Raw broccoli, Go Venn, Titration, Execution, The Teflon Diet

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

• The raw-broccoli experiment — What would be the effect on young adults and young children of seeing positive expressions on the faces of strangers who are eating raw broccoli? Katie Edwards at Aston University, UK, together with colleagues there and at the University of Birmingham, also in the UK, tried to find out. The journal Appetite published a first-hand account of that adventure, along with the title “Exposure to models’ positive facial expressions whilst eating a raw vegetable increases children’s acceptance and consumption of the modelled vegetable“….
• Go Venn — In the 1960s, young intellectuals in Western countries urged each other to adopt the philosophy and ways of Zen (Zen Buddhism). To have a thoughtful, wise, good life, people were encouraged to “go the ways of Zen” and to “be at one with the universe”. Six decades later, thoughts and chatter have advanced. Although no replacement has been widely adopted in the West as a counterpart in the 2020s, Feedback suggests Venn (Venn diagrams). Venn, like Zen, aims for a simpler understanding of matters that seem complex….
• Titration superpower — Superpowers, trivial or otherwise, have the reputation of being all or nothing. John Hancock tells Feedback of an exception – maybe a partial exception – to that. He says: “It seems I am able, consistently, to pour out almost exactly half of a 339 ml bottle of beer, such that 2 identical glasses have the same level of beer within 1 or, at most, 2 mm. This is done in one pour without any aids – I just seem to know when to stop pouring!” (Feedback notes that Hancock’s name is familiar to citizens of the US….
• Questionable discomfort — There is another recent addition to Feedback’s collection called The Title Tells You Everything You Need to Know. “The possible pain experienced during execution by different methods” perhaps brought surprise to readers of the journal Perception in 1993. It also won the 1997 Ig Nobel peace prize for its author…
• The Teflon Diet — Teflon, much appreciated as a “non-stick” coating on frying pans and other cookware, could become an everyday additive to food, especially in weight-control diets. Readers of a 2022 study called “Engineering properties of Teflon derived blends and composites: A review” get a quick hint of that in a single, slightly cryptic sentence: “By volume of Teflon reduced calories in food and observed satisfactory results accepted by community“….