What happened to the male mice that drank lots of cola? Big things

Cola: A swell tale

If you are a male mouse who drinks lots of Pepsi or Coca-Cola, and if you mainly enjoy reading manly adventure stories, get yourself a copy of the latest write-up from researcher Z. Gong, pour yourself a tall, cool glass of cola and hunker into your favourite reading chair for a hell of a good time. Kristine Danowski, who isn’t a male mouse, tells Feedback about the pleasure of reading the writings of Z. Gong and co-authors, who are at Northwest Minzu University in China, and who also aren’t male mice.

The story unfolds in the pages of Acta Endocrinologica. It tells of five groups of mice. One drank lots of Pepsi for 15 days straight. Another drank even more Pepsi. Counterpart groups drank counterpart amounts of Coca-Cola. The fifth group drank only water.

Gong and co. know how to tell a good story, seasoning their testosterone-boosting true tale with doses of pure horror. After 15 days, they “aseptically collected” the mice’s testes. That is the horror part. But there is a surprise happy post-ending, if you choose to think of it that way. All the mice had larger testes than they had had back in their pre-drinking-bout days. The cola drinkers had acquired more heft than the cola teetotallers. And yes, they all lost their testes, but that is how the ball bounces.

Learning to read a bicycle

A wonder-provoking diagram of a bicycle is parked on page 100 of 21st Century Skills: Learning for life in our times by Bernie Trilling and Charles Fadel. The book, published in 2009, still gets attention, gaining appreciation in a recent study called “The complex associations between scientific reasoning and advanced theory of mind”.

This bike, explains the book, is “a model learning vehicle designed to transport students toward the goal of becoming more successful 21st century learners, workers, and citizens”.

The diagram (pictured above) shows a pair of wheels (labelled “STUDENT WHEEL” and “TEACHER WHEEL”). Each wheel is divided into four. We see brake levers (“PACE/TIME MANAGEMENT”), but no brakes, a label for a gearshift lever (“LEARNING GEAR AND TOOLS”), but no gears.

Eight pages of earnest explanation accompany the diagram, including this proud by-the-way: “We have presented this model to educators around the world, and it always brings a smile.” Feedback presented the diagram to a university educator, who appraised it and said: “I don’t understand how bicycles work, so I don’t understand this diagram. If I did understand how bicycles work, I’m sure I would find this diagram even less helpful.”

Head, Brain, Organ et al

A few months ago, Dr Organ – Dr Jason Organ – was named the new editor-in-chief of the journal Anatomical Sciences Education. This added flesh to the nominative determinism tradition that is occasionally evident in body-parts-centric medical journals, starting (as far as Feedback is aware) with the publication Brain. Henry Head and Russell Brain were each its editor, at different times, Head from 1905 to 1923, Brain from 1954 to 1967.

Those heads of Brain achieved a sort of medico-literary ecstasy in the December 1961 issue of Brain. Readers could savour an article there titled “Henry Head: The man and his ideas”, authored by Russell Brain. It was Brain head Brain on Brain head Head, in Brain.

Lots of life in salt

When people enliven a bland meal by adding salt, they are, in many (and maybe all) cases, adding life to that food. Tiny, maybe tasty, bits of life. Most commercial salt is home to microscopic species. Leila Satari, Alba Guillén, Adriel Latorre-Pérez and Manuel Porcar, all at the University of Valencia, Spain, went looking for that life in six different kinds of table salt.

They found it, everywhere. Their report, “Beyond archaea: The table salt bacteriome”, was published in Frontiers in Microbiology. The salts from oceans were home mostly to various species of archaea. Salts from other sources gave domicile mostly to varieties of bacteria.

These scientist are continually looking for life in low-rent places. Satari, Guillén and Porcar, with Àngela Vidal-Verdú, were awarded the 2021 Ig Nobel ecology prize for using genetic analysis to identify the species of bacteria that reside in wads of discarded chewing gum stuck on pavements.

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