From Ian Simmons, Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex, UK
With regard to Feedback’s musings on what kind of music mice like, I was once party to an accidental experiment on this when I worked in Newcastle. Our education department shared a wall with an adjacent lab’s mouse facility, where the animals were suffering from unexpectedly poor fertility (29 November, p 56).
Suspecting noise to be behind the problem, the lab was engaged in lengthy negotiations with a nightclub that shared the building. However, during the Newcastle Science Festival that year, we held a 24-hour hackathon in the education department and came to realise that the mouse lab’s night shift technician, who worked alone, livened up the lonely hours by playing thrash metal at ear-splitting volume. A word was had, the metal music ceased and fertility was restored.
