Not to worry, no giant radioactive wasps here

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Super wasps

One of the least favorite feedback kinds of feedback is “reports that look like the prefiguration of the first 5 or 10 minutes of a film in the event of a disaster”. You know, stories with titles like “Tremors along the seismic fault near the big city”, “scientists create a robot sat with machine guns for weapons” or “black sarcophagus giant black found in Egypt”. (The latter is real, by fact.)

We were therefore more than a little horrified to see a BBC report on July 31, the “radioactive wasp nest found on the old American nuclear weapons site”.

The nest was found on the Savannah river site near Aiken, in South Carolina. The site produced parts for nuclear bombs during the Cold War and now houses tanks containing millions of liquid nuclear waste gallons. However, the investigators reassured all those who would listen to that none of the tanks had disclosed. Instead, the nest had picked up the “radioactive contamination of the inheritance on site”, which means residual contamination from the moment the site was used to manufacture the quality weapon plutonium.

Apparently, the nest was sprayed to kill all the wasps, then wrapped as radiological waste. No wasp was found, which the comments hope because they all died of a poisoning with radiation and not because they moved away to mutate in secret before returning to wreak havoc. We have seen enough Godzilla films to find out that animals grow regularly when exposed to radiation, whatever the laws of biophysics, and 2025 is quite difficult because it is without a scourge of giant radioactive ranging from top to bottom of the east coast of the United States.

Just in case, the comments released our dilapidated copy of New scientistbook Does something eat wasps? There, we have learned that striped insects are preceded by other insects such as dragonflies and various birds, including bees (Duh, we assume), as well as badgers and many others. We propose to send a clan of badgers to the Savannah river site for a gigantic induced by radiation. This is the only way to be sure.

See high dogs

The journalist Matthew Sparkes erased press releases looking for potential stories when he came across the one who asked a very direct question in his title: “What do you do if your dog ingests cocaine?” After being sent, the immediate thought of feedback was “to do so for a walk”, but apparently, it is neither useful nor correct.

The press release refers to a clinical report on a chihuahua brought into veterinary surgery after a “acute start of lethargy and a transitional episode of non-response”. His urine contained “cocaine, cocaine metabolites, norfentanyl and fentanyl traces” – which would certainly leave feedback by feeling a little lethargic. This cocktail had apparently slowed down the dog’s heart, a symptom that veterinarians have successfully treated.

So, everything was good at the end, however, the comments cannot help imagining how much exasperated chihuahua – already the most yappieux of Yappy dogs – would be brought up in coke.

By reading more, we learned that the dog had “history of food indiscretion”. Two things about it. First, comments can be linked. Second, we knew once a rather weak spaniel that would eat almost everything she found in the field, whatever her unhealthy way or the cataclysmic effects that follow on her non -terrible digestive system. Due to the place where we lived, this was mainly limited to old take -out boxes and lots of fox excrement. But maybe she could have ingested something more psychoactive if we had taken her for walking in Soho from London.

Shorten, whatever happens

Comments must often read the reference lists at the end of academic articles, looking for a vital context. They all look like something like “Thomas, Richard & Harold”, “Something very complicated”, “Nature Vol 1366 (1984)”.

To save space, the names of university journals are often abbreviated, and although there are detailed rules governing the forms that abbreviations must take, the results can be impenetrable without basic knowledge.

Recently, we were completely thrown when we came across an abbreviated review like Fish. Were his publishers so animated by thickened water vertebrates who named their publication twice? Finally, we shone that the newspaper was called Fishing and fishing.

Our properly stung curiosity, we wondered if it was the abbreviation of the most ridiculous newspaper title.

There are obvious trends. For example, words like “analyzes” are generally shortened in “anal”. It’s regrettable for Progress of risk analysis (ADV Risk Anal) And it’s not great for Accident analysis and prevention (Anal accident prev) or poor old Analytical methods. Likewise, many journals of journals include words on the theme of the library as “bibliography”. This explains why Zeitschrift für Librarykswesen und bibliography is apparently called Z bibl bibl.

Some bullets have been dodged. The American Chemical Society has an entire series on Arsenic research progressBut that didn’t do what we expected.

The number of journals, combined with the limited life expectancy of feedback, means that we cannot find all the best. We therefore open the quest for ridiculous abbreviations for newspaper names with broader readership.

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