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.

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.

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

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.

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

White is now an anthropology professor at Boston University, specialising in people’s odd relationships with food. Back then, she was a caterer, specialising in much the same. “Often, this meant making dishes for the first time,” she says. “I took on every challenge, but a Roman orgy was a whole different kettle of fermented anchovy sauce.”

White consulted many old texts, leaning heavily on Apicius, a Roman recipe collection assembled during the late fourth or early fifth century…

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

But no one realised it until the year 2001, when Robert M Richman published his simple recipe in the journal Complex Systems. During the subsequent passage of nine years and billions of cups of coffee, the secret has been available to all.

“The problem is that the coffee that initially comes through the filter is much stronger than that which comes out last, so the coffee at the bottom of the pot is stronger than that at the top,” says Richman….

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

BONUS: A reader gives the method a try

The paper, written by Karl Koscher and a team of 10 other researchers at the University of Washington and the University of California San Diego, was presented at the 2010 IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineering) symposium on security and privacy, in Berkeley, California.

Unlike the mindless jalopies of the past, it points out, “Today’s automobile is no mere mechanical device, but contains a myriad of computers.”

This myriad has powers to do good things for us humans, as well as bad things to us. Already, in some cases, the microchip hordes quietly, beneficently take control from the driver….

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

Indian cinema scholars focus on the content of the films or the mannerisms of the stars and directors. “The indigenous dialogue between audience and cinema has therefore gone unnoticed”, wrote Srinivas, who was then based at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, and is now an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Indian audiences like to see a film many times, a habit one sees elsewhere only for a few films, most notably of the Star Wars, Star Trek and Titanic ilks….

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

“Webster’s bibliographic and event-based timelines are comprehensive in scope, covering virtually all topics, geographic locations and people. They do so from a linguistic point of view, and in the case of this book, the focus is on Bellyaching, including when used in literature (eg all authors that might have Bellyaching in their name). As such, this book represents the largest compilation of timeline events associated with Bellyaching when it is used in proper noun form.” …

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

Conrad and Soedel, based at the School of Mechanical Engineering at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, published their work in 1995 in the Journal of Sound and Vibration. It was an instant classic.

The fear of ambling machinery resonated with the times. One could feel it in a 1995 Japanese science-fiction movie called Mechanical Violator Hakaider. Critic Jason Buchanan later described what happens once the title character, a cyborg, is loosed upon the land: “Once Hakaider sets on the path of destruction, there is little that can be done to stop him from destroying all of Jesus Town.” …

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

Many scientists had tried (though for the most part failed) to prove that repeatedly holding a mobile phone against a person’s head causes damage to the brain. The four scientists looked ahead to a perhaps different question: will holding a mobile phone near a man’s testicles affect that man’s sexual behaviour?

They devised an experiment. Given the expense, complexity and delicacy of doing it with humans, they opted instead for rabbits….

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

Ribstein is the Mildred Van Voorhis Jones chair in law and the associate dean for research at the University of Illinois college of law. His article was published in the Michigan State Law Review….

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

BONUS: Professor Ribstein warns the US Senate against the “over-deterrence effect of criminal penalties”
BONUS: Professor Ribstein explains “Why Corporate Political Spending Is Awesome“.

“[cooked cereals] tend to become pasty on cooking and to lose particle texture and flavour on prolonged heating … In many commercial eating establishments, particularly in cafeterias, it is customary to cook up a large batch of a cooked cereal … After several hours on a steam table it is not unusual for cooked cereal to become a congealed, gelatinous mass. As a result, the batch is unappetising and usually is dumped into a garbage can without further ado.” …

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