Money reunited, Choco bite, Beer glass temp, 237-fold gifting, Ketchup

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them:

• Money reunited — Chung To Kong found a way, in the spirit of unboiling an egg (Feedback, 10 September 2022), to make banknotes from shredded banknote pieces….
• The big bite — Highly educated humans are trying to discern what happened in the earliest moments of two momentous events: a bite of chocolate and the birth of the universe. Maria Charalambides at Imperial College London and her team have been beavering at the bite mystery, much as many physicists have been beavering at learning what happened when the universe big-banged into existence….
• Feasible beer glasses — In the UK, where warm beer is either treasured or tolerated, a study called “Optimizing beer glass shapes to minimize heat transfer during consumption” might raise eyebrows. In Brazil, where warm beer can be mildly dreaded, this is cool research….
• 237-fold gifting — For Mansi Gupta and her team, the existence of gift-giving is itself a gift to be appreciated. And analysed. Gupta is lead author on a study called “A bibliometric analysis on gift giving“…
• Pivotal ketchup (Nixon) — The discussion of having robots use ketchup as a non-Newtonian fluid suitable for polishing glass surfaces (Feedback, 16 March 2024) prompts us to recall an earlier unexpected use of ketchup. …