Improbable Research

Dr Martin Voracek is a shoes-and-ships-and-sealing-wax sort of specialist. His expertise ranges from romance and jealousy to the “accuracy of volume measurement in human cadaver kidneys”, plus the effects of solar eclipses on suicide, and also politics, intelligence, and much else.

This man of many degrees (DSc, PhD, MSc and MPh) is a research resident in the department of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy at the University of Vienna medical school. His work is known best to, yes, specialists. But once or twice he has come to wider public attention.

His 2002 study in the British Medical Journal, Shapely Centrefolds? Temporal Change in Body Measures: Trend Analysis, written with Maryanne Fisher, of Canada’s York University, is an exercise in statistical voyeurism….

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

The purpose of this investigation was to determine if there is a difference in the delectability and visibility, by human observers, of clothing made from solid orange vs. camouflage orange cloth.

Results: For detectability, 79% found solid orange more detectable that camouflage orange…. It remains to be determined if this finding is true over a wide variety of hunting environments and situations.

So says the report “Detectability and Visibility of Solid Hunter Orange Vs.
Camouflage Hunter Orange To Human Observers” by Kelly Olson and Todd Childs of the Southern California College of Optometry.

(Thanks to investigator Ken Belcher for bringing this to our attention.)

Like most things in life, when the smoking ban comes in force in England on July 1, it will have unintended consequences. So who and what are the unexpected winners and losers? …

More smokers choose to stay at home and have a puff, exposing their children to second-hand fumes, says a report from the International Epidemiological Association.

You’re down the pub, all your mates have nipped out for a cigarette, you don’t smoke but don’t want to sit on your own - what do you do? Join them. For some, standing outside while mates smoke has resulted in them taking up the habit.

Scottish pubs have seen a 10% drop in sales and a 14% drop in custom since the ban. But cigarette sales went up by almost 5% in the six months after the ban, according to figures from the Scottish Grocers Federation.

So says a May 23, 2007 BBC report.

(Thanks to investigator Adrian Smith for bringing this to our attention.)

The May issue of mini-AIR just went out. Topics include: Whether Fish is Foul; Nix on the Double-Dons; the Triumphant Return of Theoharis Theoharis; The Non-Returnable James James; A Pasta Prep Standard; The Russian Ig Book; Orienteer-Trampling Poets; Rhomboid Intramembrane Protease Competition; New Hair Club Member Profusion; Opera — Encore from the Stomach; Boring, Chicken, Girth, Death; and Where/How Toad Egg. (If you would like to have mini-AIR automatically sent to your email box every month, please subscribe to it. It?s free.)

“It is a nice prize, the highest form of recognition you can get in tropical medicine in the Netherlands.”

Medical entomologist Bart Knols sounded excited, and he had good reason. Yesterday, he and his colleague Willem Takken of Wageningen University were awarded the Eijkman Medal 2007 for their combined 20 years of research into insects that transfer tropical infectious diseases, like malaria. According to the press release issued by the Royal [Dutch] Tropical Institute, ‘especially their work on the attraction of the African malaria mosquito to the smell of human feet and Limburger cheese was groundbreaking’.

Less than a year ago, in October 2006, the very same research brought Bart Knols and another colleague, Ruurd de Jong, an international, yet different kind of recognition: the 2006 Ig Nobel biology prize — for showing that the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae is attracted equally to the smell of limburger cheese and to the smell of human feet.

The Eijkman Medal, awarded 45 times since 1927, is named in honour of Christiaan Eijkman, professor of vitamin-studies and recipient of the 1929 Nobel Prize in the field of Medicine and/or Physiology.

Congratulations to the board of the Eijkman Medal Fund, to Willem Takken and to Ig Nobel prize winner Bart Knols.