Improbable Research

When a scientist says “there is no hard science” to support an idea, does that mean that (1) there really is no such research; or (2) there is research, but the the scientist does not believe it; or (3) the scientist has not kept up with research done by other people?

Consider this case. FIRST, Jillian Clarke won the of 2004 Ig Nobel Public Health Prize for scientifically testing the five-second rule (Clarke was a high-school student at the time she did the research). SECOND, in early 2007, scientists at Clemson University implied that they had just done the first scientific test of the rule.

Now, THIRD, comes a September 26, 2007 press release from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It says:

If a piece of toast fell on the floor, would you pick it up and eat it? You probably would if you believe in the 5-second rule, which suggests that your spilled breakfast stays germ-free as long as you snatch it up in five seconds.

But while the 5-second rule remains a popular rule of thumb, there is no hard science to support it, says Glenn Chambliss, a bacteriologist at UW-Madison. In fact, if you dropped food in places harboring nasties like E. Coli bacteria, any contamination would happen instantaneously, the scientist says.

Again, science moves in its customary fashion, one step forward, one back, with now and then a twirling in place.

(Thanks to investigator Sip Siperstein for bringing this to our attention.)

Question: Who has co-written a scholarly book on smoking AND co-written a scholarly book on karaoke?

Answer: Dr.Xun Zhou of The School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

So imagine that you are a female ladybird. Because you are already four days old you feel it is really about time that you get a hold of yourself and cease to live your life in an aimless fashion. You feel that it is time to get pregnant. While wandering about on your green plant reflecting on where your life has gone you suddenly look up and see an attractive male about 2 cm ahead (which is about how far a ladybird can see)….

So the romance begins, and since you are ladybirds, and since ladybirds are fond of copulating you go on for a long time. (Here is a video of two ladybirds getting it on to the tunes of Donald Crawford’s “You Know I Know”.)

So writes Anders Rasmussen.

Among scholars of the game of rock-paper-scissors, only a tiny minority also study monkeys. This fact, by itself, may explain why no studies were published until 2005 about what happens when monkeys play rock-paper-scissors.

Daeyeol Lee, Benjamin P McGreevy and Dominic J Barraclough of the University of Rochester, New York, wrote the first, and so far the only, report on the subject. “Learning and Decision Making in Monkeys During a Rock-Paper-Scissors Game” was published in the journal Cognitive Brain Research. The test subjects were male rhesus monkeys. No one explained the rules: rock breaks scissors, scissors cut paper, paper covers rock….

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

The September issue of mini-AIR just went out. Topics include: Tea Catechins in Chicken Meat Systems; Gerbes for the Starved; Engineer’s Perspective on Socks; etc. (If you would like to have mini-AIR automatically sent to your email box every month, please subscribe to it. It?s free.)