Perfect cups of coffee, glug-glugging bottles, food in your mouth, and drinking fish turn up in this week’s Improbable Research podcast.
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This week, Marc Abrahams tells about:
- How to pour the perfect second cup of coffee. (Richman, Robert M. (2001). ‘Recursive Binary Sequences of Differences.’ Complex Systems 13: 381–92. Featuring dramatic readings by Sue Wellington.)
- The glug-glug of bottles. (Clanet, Christophe, and Geoffrey Searby (2004). ‘On the Glug-Glug of Ideal Bottles.’ Journal of Fluid Mechanics 510: 145–68. / “Container having no-glug pouring spout.” U.S. Patent 5,346,106, issued to Carl D. Ring, September 13, 1994./ “Anti-glug vent for plastic pails.” U.S. Patent 5,906,288, issued to Davis B. Dwinell, May 25, 1999 /.”Low cost spill-and-glug-resistant cup and container.” U.S. Patent 7,757,886, issued to I.-C. Ho, July 20, 2010. / “A continuous swallowing movement measuring device and method for measuring a continuous swallowing movement,” Canadian patent CA2575958, issued May 17, 2011, to Hidetoshi Kojima, Hirotaka Kaneda, and Toyohiko Hayashi. Featuring dramatic readings by Chris Cotsapis.) Some “glug-glug” sound is evident in this video of someone pouring Cava from a bottle:
- Words for food in your mouth. (“Texture and Chemical Feeling Descriptors That 6-11 Year Olds and Adults Associate With Food in the Mouth,” N. Oram, Journal of Texture Studies, vol. 29, no. 2, May 1998, pp. 185-97. / Szczesniak, A.S. 1972. “Consumer awareness of and attitudes to food texture: 11. Children and Teenagers,” J. Texture Studies 3, 206-217.. Featuring dramatic readings by Jean Berko Gleason.)
- How to measure how much fish drink. (“Measurement of Drinking Rates in Fish,” D.H. Evans, Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology, vol. 25, no. 2, May 1968, pp. 751-3. Featuring dramatic readings by Chris Cotsapis.)
- A bad reaction to chicken nuggets. (“Reaction to Chicken Nuggets in a Patient Taking an MAOI [a Monoamine oxidase inhibitor],” R. Pohl, R. Balon, and R. Berchou, American Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 145, no. 5, 1988, p. 651. Featuring dramatic readings by Kishore Hari.)
- Famous monks with bad breath. (Statheropoulos, M., A. Agapiou, and A. Georgiadou (2006). ‘Analysis of Expired Air of Fasting Male Monks at Mount Athos.’ Journal of Chromatography B 832: 274–79. / Mitsikostas, D. D., A. Thomas, S. Gatzonis, A. Ilias, and C. Papageorgiou. (1994). ‘An Epidemiological Study of Headache Among the Monks of Athos (Greece).’ Headache 34 (9): 539–41. Featuring dramatic readings by Jean Berko Gleason.)
- Eternity smells a rat. (“Chlorine-36 in Fossil Rat Urine: An Archive of Cosmogenic Nuclide Deposition During the Past 40,000 Years,” M. A. Plummer, F. M. Phillips, J. Fabryka-Martin, H.J. Turin, P.E. Wigand, and P. Sharma, Science, vol. 277, 1997, pp. 538-41. Featuring dramatic readings by Chris Cotsapis.)
- Icky-cutesy research. (“Body Snatching: A Grave Medical Problem,” Julia Bess Frank, Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine, vol. 49, no. 4, 1976, pp. 399–410. / “The Study of the Human Remains from Nubia: the Contribution of Grafton Elliot Smith and His Colleagues to Palaeopathology,” H.A. Waldron, Medical History, vol. 44, no. 3, 2000, pp. 363–88. Featuring dramatic readings by Jean Berko Gleason.)
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).