“The most famous psychologists today will be forgotten in less than a century”, says this study: “Varieties of Fame in Psychology,” Henry L. Roediger III, Perspectives on Psychological Science, vol. 11, no. 6, November 2016, pp. 882-887. The author, at Washington University, St. Louis, explains: “Fame in psychology, as in all arenas, is a local […]
Year: 2017
Bernard Vonnegut, Ice-17, Ice-9, chicken-plucking, and tornadoes
Bernard Vonnegut, that most surprising atmospheric scientist, gets appreciated in an Italian-language essay called “Ice Numbers“, by Franco Bagnoli of the University of Florence, published in Ciencia y Cultura. Here’s a machine translation of bits of Bagnoli’s essay: At the end of 2016, at the Institute of Complex Systems of the CNR in Florence, Italy, a new […]
Diesel Trains May Expose Passengers to Exhaust [research study]
Passenger trains train a rain of exhaust on the passengers, if the trains burn diesel fuel and the passenger cars traipse dutifully behind the exhausting locomotive. Details are in this possibly-not-entirely-surprising study: “Exposure to ultrafine particles and black carbon in diesel-powered commuter trains,” Cheol-Heon Jeong, Alison Traub, Greg J. Evans, Atmospheric Environment, epub February 8, 2017. (Thanks […]
The Hemline and The Economy – examining an urban legend
“Urban legend has it that the hemline is correlated with the economy. In times of decline, the hemline moves towards the floor (decreases), and when the economy is booming, skirts get shorter and the hemline increases.” To test the validity of such a(n) hypothesis, researchers Marjolein van Baardwijk and Full Professor Ph.H.B.F. (Philip Hans) Franses […]