Improbable Research

The campaign to make chemistry an elite profession — open only to well-bred persons who are officially vetted and licensed — is surging ahead in the United States. An early moment of triumph occurred in 1994, when Texas State Senator Bob Glasgow was awarded the Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize

for sponsoring the 1989 drug control law which make it illegal to purchase beakers, flasks, test tubes, or other laboratory glassware without a permit.

A report in the June 2006 issue of Wired magazine explores some of the campaign’s recent achievements:

more than 30 states have passed laws to restrict sales of chemicals and lab equipment associated with meth production, which has resulted in a decline in domestic meth labs, but makes things daunting for an amateur chemist shopping for supplies. It is illegal in Texas, for example, to buy such basic labware as Erlenmeyer flasks or three-necked beakers without first registering with the state’s Department of Public Safety to declare that they will not be used to make drugs. Among the chemicals the Portland, Oregon, police department lists online as “commonly associated with meth labs” are such scientifically useful compounds as liquid iodine, isopropyl alcohol, sulfuric acid, and hydrogen peroxide, along with chemistry glassware and pH strips. Similar lists appear on hundreds of Web sites.

“To criminalize the necessary materials of discovery is one of the worst things you can do in a free society,” says Shawn Carlson, a 1999 MacArthur fellow and founder of the Society for Amateur Scientists. “The Mr. Coffee machine that every Texas legislator has near his desk has three violations of the law built into it: a filter funnel, a Pyrex beaker, and a heating element. The laws against meth should be the deterrent to making it – not criminalizing activities that train young people to appreciate science.”

(Thanks to investigator Cory Doctorow for bringing this to our attention.)

“This is the first reported case of an urticarial rash apparently caused by the frustration of watching England play football.”

With these words, written in 1987, a London GP trainee named P Merry alerted readers of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine to a little-suspected risk of rooting for a World Cup team. Rooting can cause emotional upset, which can cause urticaria. Urticaria is also known as “hives”.

Here’s what happened…

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

NOTE: Due to production gremlins, the final paragraph of the column didn’t make it into print. Here is the missing, concluding passage:

Fandom carries danger, yes, but there’s a special payoff for those whose team does capture the ultimate glory. Or so implies a study that appeared in 2003 in the journal Heart. Written by two French doctors, the title proclaims: “Lower Myocardial Infarction Mortality in French Men the Day France Won the 1998 World Cup of Football.”

Matthew E. Falagas, of the Alfa Institute of Biomedical Sciences (AIBS) in Athens, Greece, is frequently confused. Therefore, he wants you to have a number. His article called “Unique Author Identification Number in Scientific Databases: A Suggestion” (published in the May 2006 issue of PLOS Medicine) explains:

it is widely known that a considerable proportion of authors share the same last name and first initial. This seems to be the case for people of most ethnic heritages. In addition, authors of scientific publications do not frequently use their middle initial, which contributes to the confusion….

In order to decrease the problems arising from authors with identical names, I suggest the introduction of a unique author identification number (UAIN) in modern electronic databases of scientific information. I further suggest that such an identification number may be hidden in the electronic databases.

(Thanks to investigator Lissa Donner for bringing this to our attention.)

Investigator Robin Abrahams adds to investigator Earle Spamer’s dig into student science requirements:

I like Earle’s take on archaeology. The popular class at KU [The University of Kansas] was “Gemstones.” It was particularly popular among the sorority girls because you could go shopping for an engagement ring as a class project.

Investigator-provocateur Earle Spamer, upon hearing the lament of a hard-core non-science student faced with the prospect of having to fulfill “The Science Requirement,” suggests:

Alas, what better science course to take than Archaeology? Other than having to use a meter stick, there is no math required. What other science requires that one study a subject about which relatively very little is understood, work surrounded by dirt and dust, do research with spoons and toothbrushes, keep secret the exact location of your study area, leave most of the area unstudied, and place that which you do uncover (mostly bits of pots and everyday trinkets) in drawers inaccessible except to authorized scholars, usually in another country?

Sign me up!

A new theoretical answer to the old question “Which came first, the chicken of the egg?” conflicts with the answer produced by an experiment in 2003.

A May 26 CNN report describes the theoretical conclusion:

Now a team made up of a geneticist, philosopher and chicken farmer claim to have found an answer. It was the egg…. Professor John Brookfield, a specialist in evolutionary genetics at the University of Nottingham, told the UK Press Association the pecking order was clear.

The experiment, which showed the chicken arriving first, was reported in the July/August 2003 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. Alice Shirrell Kaswell described her work:

Which came first — the chicken of the egg? I tackled the question experimentally, using a chicken, an egg, and the United States Postal Service (USPS).

