Improbable Research

“Rapid Mood Change and Human Odors,” Denise Chen and Jeannette Haviland-Jones, Physiology and Behavior, vol. 68, nos. 1-2, December 1, 1999, pp. 241-50. (Thanks to Enzo Festa for bringing this to our attention.) The authors report:

We demonstrate an immediate effect of airborne chemicals on human moods. We collected six groups of underarm odors, respectively, from five prepubertal girls, five prepubertal boys, five college women, five college men, five older women, and five older men…. [O]dor observers assessed their depressive, hostile, and positive moods twice, once before and once a few minutes after they sniffed one of the above seven groups of odors. Exposure to underarm odors for under 2 min led to significant, rapid, and small changes in the nonclinical depressive mood of the odor observers…. Odors

(That’s an excerpt from the article “Anti-Terrorism,” published in AIR 14:3)

A very old-fashioned diet has its advantages, implies this study:

“A Paleolithic diet confers higher insulin sensitivity, lower C-reactive protein and lower blood pressure than a cereal-based diet in domestic pigs,” Tommy Jönsson, et al., Nutrition and Metabolism, vol. 3, November 2006, p. 39 ff. (doi: 10.1186/1743-7075-3-39.) The authors, at Lund University, Sweden, and elsewhere, report:

“A Paleolithic diet has been suggested to be more in concordance with human evolutionary legacy than a cereal based diet…. We examined glucose tolerance, post-challenge insulin response, plasma C-reactive protein and blood pressure after 15 months on Paleolithic diet in comparison with a cereal based swine feed.”

(Thanks to investigator Jesse Eppers for bringing this to our attention.)

Almost everyone loves — and loves to chat about — an entertaining physics study. Here’s one published recently in the journal Physical Review Letters (in vol. 100, 202001, 2008), DOI 0.1103/PhysRevLett.100.202001. We lack the software to easily reproduce its title in the normal text of this blog entry. So here is an image of the title and the authors list:

The motorized ski tow eliminated laborious uphill hikes and thereby revolutionized downhill skiing. Early tows amounted to a rope threaded around a pair of pulleys and driven by a dismounted automobile engine and transmission. Modern tows span miles and operate at great heights….

The case at hand involved a chairlift in New Hampshire. A fractured housing caused the chair to separate from the cable and fall to the terrain far below. The two teenage male passengers were seriously injured and their parents sued the ski area. I was retained by the ski area in my usual role of metallurgist….

The plaintiff expert saw my report and changed his tune. He dropped the over-tightening claim and concluded the failure was due to sympathetic oscillations set up in the cable instigated solely by the
powering of the lift. These oscillations caused the chair to strike a tower and fracture the housing. He stated without proof the boys could not possibly have caused the swinging.

Anyone who has ever used a playground swing knows better. During the case the Boston Globe reported a Lake Tahoe accident in which teenagers “swinging the chairs” dumped people from 40 ft and injured 17 of them. But, this was a plaintiff expert so his clients had to be guiltless…. The plaintiffs lost their case against the ski area.

So writes Ken Russell, MIT professor emeritus of Metallurgy and Nuclear Engineering, in “The Case of the Strewn Skiers“

In the early 1990s, the Southern Baptist Church of Alabama produced the first mathematics-driven estimates of how many people are going to hell.

The estimates were a practical tool, a guide for where to concentrate the church’s evangelical efforts and where not to bother. Any well-run modern business does this. A company that sells insurance or cereal or cars likes to let its sales force know how many dependable customers are in each region, how many potential new customers, and also how many marginal prospects - people not worth wasting time on. With this information, the sales force can focus its efforts productively. So it is with the Southern Baptist Church of Alabama….

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