Improbable Research

The February issue of mini-AIR just went out. It?s stuffed full of still more new professor-professors, and touches on each of the following topics: self-dentistry; hiccup know-how; exhibitionists progress; acrobats’ dreams; worms and Harrison Schmitt; shaven; garbage, Molteno and Blebs; and other things. (If you would like to have mini-AIR automatically sent to your email box every month, please subscribe to it. It?s free.)

A pest to pests has been caught and convicted of theft from the museum where he once worked, according to a December 6, 2006 report in The Australian:

Museum worker’s bone haul

WHEN investigators raided the home of former Australian Museum pest controller Hendrikus van Leeuwen, every room except his bathroom and the kitchen was filled with stuffed animals and skeletons.

Among the items found on his western Sydney property were the skulls of a Javan rhino and a thylacine, the skin and teeth of a clouded leopard and the skeleton of an Adelie penguin collected during the 1912 Mawson expedition to Antarctica.

The keen taxidermist, skull moulder and collector stole an incredible array of animal and bird specimens from Australia’s oldest museum between 1996 and 2003.

In the NSW District Court yesterday, van Leeuwen confirmed his guilty plea to 15 charges of stealing as a servant and accepted that a further 179 stealing offences should be taken into account when he was sentenced.

At dispute in the District Court is whether some of the specimens were damaged while they were in van Leeuwen’s possession…

For further tidbits of museum criminal capers, see Ton Cremers’s presentation “?And the curator did it.” (PDF)

(Thanks to investigator Sally Shelton for bringing this to our attention.)

“Choosing a religious phone is one way a person who gives high salience to his or her religious identity can assert that importance in a public way,” says William Swatos, the executive director of the Religious Research Association in Galva, Ill.

So says a March 27, 2006 Wall Street Journal article about the so-called kosher telephone offered by MIRS Communications.

(Thanks to Jason Ybarra for bringing this to our attention.)

Those with a particular fondness for Beethoven and/or his hair may now own a little piece of him in the form of a Beethoven LifeGem, a diamond made with carbon from a carbon-based life form.

Of particular interest may be this note:

The Beethoven locks of hair used for creating these LifeGems have been authenticated and provided exclusively by John Reznikoff of University Archives. Reznikoff holds the Guinness World Record for the largest and most valuable collection of celebrity hair. Reznikoff?s collection also includes such figures as Napoleon, Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. In total, the collection is valued at over $5 million dollars.

Zen Faulkes has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. His interests include invertebrate neuroethology (brains and behavior), particularly in decapod crustaceans and ascidian embryos.

Zen Faulkes, PhD, LFHCfS
Biology Department
University of Texas Pan American
Edinburg, Texas, USA

(Click on the photo to see more detail.)

Composer/pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff had big hands.

Such is the thesis put forth by Aleksey Igudesman and Richard Hyung-ki Joo. A three-minute video documents their attempt to demonstrate.

(Thanks to investigator Peter Langston for bringing this to our attention.)