blushing chicken
People, humans, blush. Chickens are not entirely inhuman, either, in that they express emotions through the skin on their faces. Delphine Soulet of the University of Tours in France and her colleagues investigated the possibility that skin redness could be a reliable indicator of a chicken’s emotional state. Reader Frédéric Darboux brought this project to the attention of his feedback.
This is the story of six hens in a grassy outdoor woodland. They had free access to the chicken coop and could be given as much water and food as they wanted at any time.
This is also a story that was essentially a reality show. The chickens were not given a script to follow. However, they were placed in a situation where they were almost forced to respond in a way that would induce persuasive video viewing.
The adventure spanned three consecutive weeks of summer. The main event was the “catch test,” in which the experimenter captured an individual hen by holding its feathers with both hands. The hens also participated in a “reward trial,” in which a glass dish containing mealworms and wood shavings was placed “in the middle of the testing area.”
The researchers filmed videos of the animals in “calm conditions,” including resting, grooming, and feeding. Other footage showed “exciting and challenging conditions” such as dust bathing and exposure to mealworms. Inevitably, the “fear-related states” that were most prominent in the catch test also occurred.
The colorful data came from a process called “extracting redness from still images of chicken profiles.” In the past, before digital technology became available to study chicken emotions, this may have been a matter of subjective artistic evaluation. 2020s methods remove human emotion from that aspect of data collection. Electronic video processing extracted the “average values of red (R), blue (B), and green (G) for each bare skin area (comb, cheek, earlobe, and wattle) on the hen’s face.”
After analyzing the data from the videos, scientists came to a conclusion about when the chickens turned red most intensely. According to the final report, hens “had the highest facial skin redness in highly aroused and negative situations.”
eclectic smectic
For some reason, if your interests are eclectic and you have an esoteric feeling (but not a stroke) about exploring dialectics and rhyming words, then the title of the study “Smectic and soap bubble optofluidic lasers” Try “smectic” as it is.
Zala Korenjak and Matjaž Humar write in a diary with an interesting name Physical Review Xthe paper explains that it doesn’t take much to turn soap bubbles into lasers.
Or, if you want a bit of cheerful melancholy, go back to 1987 and read P. Oswald’s paper. journal de physique“Dynamics of Smectic Bubble Collapse”.
Tendency toward entropy
Physics is often portrayed as a field so esoteric that most people cannot understand or use it directly. A new study called “The principle of increasing entropy: A new look at how tourism affects human health” shows how wrong some people think that is.
The researchers write: “The principle of ‘increasing entropy’ is a universal law that explains the natural progression from order to disorder. This paper innovatively applies this principle to how tourism impacts human health. It was the first to adopt this as a theoretical basis for evaluating it from the perspective of sociomateriality.
Back in 2000, a collaboration between physicists in Italy, Brazil, and the United States sought to understand another and borderline intractable aspect of the concept of entropy growth. They published a paper called “Rate of entropy increase at the edge of chaos.”
Tourism experts both like and don’t like tourism to happen on the edge of disruption. They do it for the excitement, but not for the danger. Risk is material and economic. Too much entropy in a short period of time can increase both types of danger.
A press release about the new tourism study states that “entropy is classified as the general tendency of the universe toward death and disorder.” But other than that, the press release highlights the positives. “For the first time, a multidisciplinary study applies entropy theory to tourism and finds that travel may have positive health effects, including slowing the signs of aging.”
In theory, this theory might lead people to believe that by cleverly introducing physical principles, they can slow down the appearance of wrinkles. Taking this to a literary dimension, Feedback muses and reminds me of reading Madeleine L’Engle’s science fiction novel A Wrinkle in Time.
The book’s plot involves travel. Publication of the book was reportedly delayed because the publisher could not decide whether the story was for adults or children.
Tongari calculation
We’ve added a few more to Feedback’s collection of conversation starter research paper titles.
“Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects” provided subscribers with incisive knowledge. BMJ In 2006, “Estimating the total amount of saliva produced per day by a 5-year-old child” provided readers of this paper with a quick and, in some ways, hard numbers. Oral Biology Archives In 1995.
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