How cheese balls and other puffed snacks lose their crunchiness; how shoppers react to headless mannequins; and women who choose incarcerated men as romantic partners — all these all turn up in this week’s Improbable Research podcast.
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This week, Marc Abrahams tells about:
- Crunchiness Loss in Puffed Snacks. (“Crunchiness Loss and Moisture Toughening in Puffed Cereals and Snacks,” Micha Peleg, Journal of Food Science, epub July 29, 2015. / “A Study of the Effects of Water Content on the Compaction Behaviour of Breakfast Cereal Flakes, ” D.M.R. Georget, R. Parker, and A.C. Smith, Powder Technology, 81, no. 2 (1994): 189-195. Featuring dramatic readings by Jean Berko Gleason.)
- How shoppers react to headless mannequins. (“Does the presence of a mannequin head change shopping behavior?” Annika Lindström, Hanna Berg, Jens Nordfält, Anne L. Roggeveen, Dhruv Grewal, Journal of Business Research, epub 2015. Featuring dramatic readings by Robin Abrahams.) Here’s detail from that study:
- Women who are captured by love — sort of. (“Characteristics and Personality Styles of Women Who Seek Incarcerated Men as Romantic Partners: Survey Results and Directions for Future Research, ” Marcela Slavikova and Nancy Ryba Panza, Deviant Research, Volume 35, Issue 11, 2014, pages 885-90. Featuring dramatic readings by Sue Wellington.)
The mysterious John Schedler or the shadowy Bruce Petschek 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, on the CBS Play.it web site, and on iTunes and Spotify).