or snow.”
So it’s only fine-weather-proofed then. Still, sounds good for Mars.
HYDROPHOBIC readers may like to find out the secret of a beauty salon in Sevenoaks, Kent, that offers “dry hydrotherapy, which is a combination of massage, wet hydrotherapy and heat”. According to the Sevenoaks Chronicle, clients at the salon can “lie on a special bed fully clothed, while jets of water move up and down their body”.
People have told the salon that “they would love the experience of a jacuzzi, but don’t want the hassle of getting wet and with the hydrotherapy system, they don’t have to”. But what on earth are they getting? We can only guess that it somehow involves dehydrated water.
A PUZZLING warning has started to appear on adverts for movies on British TV. How is one supposed to react to the information that a film “contains mild language”?
Wouldn’t it be more informative to label made-for-TV movies “content-free”? And can we expect similar warnings about sex and violence, such as “depicts demurely dressed dames or “includes calm gentlemen”?
IT WAS the only possible paper title, given a researcher of a certain age: “Where have all the young girls gone?”
Nancy Andrews’s paper in Nature Medicine (vol 8, p 439) did have the main title “The other physician-scientist problem”, and it was about the dearth of women in biomedical research, not the protest songs of 1959 and 1960 or the compositions of Pete Seeger and Joe Hickerson.
Nor is “Optimal food allocation in a slave economy” by R. Rees and others a protest song (Journal of Population Economics, vol 16, p 21). We think. It might be a ditty from the mathematician Tom “we’ll all fry together when we fry” Lehrer. Or it might be a manual for managing graduate student research assistants.
A FEW years ago an artist well known for illustrating children’s books came to Feedback with a dilemma. Moles were digging up his lawn, and he wanted to stop them without hurting them.
“I can hardly spend the day drawing cuddly pictures of furry moles while being nasty to them at night,” he confided. We found him a German device that pumps synthesised sound into molehills to drive the moles away. Having heard nothing more from him, we presume it worked.
But some people obviously have fewer scruples. The European patent office has published an international application (WO 03/041498) entitled “Mole trap with explosive”. A box is placed over a molehill, with a sensor rod that extends down into the mole run. When a mole touches the rod, it trips a circuit in the box, which detonates an explosive charge. The shock wave travels down into the run and kills the mole.
The patent was filed from France by a French inventor. We can only suggest a less bloodthirsty alternative. Playing French pop music down a molehill would, we are sure, suffice to persuade the sensitive little things to go and live somewhere else.
FINALLY, the British Medical Association continues to personalise its emailed press releases. First we had “DVT risk highest within two weeks of flying to Damian Carrington”, which left our online news editor protesting that he didn’t feel like an airport (Feedback, 15 November 2003). Now a medical correspondent we know is wondering what the association knows that she should know, after receiving a bulletin telling her: “BMA reaffirms its position on organ donation to Ann Smith.”
Primed by our mention of “throughdoors”, reader Alasdair Graham-Rogers spotted a TV weather forecast warning of “snowblizzards”, and a radio programme predicting “whitesnow” and “freshnew snow”. Moreextra twicedoubling doubleplus soonshortly.
