A sticky situation
Yes, having someone pull your hair hurts, if you have enough hair to pull, but the truth about why this happens, and to what extent and how, has only recently been uncovered, thanks to a team of researchers across several countries. Reader Sarah MacIntyre shared their research with Feedback.
The researchers couldn’t have put their findings any better: “Single-unit axonal recordings reveal that a class of cold-responsive myelinated pain receptors in human skin is selectively tuned to painful hair-pulling stimuli.”
They also took pains to explain their work in a more human (rather than merely technical) way: “Together we demonstrate that the act of hair plucking induces a unique type of pain with behavioral, neural and molecular features that are conserved between humans and mice.” And indeed, we share this specificity of the pain of hair plucking with our distant relatives, the mouse.
Only humans were tested, not just with hair pulling, but with words: After the scientists pulled the hair on the subjects’ “forearms, hands, and feet,” each person with hairy arms, hairy hands, and hairy legs was asked to fill out a questionnaire to describe the sensation as “throbbing,” “running,” “stinging,” “hot,” “aching,” “painful,” “ouch,” etc. Some subjects also had their hair pulled on their heads.
Everyone experiences pain differently, and the study found that the force required to produce a particular level of pain was “many times lower for hair pulling than for a pinprick.”
Honestly?
If you want to know the truth about cheating, you’re in luck. That seems to be the underlying message of František Bartosz of the University of Amsterdam.
His study, titled “Unreliable Evidence in Cheating Research,” reviews much of the evidence and, with a sigh, concludes: “The conclusion is that caution is advised in relying on and applying the existing literature on cheating.”
In recent years, a growing number of academic papers have been published about how often people lie and cheat, and in what circumstances they do so.
Some papers go even further, proposing specific tricks that can induce people to behave more honestly: In one cheating research project, subjects were asked to write down the Ten Commandments of the Bible just before engaging in a task that tempted them to cheat.
Bartosz conducted an extensive analysis of statistics from 99 published papers on fraud that other researchers have identified as worthy of closer scrutiny.
He reports that many of the papers contain suspiciously low or high numbers, or “unbelievably positive results.”
Of course, Bartosz points out that his study could be wrong, and he writes that there is “reasonable hope” that the overall situation is improving. Why? Because these days, more people are scrutinizing the studies they read, rather than simply assuming that everything is being done carefully and honestly.
Collapsing Satellite
Few people want a satellite to lose orbit, plummet downwards, and hit them, which is why a team of researchers has been exploring ways to create self-destructing satellites, making parts of them out of materials that would break apart automatically upon entering the atmosphere, breaking the larger solid pieces into smaller pieces that would burn up and become almost nothing.
The scientists call this approach “the use of thermite to aid in the annihilation of a spacecraft during re-entry.” They reported their progress at a conference in Orlando, Florida, titled “Thermite Annihilation (T4D): From Material Selection to Test Campaigns.”
An interesting detail: “The explosives are expected to spontaneously ignite during the re-entry phase, providing additional heat to components critical to the risk of casualties on the ground.”
Advances in engineering adventures tend to come in batches, with new puzzles, big and small, waiting to be solved. Recently, a team was able to “explain the reason for an unexpected pressure rise observed during tests with a piece of activated thermite.”
If basic satellite self-destruction and scattering technologies prove reliable, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poetic words, “I shot an arrow into the sky; it fell to the earth, I know not whither,” may take on a new, more widespread metaphorical meaning.
Dangerous coconut
Two more additions to our feedback research study collection, with titles to help you start or finish the conversation.
First, the article “Falling Coconut Injuries” was published in The Journal of Trauma in 1984. Then, in 2006, “Sitting Colonoscopy: Lessons Learned from Self-Colonoscopy with a Small-Calibre, Variable-Stiffness Colonoscope” was published in Gastrointestinal Endoscopy.
If you’ve come across similarly striking examples, please send them to us (with citation details) at feedback@newscientist.com.
Marc Abrahams is the creator of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founder of the journal Annals of Improbable Research. He previously researched unusual uses of computers. His website is improbable.com.
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