Improbable Research

What can be learnt with a cat, a cow and a paper bag? This is not a moot question. To raise dairy cows can be intellectually challenging, in addition to being hard physical work. Every dairy farmer knows this, although it may be news to a small number of milk-guzzling, cheese-chomping city-dwellers.

Fordyce Ely and WE Petersen wanted to understand why some cows spew their milk….

So begin’s this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

The Polish edition of the book The Ig Nobel Prizes is now out.

Here is a nice, apparently moving optical illusion.

For more, and more detail about it, consult Akiyoshi Kitoaka, at the Department of Psychology, Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan.

There is talk (and more) of the romance of ear candles.

Some doctors fail to see the romance. This report seems to be an example:

“Ear candles: a triumph of ignorance over science,” Edzard Ernst, Journal of Laryngology and Otology, vol. 118, no. 1, January 2004, pp. 1-2. The author, who is at the Universities of Exeter and Plymouth, Exeter, UK, explains that:

“Ear candles are hollow tubes coated in wax which are inserted into patients’ ears and then lit at the far end. The procedure is used as a complementary therapy for a wide range of conditions. A critical assessment of the evidence shows that its mode of action is implausible and demonstrably wrong. There are no data to suggest that it is effective for any condition. Furthermore, ear candles have been associated with ear injuries. The inescapable conclusion is that ear candles do more harm than good. Their use should be discouraged.”

In recent years several cooking techniques have been refined. Among them are cooking with lava, and the many innovations of Heston Blumenthal, of whom The Observer wrote:

For example his famed bacon and egg ice cream came about through his interest in ‘flavour encapsulation’: the principle of which means a single coffee bean crushed in your teeth while drinking hot water will taste much more of coffee than the same crushed bean dissolved in the water.