Improbable Research

A study called The Sexual Unification of Germany tells what happened, on paper and in some people’s heads, when East Germany hooked up with West.

Ingrid Sharp

After the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989, salacious minds wondered how many, how quickly, how often, and just how Easterners would fall into bed with Westerners. Ingrid Sharp, a senior lecturer in German at the University of Leeds, pored through newspapers and academic papers in search of something related to the answer. She published her findings in a 2004 issue of the Journal of the History of Sexuality.

Sharp focused on a single question…

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

A rat (but not one of those used in this study).

A study called Similar Preference for Natural Mineral Water between Female College Students and Rats pulls off a nice bit of interspecies diplomacy. Reading it end to end, you would be hard pressed to say who – the college students or the rats – was most intended to benefit from the research.

Written by Esumi Yukiko of Shimane Women’s Junior College in Matsui, Japan, and Ohara Ikuo of Kobe Women’s University, and published in the Journal of Home Economics of Japan, this six-page monograph describes a simple experiment.

The authors explain their work was partly inspired by a simple fact: “The Society for the Study of Tasty Water, which is sponsored by the Ministry of Public Welfare, proposed hardness to be one of the most important requirements for tasty water.” …

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

A series of Italian research studies suggest that eating pizza might do good things for a person’s health. These benefits show up, statistically speaking and seasoned with caveats, among people who eat pizza as pizza. The delightful statistico-medico-pizza effects do not happen so much, the researchers emphasise, for individuals who eat the pizza ingredients individually.

Back in 2001, Dario Giugliano, Francesco Nappo and Ludovico Coppola, at Second University Naples, published a study in the journal Circulation called Pizza and Vegetables Don’t Stick to the Endothelium. The thrust of their finding was that, unlike many other typical Italian meals, pizza does not necessarily cause clogged blood vessels (atherosclerosis) and death.

Silvano Gallus of the Istituto di Ricerche Farmacologiche, in Milan, has cooked up several studies about the health effects of ingesting pizza….

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

BONUS: Last week’s column, about some possible medical risks of/re pizza.

Pizza is dangerous. Pizza is beneficial. If you hold either of these opinions, published research agrees with you, especially research in England and Italy.

Two British studies highlight, darkly, some dangers that accompany pizza that’s served too speedily or too heartily. One, a monograph in the journal Traffic Injury Prevention, explains that, whatever the good or bad of eating pizza may be, delivering the pies can put you on a collision course with unhappiness.

Dr Chris McLean and his colleague J Bernard at Mayday University Hospital in Croydon say they were inspired by a 1992 report in the journal Injury by Dr MG Dorrell of Edgware General Hospital in north London. Dorrell “described a series of six patients who sustained bony injuries in road traffic accidents during the course of their employment as pizza delivery personnel”. Subsequently, the Pizza and Pasta Association, acting in concert with the government…

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

Dr Gábor Horváth discovered that white horses attract fewer flies. Horváth, head of the Environmental Optics Laboratory at Eotvos University in Budapest, solves mysteries about light and about living creatures.

He and five colleagues wrote a study called An Unexpected Advantage of Whiteness in Horses: The Most Horsefly-proof Horse Has a Depolarising White Coat, which they published recently in the Proceedings of the Royal Society.

They experimented with a small number of sticky horses and a large number of horseflies (of the variety called tabanids). The horses were sticky because the scientists had coated them with “a transparent, odourless and colourless insect monitoring glue [called] Babolna Bio mouse trap“….

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

Monkey flossing became a formal practice, at least experimentally, in the late 1970s, thanks to a dentist named Jack Caton. Twenty years later, a physician, David C Sokal, inspired by the monkey flossing, patented a top/bottom flossing-reminder and floss-dispensing device for humans. Monkeys themselves apparently began unassistedly flossing not long afterwards. But in all probability those animals were not influenced by either Caton’s experiment or Sokal’s invention….

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