Ideas

Department of Questionable Ideas experiment report: Raw Propolis Versus Six Unsuspecting Strawberries The idea in one sentence: Put a small piece of untreated propolis from a beehive in a sealed tub with strawberries and see whether its suspected antimicrobial properties slow spoilage. The short verdict The idea did not work. More precisely, it did not work in the form actually tested. Three strawberries were sealed in a control container. Three more were sealed in a second c

The idea in one sentence: Put a small camera roughly 20 feet above each end of a temporary roadworks site, use it to measure the true visible queue on both approaches, and let a safety-constrained controller adjust green time using better information. The short verdict This is a credible idea aimed at a real weakness in temporary traffic management. Ordinary temporary lights are not blind. Most already use vehicle detectors, and newer commercial systems use modern radar and a

What happens when an apparently obvious animal-welfare idea collides with mammary biology, dairy economics and the inconvenient discovery that scientists have already tried half of it? The basic fact behind dairy farming is familiar enough. A cow has a calf, begins producing milk, is milked for much of the following year and is normally made pregnant again so that, after a dry period, she calves and starts another lactation. Which prompted what seemed to me an obvious questio