Improbable Research

Investigator Rob Sanders sends bear news. He writes: “Obviously, Mr. Scott MacInnes hasn’t been keeping up with the Igs over the years.  Look at this April 22, 2005 new report from Reuters:

ANCHORAGE, Alaska – Scott MacInnes set an Alaskan record this week,
although not one contenders would seek to break. State officials say
the 51-year-old biologist is the first person known to have survived
two bear attacks.
MacInnes, a 51-year-old biologist, was mauled during his early morning
jog on Monday when he met up with a brown bear and one or two cubs near
his home in the Kenai Peninsula town of Soldotna.
He had been mauled 38 years earlier on a well-used hiking trail in the
Chugach National Forest, according to a government biologist….

“Does anyone want to connect Mr. MacInnes with Troy Hurtubise [who won a 1998 Ig Nobel Prize for building and personally testing a suit of armor meant to be impervious to grizzly bears, and who has since continued his altruistic engineering adventures]?”

Klaus Frick of the University of Innsbruck and Duncan Hull of the University of Manchester and Michael Caldwell of the University of Alberta have delighted an uncountable number of residents of several continents  — they have joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS).

The doctor who knows everything is William Campbell Douglas, or so one might infer. Among his qualifications: (1) For a full year, he endured economic and physical hardship; and (2) He is the author of five books.

At election time, it occurs to voters that certain candidates are, to put it simply, simple. For most candidates and their staff, this is the desired payoff for years of hard work. A study that appeared in 1997 in the journal Nature explains why….

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian

How do individuals react to psychedelics? And how does one probe receptor space with psychedelics? A  conference last year in Phoenix, Arizona attempted to bring together answers to these questions.

(Thanks to Bob Frenay for bringing this to our attention.)

A new project

brings echoes of Chris McManus’s Ig Nobel Prize-winning report "Scrotal Asymmetry in Man and Ancient Sculpture."