Improbable Research

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.