Improbable Research

Do you enjoy conformity? If so, perhaps you already read
the journal that is quietly yet splendidly called “Conformity“.

(Thanks to investigator Tom Roberts for bringing this to our attention.)

Higher U.S. gasoline prices may slim more than just wallets, according to a new study from Washington University in St. Louis.

Entitled “A Silver Lining? The Connection between Gas Prices and Obesity,” the study found that an additional $1 per gallon in real gasoline prices would reduce U.S. obesity by 15 percent after five years.

The report, written by Charles Courtemanche for his doctoral dissertation in health economics, found that the 13 percent rise in obesity between 1979 and 2004 can be attributed to falling pump prices.

So says a September 11, 2007 Reuters report.

Investigator Piri LaCoste writes:

Why don’t you write more about photocaged morpholino? It’s my favorite chemical name.

Ps. I truly love morpholinos of any kind.

Many traditional weather forecasts are based on the behaviour of animals: cows sitting down, sheep putting their heads into hedges, hogs running around with straw in their mouths… There are hundreds of them.

Even if you assume that our ancestors were a superstitious lot, who saw disaster in every twitch of a lamb’s tail, so many of these old proverbs have common elements that it’s hard to discount them entirely.

Over the last couple of years I’ve been trying to think up ways of testing out some of these sayings.

So writes Howie Watkins. His early study on the topic, tilted “Cats and Weather Prediction,” appeared in the July/August 1996 issue (vol. 2, no. 4) of the Annals of Improbable Research

QUESTION: For what discovery can Coca-Cola enthusiasts thank Mr Prof. Dr. sc. agr. Dr. rer. nat. habil. Ewald Schnug?

ANSWER: They can thank him for his two studies:

“Coca Cola Is It! The Ubiquitous Extractant for Micronutrients in Soil,” Ewald Schnug, Jürgen Fleckenstein, and Silvia Haneklaus, Communications in Soil Science and Plant Analysis, vol. 27, no. 5-8, 1996, pp. 1721- 30. The abstract reads in part:

soils, particular [sic] for manganese (Mn). The main ingredients of Coca”Coca Cola has been found to be an excellent extractant for micronutrients in Cola, phosphoric acid, reducing sugar and carbon dioxide are well proven in common extraction recipes. The overall extraction force of Coca Cola was similar to that of commonly used phosphoric acid methods.”

—–

“Factors Affecting Available Micronutrient Concentrations in Soils Using Coca-Cola (R) as Extractant,” Ewald Schnug, Jürgen Fleckenstein, and Silvia Haneklaus, Communications in Soil Science and Plant Analysis, vol. 29, nos. 11-14, 1998, pp. 1891-6.

(We can and do thank to investigator Tom Gill for bringing the first study to our attention several years ago, and to investigator Terra Rosa for reminding us about it and mentioning the second study.)

Tonight is Ig Nobel night at the Genoa Science Festival.

The event starts at 9:00 pm. at the Ducal Palace. AIR editor Marc Abrahams will introduce Ig Nobel Prize winners Stefano Ghirlanda, Donatella Marazitti, Ruurd de Jong, and Kees Moeliker, and Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club man of the year (and rock star) Dr. Piero Paravadino.

On June 18, 2007, skulduggery and detective adventure seeped out from an unlikely source - an otherwise stodgy 108-page-long committee report to the administrators of a government research institution in Washington, DC. The story’s villains are magnificent, because we meet them only as darkly sketched figures.

The report’s title is dull enough: A Report to the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution. But the names of its three authors will be recognised by any Agatha Christie fan for their cartoonishly ringing roundness: The honourable Charles A Bowsher, The honourable Stephen D Potts, and AW “Pete” Smith, Jr.

The report’s introduction seems to have its tongue sutured into its cheek…

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

James Voordeckers updates his membership in the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. He says:

Finished my doctoral studies at Rutgers and have moved north. I am currently researching the physiology of iron reducing hyperthermophile microorganisms at UMASS.

James Voordeckers, Ph.D., LFHCfS
Postdoc
University of Massachusetts Amherst
Massachusetts, USA

Benzi Kluger has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. Deborah Townsend and Lauren Saunders, who nominated him, say:

Benzi is a neurology fellow at the University of Florida working on research related to fatigue in healthy subjects and stroke patients.

Benzi Kluger, MD, LFHCfS
Neurology Fellow
Department of Neurology
University of Florida
Gainesville, Florida, USA

Investigator Jeannie Crosby sends this image of an anatomical peculiarity, together with a link (now gone dead, sorry to say) to the web site where she found it.

For a possible explanation, see the medical report “Salvage of amputated digits by temporary ectopic implantation,” by J. Bakhack and colleagues at Institut aquitain de chirurgie plastique, reconstructrice et esthétique, chirurgie de la main et microchirurgie in Bordeaux, France.

It’s nearing the end of the 2007 U.S. major league baseball season. For those who love baseball, and for those who are baffled by it, here are two research reports that everyone — baseball fan or not — will find either enlightening or not.

At the end of the day, then, we believe that even the most apparently superficial opinions – including those about sports – embody and express citizens’ underlying values, and so can serve as useful barometers of social and political attitudes.

