Nest in mouth
Curious items lurk unnoticed in large museums. The photo above shows one of them: a bird’s nest seated in the mouth of a large, ancient, carved stone human face.
Feedback recently had the joy of accompanying the director of one of the Netherlands’s great natural history museums when he paid a first visit to the National Roman Museum, an archaeology repository that occupies what once were Rome’s great ancient thermal baths. The previous day, a professor from University College London had visited the same site, noticed this unusual object-inside-an-object – and alerted his Dutch colleague.
The professor remarked that it was hanging high on a wall in a dusty section of a large, open-air garden known as Michelangelo’s Cloister. It looked, he said, as if nobody had even glanced at it in recent times. Surely, he said, if the museum had become aware that a bird had homesteaded in that historical mask, the nest would have been removed immediately.
The Dutch museum director suspected it was the work of an Italian sparrow (Passer italiae) and hoped to acquire the deserted nest for his museum, in lieu of having the Roman museum destroy or discard it. He inquired of an official, who was obviously a little shocked at hearing of the nest’s existence. The official grew visibly sad, and said: “We have bigger problems. We also have cats inside.”
Several higher levels of official were consulted, each quickly deciding that everyone would be delighted if the Dutch visitor would remove the nest. They sent for a ladder. This triggered the arrival not of a ladder, but of a still higher-level official. He instantly expressed what the non-Italian visitors interpreted to be neck-wringing rage. Not a twig, he declared, not a pebble, must ever leave his museum.
And so the nest remained in the mask on the wall of the cloister.
Feedback would now enjoy a report from someone who ventures to visit the northernmost corner of Michelangelo’s Cloister to observe whether the nest is still there.
Little big battery
In the spirit of “whatever they can do I can do better”, Espen Gaarder Haug sent us a copy of the study he and Gianfranco Spavieri published in High Energy Density Physics: “The micro black hole cellular battery: The ultimate limits of battery energy 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 possible 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 displays a fascination for potency and value at tiny extremes. In 2020, he published 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.”
This is small stuff. No one is thinking universally big. As yet, there are no published papers by anyone identifying the largest possible electrical battery or money. (None, anyway, has come to Feedback’s attention.)
Whodunnit?
“Whodunnit?” is a question answered, starkly, in every published research study. The answer is: the authors. The authors dunnit. The authors wrote the study. But a new study tries to answer a jarringly different question: who didn’t do it? How many distinguished persons listed as authors are not, in fact, authors?
Scientific Reports published this real-academic-life detective story. The detectives try to ascertain how often academic big shots grab a full share of official authorship credit for research work they did not do.
This is potentially 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 explain, “can be an efficient way to boost the scientific output of these individuals.” After considering the evidence, the team concludes that the goings-on “may be common in the health sciences, with those admitting to this practice finding it unjustified in most cases”.
Feedback notes two colourful, minor facts about this study. First, disappointingly, there is no direct indication as to whether any of its authors are senior members of a department. 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 magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website is improbable.com
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