Stale monk breath
Automated breath analysis, the police officer’s best tool for identifying drunk drivers, has another use. Three Greek chemists tell all in a report called Analysis of Expired Air of Fasting Male Monks at Mount Athos.
Published in a magazine few police officers read, the Journal of Chromatography B, the study comes up with a new reason to admire monks. From a scientist’s point of view, fasting monks are a reasonable substitute for “entrapped people under the ruins of a collapsed building after an earthquake”….
So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.