Improbable Research

The fact that it took researchers this long to realize that jellyfish were in fact enormous floating mucus bags might be the more remarkable revelation here.

So writes Zoologix.

UPDATE: Investigator Amber writes:

It happens occasionally that some blog posts in my reader will seem to mimic posts from other blogs. This came through today from the Weather Underground blog but reads almost exactly like it should have come from you. Their headline is “Treating scientists as bags of mostly water.”

Feeding different-coloured sparkling glitter to two female white rhinos has acted as an impromptu pregnancy test.To keep a check on the hormone levels of Ashanti and Zanta, authorities at Dublin Zoo - who are hoping to breed the animals - added blue and silver glitter to their feed to tell the faeces apart for analysis….
“When the faeces samples are collected with the different colour glitter, it’s clear which sample belongs to Ashanti and which sample belongs to Zanta. The glitter is a safe, non-toxic method of testing the hormone levels in the rhinos,” [vet John Bainbridge] said. Dublin Zoo has sent a sample of Ashanti’s droppings to a laboratory for testing and expects results early in the New Year.

So says a December 19, 2007 Belfast Telegraph report.

The photo reproduced here is from a related report by Ananova.

(Thanks to investigators Geri Sullivan and Betsy Lundsten for bringing this to our attention.)

David Schultz tells how he researched and wrote his study “Does it rain more on the weekends?” (published in AIR 4:2), and discusses subsequent research on the subject:

When I first arrived in Norman, Oklahoma, for my postdoctoral fellowship in 1996, one of the first projects I started on my own was to see if it rained more on the weekend. In 1998, I published my preliminary results…

When I got to FMI, Ari Laaksonen and Doug Worsnop encouraged me to complete the research. Ari’s graduate student Santtu was enlisted and off we went. We found no significant weekly cycles in precipitation at 222 stations across the United States, the most comprehensive assessment to date. Our work was published this month in Geophysical Research Letters.

Schultz, D. M., S. Mikkonen, A. Laaksonen, and M. B. Richman (2007), Weekly precipitation cycles? Lack of evidence from United States surface stations, Geophys. Res. Lett., 34, L22815, doi:10.1029/2007GL031889. FMI made a press release that was picked up by the Helsinki Sanomat. Nature magazine, which wouldn’t publish the paper, was happy to cite the work on their news site.

A recent paper in press by Bell et al. at Geophysical Research Letters claims to have discovered a weekly cycle, only in the summer in the southeast US, and only since the 1980s.

Looks like the fat lady hasn’t sung yet on this topic…

Margaret Mead has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists, as an historical honorary member. Ann Sasahara, who nominated her, says:

Margaret Mead (1901-1978) was an American cultural anthropologist, who moved us away from ethnocentric anthropological studies to less judgemental, more culturally-relativistic studies. She taught us that our culture has certain beliefs and other cultures have other beliefs; neither outlook is right or wrong, they are merely different. I love her fly-away locks.

Margaret Mead, Ph.D., LFHCfS
Cultural Anthropologist
Columbia University
New York City, USA

Scholars of ritual have a new kind of domestic trinket that cries out, if silently and with full patent protection, for study. The object is described in U.S. patent# 7,308,741, which was granted December 18, 2007 to Mary F. Rydberg of Scottsdale, Arizona and Sharon M. Robinson of Fountain Hills, Arizona.

Huggable cremated remains storage systems

A system for storing cremated remains in one or more holders that may be comfortably held by an individual. The present invention comprises a “plush container”, such as a stuffed animal…

The invention is marketed under the name “Eternahugs,” with lots of legalities.

One incarnation is called “EternaBears.” The vendor say of it: “The EternaBear originated because of a common human emotion, grief.”

Another variation is called the EternaPillow. It is, one presumes, for the individual who’d like to rest their head on the dead.

(Thanks to Martin Gardiner for bringing this to our attention.)

When I was a psychology professor, I always found it difficult to make students understand Freud’s notion of the Oedipus complex, which is a rather counterintuitive notion. Any other teachers of psychology who have similar problems explaining psychoanalytic concepts (or students who struggle to understand them) might want to go to the Wilkinson Sword homepage, and click on “Fight for Kisses: Whose Skin is Smoother” down at the bottom. This short video will bring Freud’s controversial theories to vivid and memorable life.

So writes Miss Conduct.

Two well-known researchers of the International Potato Center (CIP) in Lima, Peru were decorated with the Order of Merit of the Diplomatic Service of Peru José Gregorio Paz Soldán by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Peru, Dr. Oscar Maúrtua De Romaña, on 30 May 2006

during celebrations to mark the National Day of the Potato.

Professor Carlos Ochoa Nieves and Dr. Alberto Salas López are both plants taxonomists of international renown, who have practically devoted their lives to research on the potato in Peru.

So says a May 31, 2006 writeup by The Potato Musuem. Further details are available from The International Potato Center.

(Thanks to Maddalena Feliciello for bringing the museum to our attention.)

Two strangely charming old men arrive each Christmas. One, Santa Claus, is fictional. The other, Professor John Trinkaus, of the Zicklin school of business in New York City, merely seems fictional.
This year is Trinkaus’s fourth on the international Christmas scene. His gift to us - all of us - this time is a study called Visiting Santa: An Additional Look.

It is a follow-up to last year’s Visiting Santa: A Further Look. That was a sequel to the previous year’s Visiting Santa: Another Look, which expanded on the work he described in the very first of his Santa-related studies, the 2004 classic Santa Claus: An Informal Look.

Each of these reports gives a cheerfully dreary look at the behaviour of children and their parents in a shopping mall….

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

[NOTE: Trinkaus won the 2003 Ig Nobel Literature Prize for his numerous studies of things that annoy him. It is believed that, directly or indirectly, Trinkaus's Santa research inspired the South Florida Sun-Sentinel's "Scared of Santa" photo gallery, the source of the photo shown here. ]