Gift mice, Politicians’ food and pee, Tarantula sucking, Tender youth, Cat dependence

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

• Time for love — Valentine’s Day celebrates coupling. Alan McWilliam tells Feedback about an offer he received, before the most recent Valentine’s Day, from a US-based biotechnology company. It couples charm with other qualities. Alan says: “I received the marketing email below. I’ve never been offered a ‘complimentary breeding pair of genetically modified mice’ for Valentine’s Day before. What says romance more than gazing into your mouse’s eyes, over a Bunsen burner flame, before implanting a tumour and humanely euthanising it a few weeks later?” …
• Political restraint — … The BMJ (formerly formally called The British Medical Journal) makes medical note of news reports that prime minister Rishi Sunak “fasts for 36 hours at the beginning of every week”. Sunak’s past and present medical data might intrigue and inspire physicians, psychologists and nutrition researchers. Over time, does the body in evidence inflate or deflate? How much of that inflation or deflation can be attributed to the leader’s first-person management of food? More complete data may already be available about the effects and effectiveness of self-imposed restraint (or at base, self-claimed restraint) by former prime minister David Cameron, who held office and his urine from 2010 to 2016….
• Down the tarantula hole — … Trilobite researchers still chatter about the study “Frontal auxiliary impressions in the Ordovician trilobite Dalmanitina Reed, 1905 from the Barrandian area, Czech Republic“, published a few years ago in the Bulletin of Geosciences. But only the most diligent of them noticed – deep in the references section, at the end of the paper – something unexpected: mention of a paper called “Coupling between the heart and sucking stomach during ingestion in a tarantula”….
• Tender youth — Dave Kirby has noticed another cookbook that, like The Anarchist Cookbook, maybe needs to come with a warning (Feedback had suggested something along the lines of: “If you don’t cook your anarchist to the proper temperature, there may be problems”)….
• Depending on cats — … A study from California called “A comparison of people’s attachments to romantic partners and pet cats,” published in the journal Anthrozoös, reports that some people “did not necessarily need reassurance from their cat or feel distress when their cat was unavailable to them the way they might about a romantic partner”.