Improbable Research

How do porcupines make love? Wendy Cooper discovered the answer while poking around the basement of the Australian National University library in Canberra about five years ago. Cooper is a parasitologist. She studies parasites, not porcupines. She also, in the course of her work, studies scientific journals. That was how she acquired her professional knowledge of porcupines’ prickly procreation procedures.

Cooper found two studies written (one with co-authors) by Albert Shadle, of the University of Buffalo, New York, in 1946….

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

Investigator Steve Smith writes:

There’s an update from the BBC [on October 25, 2006] on the pigeon eating pelican: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/london/6083468.stm

From the date, it’s unclear whether this could be the
same bird or incident seen in the video (but the
pelican in the video looks more like an Eastern white
than an American white to me).

Question: What kinds of curses do you find in the Athenian tablets?

Answer: … A lot of them have to do with legal cases. They say things like, “Bind the tongue and the thoughts of so-and-so, who is about to testify against me on Monday.” We have some that are aimed at rival musicians or actors, and a couple that seem to be connected with athletics. We have some that run something like this, “Bind Helen, so that she is unsuccessful when she flirts or makes love with Demetrius.” But the great majority of them seem to be connected with lawsuits. This actually corroborates evidence from other sources suggesting that the Greeks thought Athenians were abnormally enamored of lawsuits–much as many Americans today think that New Yorkers are especially litigious.

So says Christopher A. Faraone in a 2001 interview.

It took Mary Louise Parker five years to obtain the patent (U.S. #7,093,832) for her Conversation Generator. The application, filed on August 9, 2001, was granted on August 22, 2006. The device is, officially, “a plate or other utilitarian object for generating conversations.”

(Thanks to investigator Martin Gardiner for bringing this to our attention.)

If you’re near Champaign, Illinois, come to the Improbable Research show on Wednesday, October 25, at 3:00 pm at the Beckman Institute. It will feature Ig Nobel Prize winners Dan Simons (attention and gorilla suits) and Theo Gray (the periodic table table) , and Ig Nobel winner George Goble’s colleague Joe Cychosz (the world’s quickest barbeque, using liquid oxygen), and computer palmist Joe Futrelle. There will also be an Ig Nobel mini-opera — “Inertial Makes the World Go Around” — performed a capella by the Girls Next Door. The Beckman is, of course, where Ig Nobel winner Jillian Clarke did her research on the validity of the Five-Second Rule.

If you are near Decatur, come to the Improbable Research talk by Marc Abrahams on Thursday, October 26, at 8:00 pm at Millikin University. It’s part of the ACUBE meeting. It’s in the Leighty-Tabor Science Building, room 001.
Both of these Improbable Research events are open to the public; and both are free.