HAVE YOU ever watched children demonstrating their boundless energy, perhaps while feeling exhausted yourself? And perhaps fantasised about tapping it? One mother of Feedback’s acquaintance is wont to muse “give me a hamster wheel big enough…”
Members of a South African project called Play-Pump have gone beyond musing. Their prototype system, at Motshegofadiwa Primary School near Pretoria, uses a playground roundabout to pump clean drinking water up from a well (). This is a great idea because women and children in South Africa’s countryside can spend hours every day fetching water from distant rivers and springs. Hand-pumping water from boreholes is laborious, while diesel and electric pumps are scarce and expensive to install and keep running.
All the parks and playgrounds in the world could copy Play-Pump’s lead, perhaps topping up the local grid or lighting a few streets. Of course, we’ll need a bit of restraint in tapping into this free resource. Remember the treadmill in Victorian prisons…
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IN Sydney, Australia, if you put up a “no junk mail” sign outside your house, it is legally enforceable. New Scientist reader Simon Pretty, who is not an Australian citizen, was there in the run-up to this month’s election. So he took an extra precaution to stem the flood of bumph. He added “…including anything election-related – we cannot vote!” at the foot of his sign. It worked. Mostly. He received just one leaflet – from the local Green Party. “Infuriated, I called the candidate,” he reports, “to find out why the supposedly environmentally aware gentleman, of all candidates, had perpetrated this wasteful act.”
“Oh, we ask our people to target those with the ‘No junk mail’ signs,” he was told. “They are the ones most likely to vote for us.”
OUR report of the non-avian chicken (9 October) was quick to do the rounds among palaeontologists, who regularly deal with animal classification. One noted that government regulations can breed some strange categorisations of animals. Thirty or so years back, US officials decided the American alligator deserved legal protection – but it didn’t fit into any of the classifications specified by existing legislation, such as migratory bird or game fish. Officials pondered the matter and decided they would have to fit alligators into one of the existing categories. Because alligators were trapped mainly for their skins, they officially became “fur-bearing animals”.
WHEN you set out on a journey it is nice to know how long it’s likely to take. So all credit to the UK’s Highways Agency for providing the real-time information service at . At the beginning of October it was helpfully telling us that roadworks on the part of the M25 motorway around London that passes Heathrow airport were due to be completed in 456 days, 5 hrs and 57 minutes. We’d be there with a stopwatch to check, if the deadline wasn’t midnight on New Year’s Eve.
THE UK Open University runs a short course called “Studying Mammals”. Sue Anderson, who was thinking of applying, began to wonder what her fellow students might be like when she read this statement in the OU’s online prospectus: “The course introduces new scientific ideas as you need them – it does not assume that you’ve studied biology beforehand or that you have any first-hand practical knowledge of mammals.”
THIS is from “Delivering Integration”, the Somerset County Council Local Transport Plan 4th Annual Progress Report, July 2004. Under “Targets Deleted” we find: “Output 16. Eliminate principal roads with less than zero residual life (currently 43 kilometres).”
Neil Howlett, who came across this, is not entirely sure what it means, but as he understands it the county council has deleted the elimination of roads with negative residual life, which seems to be a triple negative. Does that reinstate the non-existent roads or not?
HUMAN evolution may not be as we’ve assumed, reader David Wright concluded during a recent visit to Harewood House in northern England. “Parrots are some of the only birds to use their feet to hold food the same way humans would,” a sign on a display declared. “Should I stop using my hands?” Wright asks.
FINALLY, don’t forget to send in your brilliant gift suggestions to help your fellow readers in this year’s round of festive generosity. We’ll sift through your ideas and add the best to www.nomoresocks.newscientist.com. Just cast your mind back to your favourite presents on birthdays and Christmases past, then visit the website and fill in the form. Every week, we’ll send a bottle of champagne to the sender of our chosen “gift of the week”.
Andrew Baxter checked out the chemicals he intended to use in an experiment. The hazardous substance fact sheet on acetic acid told him it was “a colourless liquid with a strong vinegar-like odour”.