Improbable Research

When Maurice Ward began tinkering with
chemicals in a ladies’ hairdressing salon he never dreamed he was on
the way to revolutionizing the American space program. All the
Middlesbrough hairdresser was trying to achieve was a flame retardant
wig but it eventually led to the discovery of a plastic that can stop a
nuclear blast.

So begins an April 1994 article in the Sunday Sun, written by Keith Dufton, about the inventor Maurice Ward. Mr. Ward’s work is echoed in the more recent — and more advanced — work of 1998 Ig Nobel Prize winner Troy Hurtubise, whose flameproof materials are said to be a wonder. The Discovery Channel film of him applying a blowtorch to his head is impressive.

(Thanks to David Crane of DefenseReview.com for bringing Maurice Ward to our attention.)

Sergei Speransky Institute of Hygiene in Novosibirsk is in the news again. A March 26, 2005 article in Pravda reports that:

Doctor of Biological Sciences, Sergei Speransky, is a very well known figure in Novosibirsk. The doctor became one of the authors of the shocking whipping therapy. The professor used the self-flagellation method to cure his own depression; he also recovered from two heart attacks with the help of physical tortures too.

Dr. Speransky is perhaps most famous for a paper about mice that he published more than a decade ago:

"Study of Human-Animal Communication at a Distance Between Moscow and Novosibirsk, L.M. Porvin, & S.V. Speransky, Parpsikhologiya i Psikhofizika [Parapsychology and Psychophysics]," vol. 9, no. 1, no. 1,1993), pp. 8-29. [in Russian]

(Thanks to Christine van der Aa for bringing Dr. Speransky to our attention.)

A special "Security Guard Research Review" –  which can (and is) described as "a look at some looks at those who stand guard" — appears in the special Security Issue of the Annals of Improbable Research.

It is now 10 years since Sue Ziebland and Catherine Pope published their landmark report “The Use of the Colon in Titles of British Medical Sociology Conference Papers, 1970 to 1993″ ….

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

Peter Freundlich’s how-to study "Assessing Gluteal Hardness in Security Guards," appears in the special Security Issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. It begins:

Here is something that will almost certainly happen to you at some point in your life, if it hasn?t
happened repeatedly already: You will be engaged in what seems to you to be an entirely innocent
and unobjectionable activity when you feel a tap on your shoulder. Turning toward the tap, you
will fi nd yourself facing a Uniformed Private Security Guard (UPSG), who will inevitably say
one of two things — either ?Do you have permission to do that?? or ?You can?t do that here.?
The author of this study has often been an object of intense study by Uniformed Private Security Guards. In response, he has spent much time in turn studying them and their behavior. Here is the fruit of that study. Read it, and you will have a clear understanding of the concept of Gluteal Hardness. …

The re-Discovery Institute
says that its " primary focus is to extend and promote Design Theories, which have been so successful in Biology, to the fields of Chemistry, Astronomy, Physics and Geology."

Its greatest triumph, so far, is the revised periodic table of the elements:

The re-Discovery Institute is inspired partly by the supercharged discoveries announced by the Discovery Institute, an organization that seems to come up with its own novel, imaginitive take on all sorts of things great and small.

(Thanks to The Skeptical Inquirer and Mary O’Grady for bringing this to our attention.)