The July issue of mini-AIR just went out. Topics include: Lab Assistants Named Igor; Wombats From Space; Active Nonsense-Mediated Usage Poet; Drug Snorting Fire-Eater Competition; Manga (with an Iggy Protagonist); Inspired by Mothball Report; Tales of the Wombat; etc. Mel [pictured here] says, “It’s swell.” (mini-AIR is the simplest way to keep informed about Improbable […]
Month: July 2010
Heads Up: Snakes in your MRI tube
A simple experiment: put a person in a tube. Add a snake. Details are reported in the study [and click on the image here to see the video that accompanies the study]: “Fear Thou Not: Activity of Frontal and Temporal Circuits in Moments of Real-Life Courage,” Uri Nili, Hagar Goldberg, Abraham Weizman and Yadin Dudai, […]
Accounting songs and dance
Principles of accounting — the song from act 2 of the mini-opera “The Count of Infinity”, which premiered at the 2005 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. Principles of accounting — the song-and-dance from the US Department of Defense, which “is unable to account for the use of $8.7 billion of the $9.1 billion it spent on […]
Running downhill
Does running downhill affect maximum speed? A team from the Structure and Motion Laboratory at the Royal Veterinary College in the UK have been investigating the relationship between running-speed and slope. The rapidity of thoroughbred racehorses (Equus caballus), greyhounds (Canis familiaris) and human subjects (Homo sapiens) was logged under a number of different uphill and […]