Improbable Research

Scientists who struggle to get their reports published, or to get anyone to pay attention to them, might consider the path blazed by Dr Mohamed El Naschie. El Naschie found an appreciative science journal editor. The editor subsequently published hundreds of El Naschie’s studies, and also made El Naschie a glamorous figure - featuring him in lavish photo-spreads in the company of famous scientists and powerful world leaders.

The science journal is called Chaos, Solitons & Fractals. Its founding editor-in-chief is Dr Mohamed El Naschie.

A 19-page pictorial in the August 2005 issue shows El Naschie in the company of numerous Nobel laureates, and also of many medals, plaques, certificates and floral arrangements.

There are four photos of him with Nobel laureate Gerardus ‘t Hooft, including one labelled: “El Naschie and ‘t Hooft received by Crown Prince Sultan in his palace in 2003″. We see him with Nobel laureate Gerd Binnig, and in two photos with Naguib Mahfouz. One of the latter is captioned “N Mahfouz, Nobel laureate in literature, the first Arabic-speaking novelist to receive this honour, together with Mohamed El Naschie in Cairo. Mohamed was asked by Mahfouz to explain to him his theory, which he valiantly tried.” …

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

Alan Dundes liked to study uncomfortable jokes and the people who tell them. His 1979 study called The Dead Baby Joke Cycle, published in the journal Western Folklore, explains:

“Dead baby jokes are not for the squeamish or the faint of heart. They are told mostly by American adolescents of both sexes in joke-telling sessions with the intent to shock or disgust listeners. ‘Oh how gross!’ is a common (and evidently desired) response to a dead baby joke. Teenage informants of the 1960s and 1970s indicate that dead baby jokes were often used in a ‘gross out’ in which each participant tries to outdo previous joke-tellers in recounting unsavoury or crude folkloristic items.”

To Dundes, when a large group of people persistently make uncomfortable jokes about something, it’s something they are uncomfortable about. Thus, he writes, dead baby jokes are popular in the US because of “the traditional failure of Americans to discuss disease and death openly … many Americans prefer not to say that an individual is dead or has died.”

Dundes, a longtime professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, is himself dead, having died in 2005.

He appreciatively blamed England for introducing “sick humour” to the US, arguing that…

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

Where in London can one purchase plutonium? In Covent Garden, at the Helios Homeopathy shop.

Dr Fiona Barclay, a chemist at RGB Research in west London, made this discovery. Her company specialises in selling collections of the periodic table elements (with the exception of those elements that are illegal or are so very short-lived - a few seconds or less - that they invite frustration). Some elements are easy to purchase: carbon, sulphur, iron. For others, one can turn to eBay, where arsenic, uranium (in the form of uranium-tipped missiles), and other elements of ill repute are commonly on offer.

But plutonium proved hard to find … until Barclay turned to Google, which directed her to the Helios shop. She explains what happened next:

“I went to Covent Garden and went into the shop and said, ‘Please, may I have some plutonium.’ And the lady behind the counter said, ‘I shall fetch the chemist.’

“The chemist was duly fetched, and I said, ‘I’d really like a sample of plutonium.’ She asked, ‘And how strong would you like it, madam?’ …

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

“Go and suck eggs” is the basic experimental method in a series of studies done by Hugh B Cott, of Cambridge University, in the early 1950s.

The titles are pretty self-explanatory:

The Palatability of the Eggs of Birds - Illustrated By Experiments on the Food Preferences of the Hedgehog (Erinaceus europaeus).

The Palatability of the Eggs of Birds: Illustrated by Three Seasons’ Experiments (1947, 1948 and 1950) on the Food Preferences of the Rat (Rattus norvegicus).

The Palatability of the Eggs of Birds - Illustrated by Experiments on the Food Preferences of the Ferret (Putorius furo) and Cat (Felis catus) - With Notes on Other Egg-Eating Carnivora. Those other carnivora are numerous, and include civets, mongooses and meerkats, hyenas, dogs and dingoes, otters, aardwolves and foxes.

Egg palatability experiments are potentially of great practical value. Britain, like all island nations, was and is vulnerable to enemies who would block food shipments from overseas. One could counter that danger by discovering unknown or unappreciated edible native foodstuffs. A simple way to begin: collect bird eggs and test their palatability.

Egg collecting, like other research activities, is not without hazards…

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

NOTE: The British people put eggs to many uses. The Times reports on June 9, 2009:

Nick Griffin, the British National Party leader who was elected to the European parliament on Sunday, was ambushed by protesters today and forced to abandon a victory press conference outside the Houses of Parliament…. The group was chased around the corner from College Green towards Westminster Abbey as protestors threw eggs and hit them with placards.

Which birds are the most edible, and which are the least? During and just after the second world war, Hugh B Cott of Cambridge University doggedly pursued these questions, using means that were waspy, feline and human. His discoveries are summed up in a 154-page report called The Edibility of Birds - Illustrated by 5 Years’ Experiments and Observations (1941-1946) on the Food Preferences of the Hornet, Cat And Man. [It expands considerably on his earlier study, with a similar but shorter name, pictured here.]

In October 1941, Cott made a chance observation. While collecting and preserving bird skins in Beni Suef, Egypt, he discarded the meaty parts of a palm dove (Streptopelia senegalensis aegyptiaca) and a pied kingfisher (Ceryle rudis rudis). Hornets descended upon the palm dove carcass, but ignored the kingfisher.

Cott, entranced, later offered other hornets a choice of different cuts (breast, wings, legs and gut) of about 40 different bird meats, in 141 experiments conducted in Beni Suef, Cairo, and Tripoli, Lebanon.

The hornets especially took to crested lark, greenfinch, white-vented bulbul and house sparrow. They voted (metaphorically) thumbs down on golden oriole, hooded chat, masked shrike and hoopoe, among others.

Cott conducted another 48 experiments, with 19 kinds of bird meat, using three cats (two in Cairo, one in Tripoli) as tasters…

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