Patient: “Doctor, why do we get moles in the first place?” Physician: “No one has the foggiest notion why God gave us moles on our skin … and that’s the honest truth.” There are theories however – the most prominent being that the extra melanin produced in the moles’ melanocytes might help to protect against […]
Year: 2017
Woodpeckers don’t get headaches. They give them.
“This Woodpecker Will Drill Into Your Skull And Eat Your Brains—If You’re a Baby Dove,” explains an article by Jason Bittel in Smithsonian magazine. It says: In 2015, Harold Greeney [pictured here, horizontal] trained his camera on a mourning dove nest stitched into the crook of a cactus. As an ornithologist, Greeney studies the love […]
Umbrella Progress on a Crowded Sidewalk (podcast #96)
What happens when lots of people with umbrellas walk in opposite directions on a crowded sidewalk? A research study explores that very question, and we explore that study, in this week’s Improbable Research podcast. SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free. This week, Marc Abrahams discusses a published lotsa-people-walking-with-umbrellas study. Melissa Franklin, a Harvard physics professor who designed parts of the Large […]
How to prepare a moth to drive a car
Step-by-step, practical instructions for how to prepare a moth to drive a tiny automobile. That’s what this video shows, and the accompanying paper describes: It’s all published formally as: “Insect-controlled Robot: A Mobile Robot Platform to Evaluate the Odortracking Capability of an Insect,” Noriyasu Ando, Shuhei Emoto, and Ryohei Kanzaki, Journal of Visualized Experiments, no. 118, December 2016, […]
Haute-Cultural-Scientifical Direct-Brain-Stimulation of a Peak-Cultural (Proustian) Pastime
This newly published study may by the most impressive—in some senses—academic publication of our time: “The ‘Proust Phenomenon’: odor-evoked autobiographical memories triggered by direct amygdala stimulation in human,” Fabrice Bartolomei, Stanislas Lagarde, Samuel Médina Villalon, Aileen McGonigal, and Christian G. Benar, Cortex, epub December 18, 2016. The authors write: Vivid memories triggered by odors were […]
A look back at the Ig Nobel Prize-spurring Sokal hoax
The 1996 Ig Nobel Prize for literature was awarded to the editors of the journal Social Text, for eagerly publishing research that they could not understand, that the author said was meaningless, and which claimed that reality does not exist. The “research” paper was “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” written by Alan […]
Music discriminations by carp (Cyprinus carpio)
“Prior to this series of experiments, the prevailing opinion appeared to be skepticism as to whether koi could discriminate one piece of music from another under any circumstances. Now it appears that these animals can discriminate polyphonic music, discriminate melodic patterns, and even classify music by artistic genre.” Koi (Cyprinus carpio), which are members of […]
Dott on Wacke
Here Dott opines on wacke, and on graywack. And that’s not all: “Wacke, graywacke and matrix; what approach to immature sandstone classification?” Robert H. Dott [pictured here], Journal of Sedimentary Research 34, no. 3 (1964): 625-632. “It is suggested that sedimentary rock classification systems have become confused because factors of genesis related to tectonics, provenance, […]