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.)

Bronwen Evans has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. She says:

I am a scientist with luxurious, flowing hair. I am currently a research coordinator at the Kennedy Krieger Institute, and research the neuropathology of motor abnormalities in Autism and ADHD. Here is a link to my latest independent research. (PDF)

Bronwen Evans, LFHCfS
Researcher coordinator, neuropathology
Kennedy Krieger Institute
Baltimore, Maryland, USA

The case of Jennifer Mee demonstrates (if one can assess this from press coverage) that new medical knowledge reaches doctors slowly, if at all.

Afflicted with what is called, technically, “intractable hiccups,” the teenage Ms. Mee has apparently not been offered the medical literature’s best-documented treatment: digital rectal massage.

A simple Pubmed search for the term “intractable hiccups” turns up the key reports, which were written by Drs. Francis Fesmire and Majed Odeh, Harry Bassan, and Arie Oliven. But not all doctors consult the medical literature, and perhaps Jennifer Mee’s physicians, whom news reports describe as “baffled,” have not done a literature search.

[NOTE: the digital rectal massage medical case reports eventually earned the 2006 Ig Nobel Medicine Prize for Drs. Fesmire, Odeh, Bassan and Oliven.]

A naturalist looks at librarians, in a five-minute video called “The March of the Librarians.” The pacing is slow, as it sometimes is in nature. The creatures are graceful, as they sometimes are in libraries.

(Thanks to investigator Tab Roeln for bringing this to our attention.)

A Quick and Accurate Estimation of Heat Losses from a Cow is the there’s-no-way-you-will-ignore-this title of a report just published in the journal Biosystems Engineering. The four scientists responsible - Zahid A Khan, Irfan Anjum Badruddin, GA Quadir and KN Seetharamu - are based at universities in India and Malaysia. They infuse the report with abundant technical detail and occasionally strained grammar. Their method, they assure us, “can be used by any user to predict quickly accurate amount of heat loss from a cow”….

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

David Loring has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. Ronald Hyman, who nominated him, says:

He has a PhD in Clinical Neuropsycholgy and is clinical researcher. Inter alia, he is an eminent expert in WADA testing which is used to test cerebral cortical functioning before epilepsy surgery.

If you click on the link at the bottom of his page, you will be directed to 167 citations in Pubmed. Not as many publications as hair follicles, but still no mean feat.

David Loring, PhD, LFHCfS
McKnight Brain Institute
University of Florida
Gainesville, Florida, USA

(Click on the photo to see more detail.)

When I was a new faculty physician, I worked with a resident doctor who was smart and energetic and took excellent care of her patients.

There was just one problem. As she delivered her thoughtful patient presentations to me and the other attending doctors, it was hard not to notice her low-cut dress.

“You two have to say something to her,” one of my male colleagues said to me and another female doctor one afternoon. But while none of us would have hesitated to intervene had she prescribed the wrong drug for a patient, we felt weird saying something to her about her clothes. So we didn’t.

Nearly a decade later, my impression is that more young physicians and students are dressing like that resident. Every day, it seems, I see a bit of midriff here, a plunging neckline there. Open-toed sandals, displaying brightly manicured toes, seem ubiquitous.

So writes Dr. Erin N. Marcus in a November 21, 2006 op-ed in the New York Times.

Sandwich patents range from the general to the highly specific. US patent #D527,165 S, for an evocative cucumber sandwich, is an example of the latter. It was granted to Alexander Stenzel of Pacific Palisades, California, on August 29, 2006.

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

This time, the U.S. government’s Return-to-the-Moon Initiative is going to get be a success, we were told yesterday by a good authority.

Yesterday (Feb 17, 2006) we attended a press briefing about the USA’s moon exploration plans. This briefing was part of the Annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in San Francisco. The most enthusiastic speaker was Harrison Schmitt — the geologist who was the last man to walk on the moon. Dr. Schmitt subsequently became a politician (a U.S. Senator) and then a business consultant. He is now also chair of the NASA Advisory Council, where he is a voluble adviser to the President.

We were fortunate in being able to ask him a question. (Actually, we addressed the question to the panel in general, but Dr. Schmitt answered in place of his colleagues.)

The background: This is the third or fourth time a Return-to-the-Moon Initiative was announced. Each previous time, officials said they had a key that would ensure success. That key to success: good planning to commit adequate funding for the project.

Question to the panel: Each previous time, the financing didn’t materialize, and nothing happened. What’s different this time, under President Bush? What makes you believe that this time it will actually happen?

Dr. Schmitt’s answer: This time, they’ve done good planning to commit adequate funding for the project.

Investigator Bob O’Hara asks: “Should this journal really be open access?”

He is referring to The Journal of Privacy and Confidentiality. The journal’s founders — at least those who are making their identities public — are Cynthia Dwork, Stephen E. Fienberg and Alan F. Karr.