Hardening – the new way to stop your kids getting a cold?

[Pelican Press 0]

Hardening – the new way to stop your kids getting a cold?

Hardened children

“It is well known that the best means of preventing colds is hardening,”

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Sidikova Maryam Amankeldievna in the Journal of Medicine, Practice and Nursing. To prevent parents from going overboard, she warns that only healthy children “can be hardened with water procedures”.

Hardening may be best, but it isn’t the one-and-only method of cold prevention. Amankeldievna, a researcher at Samarkand State Medical University, Uzbekistan, also advocates rubbing. “Rubbing,” she specifies, “should be done all year round.” Done properly, rubbing “is carried out in the following order: first the arms, then the legs, chest, stomach and back”.

Hardening need not be water-based. Amankeldievna also approves of air. “Air hardening is a milder factor,” she writes, “and is allowed for children of all health groups.”

Sunlight is another alternative. But sunlight hardening is problematic: “Sunbathing,” says Amankeldievna, “is possible only with the permission of a doctor.”

We all know that

If you are a rapid reader, it is easy to keep abreast of everything that is well known: just read the thousands of new research papers published every week. But not everyone is a rapid reader.

As a service for slower readers, Feedback aims to round up some of the things that – as testified in scientific literature (see above) – are officially well known. Each is documented in a statement that begins “It is well known that…”.

Here are some well-known examples.

The forgetful functor is well-known. Cary Malkiewich and Maru Sarazola

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“It is well-known that the stable model structure on symmetric spectra cannot be transferred from the one on sequential spectra through the forgetful functor.”

Some really complicated things are well known. Frank Nielsen, writing in the journal Entropy,

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one: “It is well known that skewed Bhattacharyya distances between the probability densities of an exponential family amount to skewed Jensen divergences induced by the cumulant function between their corresponding natural parameters, and that in limit cases the sided Kullback-Leibler divergences amount to reverse-sided Bregman divergences.”

Heinz Kohut’s papers on narcissism are well known. Allison Merrick,

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in the journal Psychoanalysis, Self and Context, reminds us it is “well known that Heinz Kohut’s papers on narcissism brought forth a re-evaluation of a patient’s healthy self-regard”.

Ronald Fagin and Joseph Halpern, in a paper called

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, note that it is “well known that the conditional probability function is a probability function”.

And Luca Di Luzio, Admir Greljo and Marco Nardecchia, writing in Physical Review D, assure us that “

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that massive vectors crave an ultraviolet (UV) completion”.

How many of these well-known things do most people know? The answer to that question is unknown. If you know of a way-too-little-known well-known thing that screams for its moment in the sun, please send it (with documentation) to: Well-known things, c/o Feedback.

The fascist ********

Reader Jennifer Skillen tells Feedback how thinking about thinking led to a mother-son collaboration during one of their shared reading sessions, which began years ago with The Very Hungry Caterpillar and now encompass New Scientist, along with other more ****** material.

“The other day when I started reading the ******* section of ‘How to think about…’ [New Scientist, 25 May, page 42], my son said, ‘Mum, how about reading it substituting the word fascist for *******.’ Well, nothing is too much trouble for me when it comes to my son, so I did,” says Jennifer.

“Surprisingly, the article read very well with the substitution; it both continued to make sense, but was also very funny. It seems both ******* cells and fascist cells respond to changes in the environment, and can divide rapidly.”

Feedback agrees, and provides some snippets from the article so readers can make up their own minds: “******* cells compete for access to nutrients, and only the fittest survive… They’re evolving to become the best ******* cell they can become and that typically is bad news.”

Jennifer and her son have thus been wondering about other word pair substitutions that readers may have found for New Scientist articles, where the substitution “makes sense, increases knowledge and amuses”.

Eely ******

The question “What’s inside?” leads to many a surprise, sometimes involving an eel. Rohit Goel at Pondicherry Institute of Medical Sciences in India and his colleagues reveal one of those surprises.

Writing in the The ********* Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology, the researchers describe “

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of an interesting postmortem artifact of the presence of moray eels within a corpse”.

The team says that to the best of its knowledge, “this is the first reported case of such a finding”.

Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founded the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website is 

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.

Got a story for Feedback?

You can send stories to Feedback by email at *****@*****.tld. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks can be seen on our website.

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#Hardening #stop #kids #cold

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