Josie Ford
Biting biting remarks
Biting remarks about bite marks are evident in several papers in the current issue of the Journal of the California Dental Association. One paper, called ““, expresses the general sentiment that, no, courts cannot and should not trust a bite mark as scientific proof of which person did the biting.
Another , saying that that community is tiny and “composed of a few dozen adherents in the US” and that bite-identification evidence is unreliable.
As Feedback remarked not long ago (10 December 2022), bite mark-assessment assessment entered a Pretty/Sweet era in 2010, when David Pretty and Iain Sweet published a paper warning legal and dental authorities that there had been .
Advertisement
The prognosis for relying on bite marks to forensically identify individual biters seems dim, but hope exists. Researchers in Indonesia, Peru, Brazil, Malaysia, Cambodia and India have published a paper about ““. They assert that “technologies have been developed to obtain an adequate bitemark analysis”.
Bite-mark analysis hoo-ha, so far, mostly applies to identifying human biters. Mostly, but not entirely. Enter a new paper called ““.
It reports several cases of bitership (please note and celebrate Feedback’s word coinage) identification of bite marks on turtles. Detectives reportedly “narrowed down” the list of suspected biters to one or perhaps two species of shark. They neglected or failed to identify the individual shark or sharks.
He is Lean
Nominative determinism can be a heavy burden for individuals whose life work immediately seems, to everyone who meets them, a fat target for jokes.
With that in mind, Feedback expresses sympathy to , professor of human nutrition at the University of Glasgow. Lean has written, in Lean prose, about many subjects that relate either directly or oppositely to leanness. Among them: ; ; and .
He is Stout
Michael Lean, meet , assistant professor of nutritional sciences at the University of Oklahoma. Stout has done much research related to stoutness. Among his topics: ; ; ; and .
Duck dining
““, a new study by Ali Salavati and colleagues at the University of Tehran, Iran, is comprehensive and crowd-pleasing (who could resist its mention of “using Sheather’s sugar solution for detection of helminth eggs and apicomplexan oocysts”?).
But it overlooks a curious reciprocal exchange of parasites that almost inevitably happens between certain whooper swans and certain mallard ducks.
The whooper/mallard relationship becomes evident to anyone who chances to read two old research reports. Each tells half of the story of the two kinds of bird.
In 2012, Tetsuo Shimada published a paper called ““. Shimada tells about his “observations made of five Mallard Anas platyrhynchos… seen feeding on Whooper Swan Cygnus cygnus faeces, on the ice in Lake Izunuma, Japan, on 10 February 2010″.
In 1984, Yoshiaki Iijima wrote a paper called “ Strange feeding behaviour of the whooper swan Cygnus cygnus“. There he says: “On 20 March 1984, young Whooper Swans were seen to peck at and eat two Mallards A. platyrhynchos which were caught in fishing nets at a salmon culture pond… According to the staff of the fish farm, two adult and four young swans had frequented the pond since the beginning of March, and it was primarily the young which ate the Mallards… The reason for this strange feeding behaviour is not clear.”
When considered together, the reports are further evidence that different species do sometimes provide each other with succour and nourishment.
Well-knitted superpower
Bryn Glover makes a measured, although slightly deteriorating, contribution to Feedback’s list of trivial superpowers. He says: “Half-a-century ago, when we were producing babies, my wife spent many evenings in front of the telly with her knitting needles. The patterns usually required specified lengths to be knitted on to one needle, and we found that if she held up her work, I could instantly estimate the length to about one-quarter of an inch. This meant she did not have to fiddle around with her tape measure until the work was very close to its intended length. I can still do it, but my accuracy has seriously deteriorated to about plus/minus half an inch.”
Got a story for Feedback?
You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.
