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, […]