Improbable Research

You have a brain as well as a heart and a gut. You’ll be a better functioning organism if you use all three.

So said Eugenie Scott in her short, brilliant talk at the Mount Holyoke College when she received an honorary doctoral degree.

The researchers placed six guinea fowl on a treadmill and gave them three different workouts. During one, they wore a weighted backpack to work the stance muscles; a second featured ankle weights to work the swing muscles. The third was a no-load workout.

So says a May 16, 2006 report in ScienceNow.

The formal study is titled “The energetic costs of trunk and distal-limb loading during walking and running in guinea fowl Numida meleagris : I. Organismal metabolism and biomechanics.”

(Thanks to investigator Eric W. Metzler for bringing this to our attention.)

Some techno-artists have used stop-motion video of live people in an auditorium to simulate the Space Invaders video game.

(Thanks to Presurfer for bringing this to our attention.)

Three past Ig Nobel Prize winners were in the news this past week. They present a study in contrasts and incomparabilities.

Liechtenstein. Liechtenstein is celebrating its 200th anniversary. The nation shared the 2003 Ig Nobel Economics Prize for making it possible to rent the entire country for corporate conventions, weddings, bar mitzvahs, and other gatherings.

James Gundlach. Professor James Gundlach of Auburn University is fighting to make sure that his university’s teachers actually teach their students, even if the students are football players. (Details first appeared in a July 14, 2006 New York Times report titled “Top Grades and No Class Time for Auburn Players.”) Gundlach shared the 2004 Ig Nobel Medicine Prize, for co-authoring the study “The Effect of Country Music on Suicide.”

Ken Lay. Ken Lay, the former head of Enron, died and (according to the headline of a July 13, 2006 NewsMax report) was “Compared to Jesus, MLK Jr.” Lay, who was a close friend and generous supporter of American Presidents George Bush and George Bush, shared the 2002 Ig Nobel Economics Prize for adapting the mathematical concept of imaginary numbers for use in the business world.

NOTE: Of these three Ig Nobel Prize winners, only Ken Lay did not deliver an acceptance speech at an Ig Nobel Prize ceremony (or have one delivered on his behalf by a co-winner). The world may never know his thoughts about being honored.

For people who feel numbers in their gut, there is a new book:

Coding & Medicare for Gastroenterology 2006
ISBN: 1-58383-423-0
Publisher: MMI
Price: $165.00
Format: Spiralbound

The publisher assures us that it’s full of codes, codes, values and modifiers.