How a spot of coral cosplay helped put marine pollution on the map

Cosplay coral-ation

Getting anyone, anyone at all, to notice what you have discovered is a problem for almost every scientist. (It’s a problem also for almost anyone anywhere who discovers almost anything.)

Mark Patterson at Northeastern University in Massachusetts and his colleagues tried being theatrical to raise awareness about marine microplastics. They found success (“attentive engagement”) by doing cosplay at a Comic-Con convention in San Diego. Patterson wore a giant coral costume and wielded a swordlike “microplastics sampling device”, while another team member was dressed as Greek sea goddess Amphitrite, “with bracelets and hair made with plastic debris”.

“We found that the novelty factor of our costumes and accessories, not part of the traditional cosplay pantheon of characters, was a captivating way to engage convention attendees,” they say. “Engagement lasted 1–8 minutes in length, with 1–9 attendees at a time.”

Readers of Current: The Journal of Marine Education can see stimulating photographs of the adventure, then, properly roused, go read up about microplastics.

What’s on your mind?

Feedback wonders whether people who professionally think about thinking really think anyone really thinks those thinkers know much about it.

Those thinkers who think about thinking are called many things: cognitive scientists, brain scientists, neurologists, neuroeconomists, philosophers, neurophilosophers, psychologists, neuropsychologists, psychiatrists, neuropsychiatrists, therapists, neurotherapists, theologians, neurotheologians, intellectual historians, et al.

Never mind that they call each other many things, not always admiringly.

The professionals quibble about consciousness. In the past five years alone, nearly 2000 academic papers have publishingly explored the question “What is consciousness?”

And they ruminate about ruminating. For example, Christopher Marcin Kowalski, Donald Saklofske and Julie Aitken Schermer at the University of Western Ontario in Canada published a paper in May called “What are you ruminating about? The development and validation of a content-dependent measure of rumination“. These three ruminators say they think that “existing measures of rumination assess ruminative thought without reference to the content of ruminations”.

What is the content of these ruminators’ own ruminations? In some of their other papers, they give us glimpses.

Schermer ruminated in 2023 on the owners of noisy automobiles, in a brief report titled “A desire for a loud car with a modified muffler is predicted by being a man and higher scores on psychopathy and sadism“.

Kowalski and Saklofske ruminated in print on “Enthusiastic acts of evil“.

Saklofske also ruminated, also in print, on “measuring gelotophobia, gelotophilia, and katagelasticism“.

Now perhaps you too – if aided by a dictionary – will ruminate on gelotophobia, gelotophilia and katagelasticism.

Exploding insights

Questions arising from underground explosions, including those of buried, embalmed corpses, and toxic groundwater (Feedback, 20 July) continue to spur thought.

William Drennan, a law professor at Southern Illinois University, casts a cold eye at the practice of embalming. He writes in the Dickinson Law Review that: “Attempts to make caskets air-tight and water-tight have led to a phenomenon termed ‘exploding casket syndrome.’ Basically, efforts to make caskets air-tight and water-tight lead to a disturbing conclusion because heat, gas, and liquid build up inside the coffin as the body decomposes, eventually causing an explosion.”

Leaving aside the intrinsic value of tradition, Drennan says “there appears to be no benefit to embalming after the public viewing”.

Recognising the intrinsic value of knowledge, Wei Guo and colleagues at the Army Engineering University of PLA in China published a wide-ranging look in the journal Underground Space at the “theory and test of underground explosions”.

They summarise “a large number of field tests and numerical simulations [that] have been conducted at home and abroad”.

Though they don’t specifically mention exploding, buried, embalmed corpses, the team does warn that: “Calculating the parameters of the ground shock induced by an underground explosion is a complex energy coupling problem.”

Saying it all

We have two additions to Feedback’s collection called The Title Tells You Everything You Need to Know.

“A man who pricked his finger and smelled putrid for 5 years” edified readers of The Lancet in 1996, while “Dizziness in discus throwers is related to motion sickness generated while spinning” informed subscribers to Acta Oto-Laryngologica in 2000.

If you find an equally prickly, smelly or dizzyingly clear example, please send it (with citation details) to: Telltale titles, c/o Feedback.

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.

Got a story for Feedback?

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