The January issue of mini-AIR just went out. It?s stuffed full of new professor-professors, and touches on each of the following topics: Pasta Optimization Project; Professor-Professor Quintet; Melvin Melvin search;? Tongue-shaped food; The Metrically Perfect Professor; Exhibitionists’ Progress Competition; Brain/Cocaine and Vicious Walks.(If you would like to have mini-AIR automatically sent to your email box […]
Month: January 2007
Cheese and chips
Criminal gangs in Italy have found a lucrative new way of earning money – hijacking lorries containing wheels of Parmesan cheese…. To counter the thefts, producers and the Italian farmers’ union, Coldiretti, are experimenting with microchips hidden in the crusts of the cheese, which means they are more easily identifiable. So says a December 6, […]
Meaty vertical integration
Vertical Integration is a business concept: combining processes, factories, or even entire companies that together constitute different stages of the manufacturing/marketing/sales process for a particular industry. Season Shot, Inc., a perhaps apocryphal company in Bloomington, Minnesota, combines some industrial elements that, traditionally, were separate. Their industry: hunting and cooking. As they explain: Season Shot is […]
Bra belletrist
Investigator Martha Parkinson writes: Dear improbablecom.wpcomstaging.com owner, As we both have an interest in helping women, I am writing to you about establishing a potential linking relationship between our two web sites. As you publish a lot of bra related material at improbablecom.wpcomstaging.com, I wondered if you would be interested in exchanging links with my […]
How to raise haggis
Haggis, which is native to Scotland, can be bred and raised on a farm, if an article in the January 2007 issue of The Veterinary Record is correct. Investigator Pat Grant alerts us to the published study by haggis specialists at the University of Glasgow Veterinary School: “Applications of Ultrasonography in the Reproductive Management of […]
Unsquare bods in bikes
Investigator David Deitsch writes: Sure, Stan Wagon’s squared bicycle is cool. But it cannot touch the scientific value of body-suited babes and hunks riding the Hyperbike.
Divine: Professor Tedlock
How do diviners divine? How do they achieve such dependable results? Barbara Tedlock, distinguished professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Buffalo, analysed the mystery. Her crystallised thoughts appear in a new study in the journal Anthropology of Consciousness. Tedlock explains why other anthropologists were unwilling or unable to build what […]
Bias bias
Bias Seen in Bias Studies “The ‘Faculty Bias’ Studies: Science or Propaganda,” takes eight of the recent studies on faculty politics and judges them by five general tests of social science research. Today?s study finds that the eight all come up short in adhering to research standards. The new study was sponsored by the American […]
Slightly-high-heel injury epidemic
The journal Injury alerts us to another new health menace of high-heeled shoes: “Heely Injuries: A New Epidemic Warranting a Government Health Warning!” B. Lenehan, O. Callender, A. McIntyre, S. Boran, D. Moore, E. Fogarta and F. Dowling, Injury, January 17, 2007 [Epublication ahead of print publication]. The authors, who are at variously at the […]
Pathology: voice of doom
Boy’s voice ‘kills 400 chickens’ BEIJING, China (Reuters) — Hundreds of chickens have been found dead in east China — and a court has ruled that the cause of death was the screaming of a four-year-old boy who in turn had been scared by a barking dog, state media reported on Wednesday?. A villager was […]