I mailed the chicken and the egg, each in its own separate packaging, and kept careful track of when each shipment was sent from a post office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and when it subsequently arrived at its intended destination in New York City….

Kaswell’s article came came to a prophetic conclusion:

It has now been empirically determined that the chicken came first, the egg second.

However, seeing the history of previous questions that were taken up first by philosophers and only later by scientists, I am loath to predict that these results — clear as they are — will settle the question to everyone’s satisfaction.

(Thanks to investigator Erik Pettersson for bringing the new theoretical work to our attention.)

Investigators Jack and Carol Clark write (actually, wrote — this note was stuck in our in pile since 1999):

On a CBC proram called “Basic Black,” a Diane Forsano was interviewed. She had just defended her master’s thesis and had it accepted. She had done her research on “love and comfort - sleeping with cakes” at Concordia University. For part of her research she made a broth of favourite items to see what effect the aroma would have (for her the favourite items she put - together as I understand it - steel-toes boots and a favourite book into the broth. Another part of her research consisted of touching 1,000 people in one month.

Forsano’s work was published as “Sleeping with Cake: and other affairs of the heart,” Drama Review, vol. 45, no. 1 (T 169), Spring 2001, pp. 59-67. More recently, in 2005, she produced “Artifacts in My Mouth,” the source of the photo here.

What’s new (or fairly new) in the Gendering of speed in organisations? To find out, ask anyone who attended the 20th Anniversary Standing Conference on Organisational Symbolism, in July 2002 in Budapest, Hungary. There a session was devoted to this most intriguing topic. Or so they say.

[As] Paul S. Peercy, dean of engineering at the University of Wisconsin and chair of the Engineering Dean’s Council at the American Society for Engineering Education put it:

“I used to say, ‘look around, everything except the plants are engineered.’ Now I say, ‘look around, everything and some of the plants are engineered.’”

[This passage is from the article "The Technology Mosaic" in the May 25, 2006 issue of Inside Higher Ed.]

(Thanks to investigator John Dupuis for bringing this to our attention.)

The authors conducted an exhaustive empirical study, with the aid of custom software, public search engines and powerful statistical techniques, in order to determine the relative popularity of every integer between 0 and one million.

So say the persons behind the project known as “The Secret Lives of Numbers.”

(Thanks to David Weinberger for bringing this to our attention.)

Jatila van der Veen - Davis has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. She says:

I am a geophysicst by my first graduate degree; have taught physics and astronomy at high school and college for 14 years, and am now getting a PhD in Physics Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I also perform Middle Eastern and Balkan dance.

Jatila van der Veen - Davis
PhD Candidate, physics education
Gevirtz Graduate School of Education
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

(Click on the photo to see more detail.)

Kevin W. Plaxco and Lisa M. Plaxco have joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. Jing Xu, who nominated them, says:

I would like to nominate my thesis adviser, Kevin W. Plaxco, and his wife, Lisa M. Plaxco. Both hold degrees from Caltech (Kevin with PhD. in Biology, and Lisa with B.S. in Chemistry). They are a joint force conquering the filed of bioengineering (Kevin as a tenured chemistry and Biochemistry Professor at UCSB) and finance (Lisa as the associate director and portfolio strategist at First Quadrant in Pasadena, CA).

Kevin W. Plaxco
Professor of Biochemistry
University of California, Santa Barbara, USA

Lisa M. Plaxco
Chemist and portfolio strategist
First Quadrant, Pasadena, California, USA
(Click on the photos to see more detail.)

Vicente Martinez has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. He says:

I am a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan. I feel compelled to nominate myself for membership. I easily possess the most luxuriant hair in the Big Ten Conference, and I am an ass-poor doctoral candidate who can’t afford a hair cut. I attribute my luxuriant hair to my Latino ancestry.

Vicente Martinez
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Psychology
Biopsychology and Behavioral Neuroscience
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA

(Click on the photo to see more detail.)

Lisa-ann Gershwin has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. She says:

I am a jellyfish doctor. My hair travels around the world and discovers new species — kind of a mystic medusa as it were.

Dr. Lisa-ann Gershwin
National Marine Stinger Advisor
State Marine Stinger Advisor
Marine Stinger Coordinator
Surf Life Saving
S. Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

(Click on the photo to see more detail.)

Crispness is associated with crunchiness, but your ears make a difference. That’s the takeaway-and-chew-on-it message of an Oxford University study called The Role of Auditory Cues in Modulating the Perceived Crispness and Staleness of Potato Chips.

The authors, the experimental psychologists Massimiliano Zampini and Charles Spence, wax distinctly poetical:

“We investigated whether the perception of the crispness and staleness of potato chips can be affected by modifying the sounds produced during the biting action….

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