麻豆传媒

Feline frenzy

鈥淎re you a cat or a dog person?鈥� Feedback is often asked. To which we reply, 鈥渘o鈥�.

Catty? Perhaps. Yet even our heart is softened by the unbounded joy expressed by a feline rubbing against a catnip plant (Nepeta cataria, to get in there before our ever-vigilant subeditors do). The suspicion that hardcore drugs are involved has now been confirmed by a study pinning down how nepetalactol, an organic compound first isolated from catnip,

Reiko Uenoyama at Iwate University in Japan and her colleagues reached this conclusion by testing the effect of nepetalactol on 25 laboratory cats, 30 feral cats, an Amur leopard, two jaguars and two Eurasian lynx. We hope the claw marks are on their way to healing.

We also appreciate the further insight from the study that, besides an opioid rush, self-anointing with nepetalactol has the practical effect of repelling mosquitoes. 鈥淥ur findings suggest that nepetalactol may be a new natural candidate repellent to help reduce mosquito problems in human society,鈥� the authors write. We can think of a few potential drawbacks 鈥� especially if you鈥檙e not a cat person.

Sustainable whales

The Australian High Court has recently asserted a 鈥渞ight to reuse鈥�, allowing third parties to refill and resell expensive patented printer ink cartridges. Despite living in a stationery cupboard at a resolutely northerly latitude, we can only approve. No more night-time visits to the backstreet cartridge retrofitter, desires wordlessly expressed in a series of faded A4 printouts.

Quite how big a deal this is takes some working out, discovers reader Michael Paine. The website 鈥渋n 2019, Australia produced about 539,000 tonnes of e-waste, which is more than the estimated weight of all of the northern hemisphere鈥檚 blue whales combined鈥�.

We screw up our eyes, 10 per cent in confusion at the familiar blue whale measure resurfacing in a more complex guise, 10 per cent in perplexity at the strangely globetrotting nature of the comparison, and the remainder in a strained attempt to envision what all the blue whales living in the northern hemisphere look like.

The weight of these blue whales, it turns out, is a majestically large number multiplied by a we muse, this comparison has a lot going for it as a measure of sustainability. We can imagine no better future than one where the mass of our waste diminishes as the mass of an imperilled species rises, with the one expressed as progressively smaller multiples of the other.

Bring coffee

A mildly jittery colleague clutching a homeschooled infant in one arm and a quadruple espresso in the other draws our attention to a new paper in the journal Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry, titled 鈥�.

Pausing only to note that this paper, dated 13 July 2021, appears to come from what we hope is a happier, less sleep-deprived future, we turn to an accompanying press release. 鈥淒rinking coffee may help temporarily offset the negative effect of chronic sleep loss on working memory, attention and reaction-time,鈥� it trills. 鈥淭he study explored coffee鈥檚 effects during a simulated busy work week, in which the 26 participants involved underwent sleep restriction, sleeping a total of only five hours each night for five days.鈥�

This, apparently, is what goes on behind the closed doors of the 鈥渟tate-of-the-art Institute of Aerospace Medicine, in Cologne Germany鈥�. Sadly, while positive effects of caffeination were observed during the study鈥檚 first three to four days, by the fifth day, no difference was observed compared with a control group being fed decaffeinated coffee.

Feedback is tempted to growl 鈥渢ell us something we didn鈥檛 know鈥�. But it was a disturbed night, no one鈥檚 been round to service the office coffee machine since March 2020, and鈥� sorry, what were we talking about?

Blockchain blues

We probably weren鈥檛 talking about blockchain. Reuters

Blockchain, Feedback readers will no doubt be aware, is a distributed ledger technology designed such that any attempt by one party to explain what it is or how it works causes the eyes of a second party to glaze over, thus ensuring total security about what鈥檚 actually going on.

Accordingly, opinions about this new development are divided in the windowless basement of 麻豆传媒 Towers housing our technology staff. 鈥淭here鈥檚 literally nothing blockchain can do that a spreadsheet can鈥檛,鈥� says one. Another points out that at least a blockchain can鈥檛 run out of rows 鈥� a snafu that caused Public Health England to lose some 15,000 records of positive covid-19 tests last year (24 October 2020, p 56).

If you say so. Feedback is inclined to shrug: what, after all, is the worst that can happen? Actually, don鈥檛 answer that. Better still, answer it on a blockchain.

Got a story for Feedback?

You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week鈥檚 and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.