Chickens, beautiful, people, and severed feet (and other things) turn up in this week’s Improbable Research podcast.
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This week, Marc Abrahams tells about:
- Chickens prefer beautiful people. (“Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans.” Stefano Ghirlanda, Liselotte Jansson, and Magnus Enquist, Human Nature, vol. 13, no. 3, 2002, pp. 383-9. / “Do Mynahs prefer peacock feathers of more regular pattern?” Tomomichi Kobayashi, Ornis Svecica 9, 1999, 59–64. Featuring dramatic readings by Jean Berko Gleason.)
- Are beautiful people more intelligent? (Satoshi Kanazawa [pictured here] and Jody L. Kovar (2004). ‘Why Beautiful People Are More Intelligent.’ Intelligence 32: 227–43. /
Satoshi Kanazawa (2007). ‘Beautiful Parents Have More Daughters: A Further Implication of the Generalized Trivers-Willard Hypothesis (gTWH).’ Journal of Theoretical Biology 244 (1): 133–40. Featuring dramatic readings by Daniel Rosenberg.) - Improbable Medical Review. (“Feet Rolled Over by Cars: Radiological and Histological Considerations from Experiments,” J. Falk, J. Michael, P. Eysel, M. A. Rothschild, International Journal of Legal Medicine, vol. 122, no. 2, March 2008, pp. 97–100. / “A Case Study of Gut Fermentation Syndrome (Auto-Brewery) with Saccharomyces cerevisiae as the Causative Organism.” Cordell, Barbara, and Justin McCarthy, International Journal of Clinical Medicine, vol. 4, 2013, pp. 309–12. / “Papaya (Carica papaya) Consumption is Unsafe in Pregnancy: Fact or Fable? Scientific Evaluation of a Common Belief in Some Parts of Asia Using a Rat Model,” Adebowale Adebiyi, P. Ganesan Adaikan, and R.N.V. Prasad, British Journal of Nutrition, vol. 88, no. 02, August 2002, pp 199–203. Featuring dramatic readings by Corky White.)
- Soda and Pop. (“Soda or Pop?”, Luanne von Schneidemesser, Journal of English Linguistics, 1996, vol. 24, no. 4, pp. 270–87. Featuring dramatic readings by Andrew Hunter Murray.)
The mysterious John Schedler perhaps did the sound engineering this week.
The Improbable Research podcast is all about research that makes people LAUGH, then THINK — real research, about anything and everything, from everywhere —research that may be good or bad, important or trivial, valuable or worthless. CBS distributes it, both on the new CBS Play.it web site, and on iTunes (and soon, also on Spotify).