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Q&A's: New Scientist's Last Word sectionThe best bitsIn a worst-case scenario, if one had to eat parts of oneself, which non-organs would be the most nutritious? Nails? Hair? Earwax? Bigger bagWhy, when you pour boiling water on a tea bag, does the bag inflate? Visit the Last Word blog, where you can post your answers online and explore all the unanswered questions
ANSWERS PLEASEThe writers of all published answers receive £25 ($40)
Beat generationMost music is written in 4/4 meter, giving four beats per bar. Why we are inclined to prefer 4/4 time? Are there circuits in our brains that tick along in patterns of four? On the tubeI saw what looked like a huge tube of cloud floating just below a uniform blanket above rural Oxfordshire, UK, at 7.30 am on 11 December 2007 (see Photo). Anyone know why it formed? QUESTIONS PLEASEDo you have a scientific enquiry about everyday phenomena?
HUMOUR: New Scientist's Feedback ColumnMagic numberAPPARENTLY, there are all sorts of uncanny coincidences in the way that DNA codes for the amino acids - the building blocks of proteins. That's the conclusion of a paper by Tidjani Négadi of the physics department of Oran University, Algeria, entitled "The genetic code multiplet structure, in one number". If you enjoy the mathematics of symmetries, please visit http://one-number.notlong.com and reassure Feedback's relatively untutored and now-aching brain that this isn't numerology. Oddly, Négadi's discoveries revolve around the numbers 23 and 23! - the latter is the factorial 1 × 2 × 3 ... 22 × 23, or 25,852,016,738,884,976,640,000 - a number Négadi describes as "stupendously interesting as it has 23 digits". It also contains every decimal digit at least... GIZMOSOUNDBITES"People thought this was going to be a slam dunk."Connie Celum of the University of Washington, Seattle, on a study that dashed hopes that taking the anti-herpes drug acyclovir would protect against HIV infection (San Francisco Chronicle, 5 February) |
