Trod-upon banana peels; deities in toast; late night psychopaths; cat hazards; dog alignment; really, really, really heavy marijuana users; fat people’s shoes; spearmint tea and hairy women; and someone who swallowed a fork — all these all turn up in this week’s Improbable Research podcast.
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This week, Marc Abrahams tells about:
- The 2014 Ig Nobel Prize winners – PART 1. (List of the 2014 Ig Nobel Prize winners, with links to their research. Featuring a dramatic reading by Daniel Rosenberg.) Here’s an illustration from the Ig Nobel Prize-winning study about the slipperiness of banana peels:
- Improbable medical research review. (“Heavy Marijuana Users Show Increased Serum Apo-lipo-protein C-III Levels: Evidence from Proteomic Analyses,” S. Jayanthi, S. Buie, S. Moore, R.I. Herning, W. Better, N.M. Wilson, C. Contoreggi, and JL Cadet, Molecular Psychiatry, vol. 15, no. 1 (2010): 101-112. / “Do Overweight People Remove Their Shoes Before Being Weighed by a Doctor? Consecutive Study of Patients in General Practice,” Timothy Harlow, British Medical Journal, 1997, vol. 315, p. 1663. / “Effect of Spearmint (Mentha spicata Labiatae) Teas on Androgen Levels in Women with Hirsutism,” Mehmet Akdoan, Mehmet Numan Tamer, Erkan Cüre, Medine Cumhur Cüre, Banu Kale Körolu, and Namik Deliba, Phytotherapy Research, vol. 21, no. 5 (2007): 444-447. / “Removal of a Dinner Fork From the Stomach by Double-Snare Endoscopic Extraction,” P.T. Yong, C.H. Teh, M. Look , S.B. Wee, J.C. Tan, S.P. Chew, and C.H. Low, Hong Kong Medical Journal, vol. 6, no. 3, September 2000, pp. 319–21. Featuring dramatic readings by Jean Berko Gleason.) Here’s an illustration from the fork study:
- The 25th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony (and webcast).
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 Spotify).