Improbable Research

The Japanese edition (ISBN 9784062813136) of the book Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans (ISBN 0752864610)* joins the multilingual family of editions of this curious little tome.

The publishers chose an eye-catching cover boy: Ig Nobel Prize winner Troy Hurtubise, he of the suit of armor designed to protect against grizzly bears.

* Also known as “Ig Nobel Prizes 2″

BONUS: The documentary film about Troy Hurtubise and his quest can be viewed online.

Yet another entry to our “Scientists Now Know” collection: When students take a test, if the test booklet (or whatever) already seems to indicate that the student will be given a bad grade the student tends to perform poorly. And if the test booklet hints that the student will be given a good grade, the student tends to perform better. The study:

“A versus F: The Effects of Implicit Letter Priming on Cognitive Performance,” Keith Ciani and Kennon Sheldon,  British Journal of Educational Psychology, vol. 80, March 2010. The authors are at the University of Missouri. (Thanks to Kevin Lewis for bringing this to our attention.)

BONUS: Keith Ciani is a beer enthusiast.

If you want to read Müller on Muller, one place to begin is Müller’s “Gregg Müller on Muller on Lichenometry.” It begins:

FEW PEOPLE WOULD connect the splashes of color of lichen crusts on rock with unraveling the history of landscapes, yet the meek but intriguing lichen can help researchers tell the stories of places…

But if you want Lichens on Lyme, go for the 19/10/2008 Background Briefing from Radio National (National Australia), according to which:

Gene Lichens, ecologist, US, says scientists at his institute have proved the connection between loss of biodiversity and the increase of the transmission of Lyme disease.

The Pharaoh configuration is a concept invented by Sydney Brenner in his 2004 essay “Academic Dynamics“:

This is a scheme which offers a solution to the fundamental problem of all scientific departments, which is how to get rid of the old — both people and science — and create space and resources for the young and the new. Our elegant answer is to treat all scientists as Pharaohs; thus, when a senior scientist retires, he and all of his research associates, post-docs, students and technicians are sacrificed and buried in a specially constructed pyramid, together with all of their equipment to enable them to continue research in the after Life Sciences. At one blow, space would have been created for a new professor and a new group, without any arguments and with none of the rancour that usually accompanies such events.

It is obvious that this needs to be carried out only once.

A reply to the study we mentioned two days ago:

“Of cup and bra size: Reply to a prospective study of breast size and premenopausal breast cancer incidence,” Anita Ringberg, Erika Bageman, Carsten Rose, Christian Ingva and Helena Jernstrom, International Journal of Cancer, vol. 119, 2006, pp. 2242–2243. The authors explain:

“we found that the use of cup size alone without taking rib cage circumference into account is a poor surrogate for actual breast volumes,

James Bond, the ornithologist whose name was purloined and bestowed upon a fictional spy, is more than 20 years gone. Bond’s life and work were celebrated in the monograph “In Memoriam: James Bond,” by Kenneth Parkes, Auk, vol. 106, October 1989, pp. 718-20. (Thanks to investigator Sally Shelton for bringing this to our attention.)