Improbable Research

I would like to adduce the late H.C. Brown as a shining example. Who, during the 1970s and 80s, did not groan on seeing yet another paper from Professor Brown? Variation after variation on his boron reagents poured forth, each with slightly different characteristics and reactivity, later superseded by other variations in the endless series. And the thing is, there are a number of real advances in there - the man didn’t get the Nobel for nothing. But there’s an awful lot of work that has, to put it kindly, not stood the test of time. Not everything he and his group did was worth being published.

So writes chemist Derek Lowe.

Jon Daniel Davey has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. He says:

Historians can spend eons wrestling what’s called “he largest permanent archive of apartment wrestling images from the 70’s and 80’s.”

(Thanks to investigators Susan O’Hanlon, Lani Durkins and Traci Chaplin-Ellis for bringing this to our attention.)

Investigator John Splettstoesser discusses a research question posed (in “The Friendship Letter,” No. 50, 2006) by his friend Michael Cooney:

Observations of groups of horses standing freely in a field have led to an intriguing question about their behavior in fly season, when flies attack them with vigor.

Quite often horses stand side by side but head to tail, so each horse can brush flies away from the other horse?s face with its tail. Whether they stand this way deliberately and for that reason is only speculation, but on long-term scrutiny (normally done by graduate students), the question to be looked at is whether they switch their tails at random, or whether the horse is reacting only when the adjacent horse is emitting some kind of signal to inform the other horse that ?flies are about my face, please switch your tail.?

It is also possible that a horse switches its tail when a fly is bothering its own face, although the tail is on the wrong end of the horse to be effective in that case. A horse might switch its tail as a result of flies bothering its posterior, which has some merit, although irrelevant in a case of mutual switching for its neighbor.

It would seem that the position of side by side and head to tail has merit in the fly situation, but is it also valid when it is colder and flies are not a problem? Observation of horses in winter conditions also shows the same configuration, however, so the matter of mutual assistance between horses does not seem to apply for the sake of flies (or other insects). Because an observer must be concentrating on only one end of the horse, the field study requires two graduate students, one for each end of the horse, although it has been noted since historical times that there often seem to be more rear ends of horses than there are horses.

Horses that have their tails wrapped up in a ?bun?, such as draft horses groomed for display, are at an extreme disadvantage in the case of insect pests, as one imagine, and have little alternative but to hope for windy days.

Nothing could be better for a prostate on a hot summer day than a nice piece of cold watermelon.

So say Stephen Reucroft and John Swain in a July 13, 2000 Boston Globe report. The report does not specify a best route for transporting the watermelon to the prostate.