The jumping abilities of dog fleas and cat fleas, and research by researchers named Hare — these things turn up in this week’s Improbable Research podcast.
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This week, Marc Abrahams —with dramatic readings by Chris Cotsapis — tells about:
- Dog flea jumping vs. cat flea jumping — “A Comparison of Jump Performances of the Dog Flea, Ctenocephalides canis (Curtis, 1826) and the Cat Flea, Ctenocephalides felis felis (Bouche, 1835),” M.C. Cadiergues, C. Joubert, and M. Franc, Veterinary Parasitology, vol. 92, no. 3, October 1, 2000, pp. 239-41. Here’s a bit of detail from the flea jumps study:
- Hare on dogs — “The Domestication of Social Cognition in Dogs,” Brian Hare, et al., Science, vol. 298, no. 5598, November 22, 2002, pp. 1634-1636.
- Hare on cats and dogs — “Cytogenetics in the Dog and Cat,” W.C. Hare, et al., Journal of Small Animal Practice, vol. 7, no. 9, September 1966, pp. 575-92.
- Hare on Olympic speed skaters — “Body Composition of Olympic Speed Skating Candidates,” J. Hare, et al., Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, vol. 53, no. 2, June 1982, pp. 150-5.
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).