Josie Ford
Full of beans
On a gut level, what happens after a person becomes full of beans?
Flatulence is what happens. But attempts at mitigation, explain Iowa State University researchers Donna Winham, Ashley Doina and Abigail Glick, can bring medical risk. They presented a paper at a recent conference in Denver, Colorado, called “Anti-flatulence supplements raise blood glucose after bean-based meals”. The particular supplement they tested, alpha-galactosidase, “reduces gas production by breaking complex carbohydrates into smaller, less fermentable, components [but it] can significantly increase glycemic response even in healthy adults”. Fewer farts, but at the expense of higher blood sugar levels.
The notion that bean-eating induces flatus underwent testing decades ago. F. R. Steggerda’s noticeable 1968 paper “Gastrointestinal gas following food consumption” reported: “To establish the theory that when one ingests bean products he experiences flatulence, a number of experiments were performed in which the effects of a non-gas-producing basal diet were compared with those of a diet containing a high concentration of beans.”
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Steggerda added a memorable two sentences to the world’s scientific literature: “The average gas volume collected per hour for the non-gas-producing diet was 15 cc, but when the diet was 57% pork and beans, the gas volume increased to 176 cc / hour… It was also observed that the gas-producing ability of Boston baked beans was not appreciably different from that of the pork and beans.”
A year later, Alan Greenwald, Thomas Allen and Richard Bancroft at the United States Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine published a study indicating the heights to which bean-to-flatus production can rise. Their paper “Abdominal gas volume at altitude and at ground level” may long be remembered for its own literary contribution, in a terse section that discusses “the increase in body volume after ingestion of 0.6 kg of commercially available canned baked beans”. The paper says: “The subject in this study agreed to retain abdominal gas for as long as possible thereafter.”
Read More: Farting: The questions you’re too embarrassed to ask
Survival of whistling
“Whistling,” a study called “The spiritual exploration of the whistling art in China” reminds us, “has the function of expressing personal emotions and lifting the mood”. Yet, explain authors Su Wang and Qingqing Xiao, the practice barely survived a Long, Dark Age of Whistling.
They present stark facts: “From the Song dynasty (960–1279 AD) to the Jin dynasty (1115–1234 AD), due to the constraints of feudal Neo Confucianism… at that time, only very few people liked whistling, and it basically disappeared. Although the development of whistling in the Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties was difficult to compare with the Wei and Jin dynasties, it also had its own development characteristics.”
The study makes clear how extraordinary were the Wei and Jin periods: “During the period of the Wei and Jin dynasties, the great scholar Ruan Ji actively learned from the Taoist master Xiao Gong, enabling him to transition from a god to a human, thus adding an artistic masterpiece to the life of scholars.”
Fruit, now like flies
Even before scientists discovered that a chemical called DNA transmits genetic information from generation to generation of all known living things, much of our understanding of inheritance came from fruit flies. Fruit got less attention. Now, things are catching up for fruit. Especially melons.
Flies had the advantage, for geneticists, of reproducing more quickly than most plants do. Data about fruit fly reproduction accumulates faster and more copiously than reproduction data about rice or roses. Or melons.
Hari Kesh at CCS Haryana Agricultural University in India and Prashant Kaushik at the Technical University of Valencia in Spain describe the metaphorical fruits of this catching-up in their study “Advances in melon (Cucumis melo L.) breeding: An update“. As they say, “significant information on melon genomics, and melon metabolomics, is advantageous for dissecting the inheritance of quintessential traits”.
Kaushik is, in a way, a fine example – a human fruit fly, if you will – of high-rate productivity. During the first three months of 2024 he published, as author or co-author, at least seven research studies. In a meaningless-but-mentionable comparison – Kaushik’s literary production rate versus the biological production rates of melons and fruit flies – he ranks intermediate between the plants and the insects.
Mourning dead slogans
A very few slogans stand as fading testimony to the good intent of the people who ran a particular organisation. Two of the most outstanding are IBM’s “THINK” and Google’s “Don’t be evil”.
Those have both been retired. Presumably, each retirement marked the discovery of a nobler ideal. Something more profitable for humanity, or a portion thereof.
Feedback would enjoy learning about other inspirationally commendable organisation slogans that were supplanted. If you know of one, don’t be evil and keep it to yourself. Instead, please send it (with documentation) to feedback@newscientist.com.
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 improbable.com.
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