A beef boom, the question of who can touch whom, and human-milk-smell perfume, for the benefit of babies — all of these turn up in this week’s Improbable Research podcast.
LISTEN TO IT! …or click on the “Venetian blinds” icon — at the lower right corner here — to select whichever week’s episode you want to hear:
SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free.
This week, Marc Abrahams tells about:
A beef boom. (Lee, Jill (1998). ‘Hydrodyne Exploding Meat Tenderness.’ Agricultural Research (June): 8–10. / Godfrey, Charles S. (1970). ‘Apparatus for Tenderizing Food.’ US Patent no. 3,492,688, 3 February. Featuring dramatic readings by Daniel Rosenberg.) The photo here shows Morse Solomon and a colleague preparing to tenderize up to 600 pounds of meat by subjecting it to an explosion.- Who can touch whom. (“Topography of social touching depends on emotional bonds between humans,” Juulia T. Suvilehto, Enrico Glerean, Robin I. M. Dunbar, Riitta Hari, and Lauri Nummenmaa, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, epub 2015.. Featuring dramatic readings by Jean Berko Gleason.) Here’s a detail from the social-touching study:
Human-milk-smell perfume, for the benefit of babies. (“Infant Formulation Containing an Aroma Composition For Use As Fragrance,” US patent 9167838B2, Andrea Buttner [pictured here], granted October 17, 2015. Featuring dramatic readings by Melissa Franklin.)
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).