Lianne Parkin, Sheila Williams and Patricia Priest did an experiment to test the wisdom of a local winter tradition. The trio, based at the University of Otago in Dunedin, published a report in the New Zealand Medical Journal.

They explain: “There are anecdotal reports that pedestrians who wear socks over the top of their footwear are less likely to slip and fall in icy conditions. Advocates of this practice include our local council (in Dunedin), which advises residents who prefer to walk (rather than drive) in icy conditions to ‘put a pair of old socks over your shoes to increase grip’”…

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

Batman became Batman in 1957. Until then it sported the less superheroic name “Iluh”. A monograph called Falls From Heights in and Around the City of Batman appeared in the March 2009 issue of the Turkish Journal of Trauma and Emergency Surgery. Co-authors Behçet Al, Cuma Yildirim and Sacid Çoban are based at Gaziantep University, about 200km to Batman’s west. They studied the cases of 538 people who fell to earth in Batman and wound up in Batman state hospital.

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

Dr. Salton's patient stole complimentary hotel bathrobes, and had a goal to perform Karaoke in a bar in all 50 American states

Perversions get a new lease on life, at least chronologically, whenever a new century begins. William L Salton, a New York City clinical psychologist, rang out the old and rang in the new by writing a study called Perversion in the Twenty-First Century: From the Holocaust to the Karaoke Bar. It appeared in 2004, in The Psychoanalytic Review….

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

Griffiths and Parke published it a few years ago in the Electronic Journal of Gambling Issues. “We have both spent over 10 years playing in and researching this area,” they wrote, “and we can offer some explanations on why it is so hard to gather reliable and valid data.”

Here are three from their long list….

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

THES

In today’s economic climate, efficiency and competitiveness are the guiding principles of business, of life; more product faster, while taking up less space. But are these concepts in our interests at all? Efficiency without ethics is psychopathic. And how much cleverer than chickens are we, ultimately?

Four scientists at the State University of New York, Stony Brook issued the first formal report. The Lazy Bureaucrat Scheduling Problem, by Esther Arkin, Michael Bender, Joseph Mitchell and Steven Skiena, appeared in the journal Algorithms and Data Structures. The study describes a prototypically lazy bureaucrat, transforming this annoying person into a collection of mathematical formulas, theorems, proofs, and algorithms….

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

A monograph called Sex Differences in the Jealousy-Evoking Nature of a Rival’s Body Build, published in 2001 in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior, tells what Dijkstra and Buunk learned from this endeavour. The two psychologists, based at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, begin by summarising the state of knowledge in their field. Everyone’s ultimate goal: clear up the mysteries of romantic rivalry and jealousy….

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

A smiley-face is very expressive, statistically. By tweaking the eyes, mouth and other bits, you can literally put a meaningful face on any jumble of numbers. Herman Chernoff pointed this out in 1973 in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, in a monograph called The Use of Faces to ­Represent Points in K-Dimensional Space ­Graphically.

Subsequently, folks took to calling these things Chernoff faces. Chernoff faces can make statistical analysis into a recognisably human activity. Most people, when shown some statistics, sigh and get boggled. But Chernoff realised that almost everyone is good at reading faces. So he devised recipes to convert any set of statistics into an equivalent bunch of smiley-face drawings….

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

“My observations of these women,” Hughes wrote, “showed me that, contrary to some theories, they use a strong vernacular style … These women are proud of their swearing…”

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

Richter, a chaplain and minister at Philipps University in Marburg, Germany, and her colleague Zonner published their monograph in 1996 in The Journal of Religion and Health….

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

In England, the Beatles released a song that said: “Woke up, got out of bed, dragged a comb across my head”. In America, William C Waggoner and George V Scott of the Colgate-Palmolive Company published a monograph explaining how they had measured, with a fair degree of precision, the sound of a comb being dragged through a hank of hair….

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

In this hand-sanitiser-obsessed era, Professor John Trinkaus, a man who studies things that annoy him, got annoyed. This resulted, inevitably, in a study called Hand Sanitising: An Informal Look.Trinkaus saw people being urged “to frequently wash their hands, or otherwise sanitise their hands, as a precaution against the flu”. But, he wondered, to what extent did the public respond to this hoopla? The answer apparently is: not much….

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

Fabulous stories – fabulous in one or another sense of that word – are the essence of a much-used American history textbook called Making Thirteen Colonies 1600-1740, written by Joy Hakim and published by Oxford University Press.

The stories enchant compactly. On page 9, the book says: “A long time ago – actually, it was almost 4,000 years ago – in the city of Ur, there lived a man named Abraham… Abraham will turn out to be important – to people all over the world – and to us in America.”

We’re never told how or why Abraham is important to American history. And we’re not told that he may be a mythical fellow. The book introduces Abraham and Moses and other biblical people in the same way that, a few pages later, it serves up George Washington.

We also meet the Greek writer Homer…

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

England’s professional rat-catching community produced at least two instructive books during the Victorian years.

Studies in the Art of Rat-Catching, by Henry C Barclay, went on sale in London in 1896. Avowedly educational, it’s also a rambling entertainment that finishes up with this jolly sentiment: “I have heard from half a dozen head-masters of schools that they find the art of rat-catching is so distasteful to their scholars, and so much above their intellect, and so fatiguing an exercise to the youthful mind, that they feel obliged to abandon the study of it and replace it once more by those easier and pleasanter subjects, Latin and Greek”. Two years later, Ike Matthews, in Manchester, published his Full Revelations of a Professional Rat-Catcher after 25 Years’ Experience….

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

Psychologists still grind away (sometimes at each other) at explaining what genius is, and where it comes from. The effort, now weary and tendentious, was exciting in its earlier days. In 1920, Lewis Terman and Jessie Chase of Stanford University published a report called The Psychology, Biology and Pedagogy of Genius, summarising all the important new literature on the subject.

Those early 20th-century psychologists showed a collective genius for disagreeing about almost everything. JCM Garnett, in a study called General Ability, Cleverness and Purpose, offered a formula for genius. Measure a person’s general ability; then measure their cleverness, then square both numbers and add them together, then take the square root. Genius.

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