Improbable Research

Sina Zarrintan devised what he calls “a unique treatment” for adult men who have nasal congestion. It’s a do-it-yourself form of treatment, no doctors or equipment needed. If your nose is stuffed up, and you want to unstuff it, and if you’re a man, ejaculate.

Zarrintan, who is based at Tabriz Medical University in Iran, wrote a study called Ejaculation as a Potential Treatment of Nasal Congestion in Mature Males, which he published recently in the journal Medical Hypotheses. The study does not say whether there is a related or parallel treatment for women….

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

Podiatrists and textile designers may have their own opinions about why stockings droop, but it is first and foremost an engineering question. That’s why a study called Prevention from Slipping Down of Top Parts of Socks, published in 2006 in the Journal of Textile Engineering, stands paramount.

The authors, Toshiyuki Tsujisaka, Yoichi Matsumoto, Hiroaki Ishizawa, Yoshiaki Azuma and Hideo Morooka, are based variously at Shinsu University in Ueda, Japan, at the Nara Prefecture Institute of Industrial Technology and at the Nara Women’s University.

They summarise their report tidily:

“In this study, to design and develop socks that provide wearing comfort, the way of preventing slipping down of socks’ top parts is investigated….”

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

As the 21st century arrived, two distinguished psychiatrists offered mankind proof, written proof - in a study called A Preliminary Survey of Rhinotillexomania in an Adolescent Sample - that most teenagers pick their noses.

Dr Chittaranjan Andrade and Dr BS Srihari, colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bangalore, India, were inspired by an earlier published report by scientists in the American state of Wisconsin. The Wisconsin research claimed that more than 90% of adults are active nose-pickers. But it was silent as to whether teenagers are less or more picky than their elders.

Andrade and Srihari decided to find out….

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

Many people, of a morning, wonder why their breakfast cereal becomes soggy. Thanks to a study published in 1994, the answer can be read over morning coffee.

A Study of the Effects of Water Content on the Compaction Behaviour of Breakfast Cereal Flakes, by DMR Georget, Roger Parker and Andrew Smith of the Institute of Food Research in Norwich, looks at the basic physics of the matter. The scientists rigorously analyse how crunchiness declines in the presence of a soggifying liquid….

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

Who waves what at whom, and to what effect, are the central questions in a study called Deceptive Digits: The Functional Significance of Toe Waving by Cannibalistic Cane Toads, Chaunus Marinus. Professor Richard Shine, of the University of Sydney, and his postdoc student Mattias Hagman published this nine-page report in the journal Animal Behaviour.

The cane toad, they muse, “is one of the most intensively studied anuran species worldwide … It is thus remarkable that the distinctive toe waving behaviour of this species has not been reported in earlier literature.” This is the toad Australians have loved to hate ever since the 1930s, when it was imported from Hawaii to prey on certain agriculturally annoying beetles. Because nothing much in Australia is keen to eat cane toads, the warty immigrants have bred themselves into multitudes ever increasing.

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