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<\/div>Blushing chickens<\/h2>\n
People \u2014 humans \u2014 blush. Chickens aren\u2019t entirely inhuman in that they, too, show emotions on their facial skin. Delphine Soulet at the University of Tours, France, and colleagues have explored<\/a> how skin redness might be a reliable indicator of \u201cthe affective states of hens\u201d. Reader Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Darboux brought the project to Feedback\u2019s attention.<\/p>\n This is the story, to the extent it is a story, of six hens in a wooded outdoor range covered with grass. They had free access to a hen house and to as much water and feed as they wanted, whenever they wanted it.<\/p>\n This is a story, also, that was essentially a reality TV programme. The chickens were given no script to follow. But they were placed in situations that almost forced them to react in ways that would induce compelling video viewing.<\/p>\n The adventure stretched over three consecutive summer weeks. Among the main events: a \u201cCapture Test\u201d that involved \u201cindividual hens being caught by the experimenter, who restrained the wings with two hands\u201d. The hens also found themselves involved in a \u201cRewarding Test\u201d that involved a glass dish containing mealworms and wood shavings \u201cplaced in the middle of the test arena\u201d.<\/p>\n The researchers captured video of \u201ccalm states\u201d: resting, preening or feeding. Other footage showed \u201cexciting and rewarding states\u201d: dustbathing and exposure to mealworms. Inevitably, there were also \u201cfear-related states\u201d, most notably seen in the Capture Test.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The colourful data came from a process of \u201cextracting redness from still frames from hen profiles\u201d. In the old days, before digital technology was available for chicken-emotion research, this might have been a matter of subjective artistic appraisal. The 2020s method removes human emotion from that aspect of the data gathering. Electronic video processing extracted \u201cthe mean red (R), blue (B), and green (G) values for each bare skin region of the hen face (comb, cheek, ear lobe and wattle)\u201d.<\/p>\n After analysing the data from the videos, the scientists reached a conclusion as to when the chickens had blushed most strongly. The hens, says the final report, \u201cexhibited the highest degree of facial skin redness in negative situations of high arousal\u201d.<\/p>\n If, somehow, your interests are eclectic and you are cathectic (but not apoplectic) about exploring words that rhyme with dialectic, try \u201csmectic\u201d \u2013 as in the title of the study \u201cSmectic and soap bubble optofluidic lasers<\/a>\u201c.<\/p>\n Written by Zala Korenjak and Matja\u017e Humar in a journal with the intriguing name Physical Review X<\/i>, that paper explains how it doesn\u2019t take much to make a soap bubble become a laser.<\/p>\n Or, for a mildly jolly burst of melancholy, reach back to 1987 for P. Oswald\u2019s treatise in Journal de Physique<\/i>, \u201cDynamics of collapse of a smectic bubble<\/a>\u201c.<\/p>\n Physics often gets portrayed as a field so abstruse that most people can\u2019t understand or directly use it. A new study called \u201cThe principle of entropy increase: A novel view of how tourism influences human health<\/a>\u201d shows how wrong some people feel that notion might be.<\/p>\n The researchers write: \u201cThe principle of \u2018entropy increase\u2019 is a universal law describing a natural progression from order to disorder. This paper is innovatively the first to take the principle as a theoretical basis for assessing how tourism influences human health from a sociomateriality perspective\u201d.<\/p>\n Back in 2000, a collaboration between physicists in Italy, Brazil and the US tried to make sense of a different and borderline-unruly aspect of the concept of entropy increase. They published a paper called \u201cThe rate of entropy increase at the edge of chaos<\/a>\u201c.<\/p>\n Tourism professionals both do and don\u2019t like tourism to happen at the edge of chaos: they do for the excitement, but don\u2019t for the danger, the danger being both corporeal and financial. Too much entropy over too short a period could intensify both kinds of danger.<\/p>\n A press release<\/a> about the new tourism research does note that \u201cEntropy is classified as the general trend of the universe towards death and disorder\u201d. But other than that, the press release accentuates the positive. It says: \u201cFor the first time, an interdisciplinary study has applied the theory of entropy to tourism, finding that travel could have positive health benefits, including slowing down the signs of ageing.\u201d<\/p>\n In theory \u2013 in this theory \u2013 people might believe that principles of physics, adroitly deployed, can help a person delay seeing wrinkles. Raise this to a literary plane, Feedback muses, and it becomes a reminder to read Madeleine L\u2019Engle\u2019s sci-fi novel A Wrinkle in Time<\/a>.<\/p>\n That book\u2019s plot involves travel. That book\u2019s publication was reputedly delayed by publishers\u2019 indecision as to whether the story was meant for adults or children.<\/p>\n A couple more additions to Feedback\u2019s collection of conversation-starting titles of research papers.<\/p>\n \u201cSword swallowing and its side effects<\/a>\u201d gave incisive knowledge to subscribers of BMJ<\/i> in 2006, while \u201cEstimation of the total saliva volume produced per day in five-year-old children<\/a>\u201d supplied some fast and, in some respects, hard numbers to readers of the Archives of Oral Biology<\/i> in 1995.<\/p>\n Got a story for Feedback?<\/b><\/p>\n You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com<\/a>. Please include your home address. This week\u2019s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website<\/a>.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\nEclectically smectic<\/h2>\n
Tending towards entropy<\/h2>\n
Pointy reckoning<\/h2>\n