VISITORS to the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, would be forgiven for fearing that their breakfast had been spiked. They may well be treated to the sight of a black-caped figure wearing a horror-movie mask running round the campus after a large flightless bird, while a colleague manoeuvres a stuffed jaguar on a wheelbarrow.
These earnest researchers are trying, reader Lauro Venancio Zier assures us, to teach captive-born rheas to run away from their natural predators. An admirable aim when the birds are about to be released into the wild, and if you don’t believe us there are pictures at .
The perils of trying to manipulate rhea psychology are illustrated, however, by the observation that the birds subjected to this treatment have in fact developed a healthy fear of wheelbarrows.
Advertisement
BUT it is not only in Brazil that there are strange training programmes for animals being released into the wild. The great bustard, a magnificent ground-loving bird that once inhabited the plains and grasslands of the UK, is to be reintroduced to Salisbury Plain after an absence of over 170 years. Thirty chicks have been flown over from the Russian steppes with the aim of establishing a self-sustaining population. The chicks will, after spending a month in quarantine, be moved to so-called “soft pens” on Salisbury Plain where they can get used to their new surroundings.
But what about natural predators? Surely after all this protective treatment the chicks will be picked off with ease by the local foxes? Not at all. Measures are being put in place to warn the birds of the danger posed by foxes. Keepers will allow the birds to see a fox – and then squirt them with water to make them link the animal with danger.
We hope it works, and doesn’t looking after endangered species seem fun these days?
ONE of the odder news stories doing the rounds last month was a report that two economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis had found “the fear of hell might fire up the economy”. Writing for the bank’s web journal The Regional Economist, Kevin Kliesen and Frank Schmid claimed that economic growth was strongest in the countries where the most people believed in hell.
Curious as to why this should be so, we tracked down their paper and found they credited the fear of hell with reducing levels of corruption that drain the economy. Kliesen and Schmid had even plotted a national corruption index against both national economic growth and number of believers in hell. Sure enough, the more corrupt the nation, the worse its economy. But to our eyes the data didn’t look like the corruption level dropped particularly among the hell-fearing.
A few hours passed before we had a chance to return to the web journal to double check the charts, only to find they were gone, along with the last few paragraphs of the article, which interpreted them. A note from the editor explained that “a number of readers” had spotted errors in the charts, and that the correlations they contained were “never intended to be a substitute for serious statistical analysis”. Evidently the friend who mistook the original story for an item from The Onion was not far off.
RECENT thunderstorms in the UK have prompted the press to try to explain how and why lightning strikes. London’s Evening Standard (4 August, p 8) took the opportunity to blame hot air from France for causing “bubbles of moisture”. How was this cross-channel attack possible? We quote:
“Water droplets at the top of clouds are the key to lightning. As they rise from the ground, they have an opposite electrical discharge from the earth’s natural magnetic field. Once there are enough droplets at the top of the cloud, the electric spark effect occurs.”
Feedback would love to hear from anyone who can find a single grain of sense in this explanation. Meanwhile, we can’t wait for the Evening Standard to explain rainbows to us.
FINALLY, don’t forget to send in your entries to Feedback’s summer competition. Now that he has sorted out the black hole information paradox, what should Stephen Hawking do next?
Any question profound enough to merit the great man’s attention must be expressed as one sentence in the plainest of English.
The winning entries will be chosen on the basis of their wit, originality and contribution to our understanding of the universe and beyond. All entries must reach us by 30 August. The five winners will be announced in the 11 September issue and, thanks to the generosity of Random House, will each receive a copy of The Universe in a Nutshell by – who else – Stephen Hawking. The editor’s decision is final.
Michael Paterek was puzzled by this notice on a building site fence: “Elite Security warning: These premises are subject to 24 hour continuous and random surveillance by Elite Security.” Continuous and random? How do they manage that?