Improbable Research

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.