So conclude the authors of the study:

“The Etiology of Public Support for the Designated Hitter Rule,” Christopher Zorn and Jeff Gill,Quarterly Journal of Political Science, vol. 2, 2007, pp. 189-203. The authors explain:

Since its introduction in 1973, major league baseball’s designated hitter (DH) rule has been the subject of continuing controversy. Here, we investigate the political and socio-demographic determinants of public opinion toward the DH rule, using data from a nationwide poll conducted during September 1997. Our findings suggest that it is in fact Democrats, not Republicans, who tend to favor the DH. In addition, we find no effect for respondents’ proximity to American or National League teams, though older respondents were consistently more likely to oppose the rule.

They cite another classic study:

“Moral Hazard and the Effects of the Designated Hitter Rule Revisited.” Brian L. Goff, William F. Shughart II and Robert D. Tollison, Economic Inquiry, October 1998, pp. 688–92.

(Thanks to investigators Robert and Sarah Duckham for bringing this to our attention.)

Here are some runners-up in the Hopping Variation in the Perched Chicken Competition. The competition was announced in mini-AIR 2007-09. The winner will be announced in mini-AIR 2007-10. The competition called for limericks that pertain to this published study:

“Ability of Laying Hens to Jump Between Perches: Individual Variation and the Effects of Perch Separation and Motivation on Behaviour,” G.B. Scott; B.O. Hughes, N.R. Lambe, and D. Waddington, British Poultry Science, vol. 40, no. 2, April 1, 1999, pp. 177-84.

INVESTIGATOR JOANNE LEARY:
If chickens were mathematickians
They’d calculate just like the dickens
The distance to perches
And how far their lurch is
To reach their desired positions.

INVESTIGATOR MIKE MCKINLAY:
The chicken who leaps from its perch
Lands with an incredible lurch
It looks for some food
Finds none but won’t brood,
It merely continues its search.

INVESTIGATOR ELVA SIMUNDSSON:
In the world of poultry elites
The losers of perch-jumping heats
Are sorted in pens
From Olympic class hens
and turned into fried-nugget treats

INVESTIGATOR CHRISTIAN FROSCHLIN:
A perched chicken sated and round,
Distrustfully ogled the ground:
“Why risk to be dropping
For meaningless hopping?
My plan to just sit here is sound!”

INVESTIGATOR MONICA SKIDMORE:
A chicken who jumps between perches
While hungry shows head bobs, and lurches.
But perch separations
Won’t get hen’s ovations.
One calls, while for short jumps it searches.

Investigator Mathew R Barley:
Those hens cleared a foot without puffing,
But poultrymen proved they were bluffing:
That gap is no bar,
They will jump twice as far
To avoid ending up full of stuffing.”

INVESTIGATOR DAVID MARPLES:
If you make chickens hungry and sad,
They will jump to a perch that’s less bad.
But make it too tough,
And they just have a huff,
And cluck that their keeper’s a cad.

INVESTIGATOR HERKY GOTTFRIED:
A chicken that wants to get plump
Will often be ready to jump
But one that’s well fed
Will not be misled –
It clucks but just sits on its rump.

INVESTIGATOR OLLIE ARBOGAST:
There once was a pullet named Josie,
Whose perch in the house wasn’t rosy.
She hopped up a peg
And soon laid an egg,
Because her new roost was so cozy.

Dutch Museum Hunts Elusive Crab Lice

By TOBY STERLING

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands (AP) — A Dutch museum said Friday it is having trouble getting its hands on a parasite that just about everybody else is anxious to avoid: crabs.

The Rotterdam Natural History Museum has appealed for somebody — anybody — to give it a single crab louse for its collection, amid fears they may be dying out.

The donor’s anonymity, said curator Kees Moeliker, is guaranteed.

“We have over 300,000 species represented in our collection,” he said. “Even though most of them are not on display, that doesn’t mean small, unpopular insects are less important scientifically.”

Moeliker said he began hunting in earnest for the species, also known as “pubic lice,” last year after reading an article published by British doctors in the June issue of the journal of Sexually Transmitted Infections.

The article, titled “Did the Brazilian Kill the Pubic Louse?” found that crabs rates had fallen first in women, and several years later in men in Leeds. The authors hypothesized that the bikini wax known as “The Brazilian” that removes all or most pubic hair, might be to blame.

“When the bamboo forests that the Giant Panda lives in were cut down, the bear became threatened with extinction. Pubic lice can’t live without pubic hair,” Moeliker said….

So says an October 19, 2007 Associated Press report. Kees Moeliker is the 2003 Ig Nobel Biology Prize winner (for his discovery of homosexual necrophilia in mallard ducks), and also now is the Annals of Improbable Research’s European Bureau Chief. Our European Bureau is located in the Rotterdam Natural History Museum.

NOTE: To see an earlier stage of the crab louse project, see the October 2006 issue of Nieuw Rotterdam.

Compare the zippy wording of a press release with the dry, scientificalistic wording in the study it describes.

The press release is headlined “High-testosterone people reinforced by others’ anger, new study finds.” The press release says:

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Most people don’t appreciate an angry look, but a new University of Michigan psychology study found that some people find angry expressions so rewarding that they will readily learn ways to encourage them.

The study is called “Basal testosterone moderates responses to anger faces in humans.” The study says:

Prior research showed relationships in humans between testosterone (T) and vigilance to facial expressions of anger, which are considered signals of an impending dominance challenge. In Study 1, we used a differential implicit learning task (DILT) to investigate the degree to which subjects find anger faces reinforcing.