It's been a good week for ...
crafty communication
An irritated customer has cross-stitched a debit card and sent it to his bank to express his dissatisfaction at waiting so long for a new card.
Keith Clark had ordered a replacement card at the end of April and was less than impressed when told one would take eight to10 days to arrive. When it didn't, he went into a branch, only to be told one hadn't been ordered.
He requested a new one, but this didn't arrive either. He decided to start stitching 19 days after ordering his card, then posted his handiwork.
His creative complaint arrived at the bank's head office the next morning, having been sent by recorded delivery.
"I found it unbelievable that it takes eight to 10 days to make a debit card and send it to me so I thought I'd wait and see how long it takes to get something to them," the 29-year-old says. "If I can knock something out and send it within three days, why can't they?"
Turning to handicrafts certainly seems a therapeutic method of venting your spleen, and one that might be expandable. You could crochet if you were feeling crotchety, or knit if you were needled. Now that Clark has put the cross into cross-stitch, there is a rich seam at which to work.
It's been a bad week for ... pandas
Everyone knows a panda eats shoots and leaves. But new research suggests the bears are not very good at digesting their famous diet of bamboo.
Chinese scientists have discovered that, unlike most herbivores, a panda's gut bacteria has not evolved to match its diet and remains more akin to its omnivorous bear relatives.
The team took 121 faecal samples from 45 giant pandas and compared these with data from a previous study, which included seven wild pandas. Both studies indicated that the bears do not have plant-degrading bacteria.
Pandas spend up to 14 hours per day consuming bamboo but only digest about 17% of their meal.
China's most famous animal evolved from a species that ate both meat and plants and began to consume almost exclusively bamboo around two million years ago.
So much for going vegetarian. Meanwhile, I hear Edinburgh's pandas recommend that bamboo be served with salt and sauce.
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