Improbable Research

Nobody sleeps alone. This has little or nothing to do with morals. It is simply a law of nature, a fact. Census after census finds that, with or without the niceties of formal marriage, dust mites are the great silent majority in every bed….

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

Today’s entry in our ongoing series "Real or Concocted?" is a press release purportedly issued by the University of Buffalo. Here are excerpts:

Results showed that in the first year of marriage for 20-somethings, husbands are more likely to start or resume smoking marijuana if their wives smoke marijuana. … [Husbands] do not seem to influence their wives’ marijuana smoking. …

Previous research by [the same researchers] found that husbands’ drinking influenced wives’ drinking during the first year of marriage. However, from the first to second year, wives’ drinking influenced husbands’ drinking.

The research is purportedly funded by an organization calling itself The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

"‘Toll House’ Recipe Cookies Do Not Maintain Their Morphology Under Heat Stress Conditions." That’s the claim. It is also the title of a research report by Michael Cammer that appears in the July/August issue of the  Annals of Improbable Research.

The achievement that won the 2000 Ig Nobel Peace Prize for the British Royal Navy is now being repeated by the British Army. A report in the July 17, 2005 issue of The Daily Telegraph tells latest chapter:

Soldiers forced to shout ‘bang’ as the Army runs out of ammunition
By Sean Rayment, Defence Correspondent

Soldiers are facing the undignified prospect of being forced to shout "bang, bang" on military training exercises after an admission by the Army that it is running out of blank ammunition….

We describe an experiment in which a Giant African Snail, acting as a data transfer agent, exceeded all known ?last-mile? communications technologies in terms of bit-per-second performance, adding to the many paradoxes of broadband communications modules.

So begins a report called "Sluggish Data Transport Is Faster Than ADSL," by Ami Ben-Bassat, Revital Ben-David-Zaslow, Shimon Schocken and Yossi Vardi. They build upon earlier work with pigeons. The report appears in the July/August issue of the Annals of Improbable Research.