Improbable Research

The edible dormouse is the star of Giuseppe Carpaneto and Mauro Cristaldi’s 1995 study Dormice and Man: A Review of Past and Present Relations, published in the journal Hystrix. The two Rome-based scholars, Carpaneto at Terza University, Cristaldi at the University of Rome, savour one of the tasty rodent’s two major historical roles. Though some scorned it an agricultural pest, many prized the critter for its succulence.

Carpaneto and Cristaldi suggest that dormouse cuisine and dormouse documentation owe much to the Romans, and almost nothing to earlier civilisations. “The ancient Greeks,” they write, “were not very interested in dormice because they did not eat them … Oribatius (fourth century AD), a Byzantine author on medicine, wrote that their meat is untasty and purgative.”

Carpaneto and Cristaldi tell of how things changed once the Romans got cooking…

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

Can punk rockers remain orthodox when they grow old? Joanna R Davis, a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, confronts this painful question in her study Growing Up Punk: Negotiating Ageing Identity in a Local Music Scene, published in the journal Symbolic Interaction.

“Punk developed in both the United Kingdom and the United States as a youth phenomenon associated with rebellion, anarchy and cacophonous fashions,” Davis explains. “Kids might choose or find in punk rock an anti-authoritarian, destructive, or anarchistic ideology that helps them manage the tumult of adolescence. But what happens next?”

Authenticity is the central concept here. Davis interviewed six “authentic” punk rockers who are now well past teenagerhood. She identifies two types of unsuccessful older punks…

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

While others tried to build a better computer or teapot or mousetrap, Julian FV Vincent, Mehmet Necip Sahinkaya and Will O’Shea of the department of mechanical engineering at the University of Bath tried to build a better hammer. Unlike most previous hammer smiths, they studied woodpeckers. Why? Because to mechanical engineers, when they are in a certain frame of mind, a woodpecker is nature’s finest version of a hammer.

The trio published a study called A Woodpecker Hammer in the scholarly journal Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part C, Journal of Mechanical Engineering Science.

There they begin with a nod to the Ig Nobel prize-winning research of Dr Ivan Schwab, of the University of California Davis School of Medicine, who in 2002 wrote a monograph that explains why woodpeckers don’t get headaches. Schwab was fascinated by the mechanical properties of the woodpecker’s head - especially why its brain doesn’t homogenise during all that pummelling, and why its eyes don’t pop out of their sockets. The Bath scientists take a more holistic approach….

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

Contrary to what you might think, sitting is not a static activity, unless you are dead. In the study Chair Load Analysis During Daily Sitting Activities, Carla Paoliello and Edgar Vladimiro Mantilla Carrasco adopt the perspective of a chair. They quantify the shifting risks your furniture faces when someone sits on it.

Now - right now - is a great moment in the history of furniture, because “the investigation of furniture behaviour itself and its components under a given load is just beginning”.

Paoliello and Mantilla are based at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, in Brazil. They published their report in the Forest Products Journal. Sitting, they emphasise, is indeed a “rather dynamic” activity. Here, in their words, is the situation:

“Sitting is a posture in which the weight of the body is transferred to an area supported mainly by the ischial tuberosities and their surrounding soft tissues. In 1979, Panero and Zelnik determined that when sitting, about 75% of the total body weight is supported by only four square inches. This constitutes an exceptionally heavy load, distributed on quite a small area,…

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

When one’s feet smell unpleasant, it’s polite to wonder why. But six scientists at the Shiseido Research Centre in Yokohama, Japan, pursued this interest more thoroughly than mere politeness alone would dictate.

The pioneering research study, Elucidation of Chemical Compounds Responsible for Foot Malodour, by F Kanda, E Yagi, M Fukuda, K Nakajima, T Ohta and O Nakata, appeared in 1990 in the British Journal of Dermatology.

The investigation had three phases. In Phase 1, they assembled a panel of 10 non-professional sniffers. The scientists mixed eight different potions, each containing chemicals of which they were suspicious - chemicals known to often lurk in other fragrant body parts: armpits, vaginas and scalps. After the sniffers sniffed each potion, the scientists asked them if the smell was familiar and, if it was, to say whether it resembled foot odour, armpit odour or something else. The sniffers all agreed that the potions smelled more or less like foot or armpit, but disagreed as to which, and how closely.

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