Louise Downham interviews someone who, despite and because of his fear of insects, now specializes in photographing them. The interview is in Fstoppers, a publication for readers who purchase photographic equipment. The interview begins: Terrified of creepy crawlies he may be, but Mofeed Abu-Shalwa has committed his career to photographing and researching tiny creatures. I […]
The scholars of wet floor signs commit scholarship to studying wet floor signs. Their web site displays pictograms, photos, and photo-realizations of many signs pertaining to wet floors. They are led by Elena Kamas, at Stanford University. (Thanks to Anna Beukenhorst for bringing this to our attention.)
Volume 20, number 4 of the magazine is a special Women (and Men) issue. The table of contents, and a few articles, are online. You can, if you are daring, purchase a PDF copy of the entire issue. If you are really daring, subscribe to the magazine.
Il Pollo di Marconi (English translation: “Marconi’s Chicken”) is a new book that collects and savors pranks pulled by scientists (and/or their ilk). Journalist Vito Tartamella did the collecting and savoring. The book, which includes Tartamella’s own celebrated discovery of the stealthily published scientific papers by Stronzo Bestiale (English translation: “Total Asshole”), is in Italian. […]
“Tracking the Air Exhaled by an Opera Singer” [by Philippe Bourrianne, Paul R. Kaneelil, Manouk Abkarian, and Howard A. Stone, Physical Review Fluids, vol. 6, no. 11, 2021] is one of the studies featured in “Viruses Research Review: Group Sex, Singer, Saint, Count“, which is a featured article in the special Viruses and Pandemics issue […]
“Frozen Meat Against COVID-19 Misinformation: An Analysis of Steak-Umm and Positive Expectancy Violations” [by Ekaterina Bogomoletc and Nicole M. Lee, Journal of Business and Technical Communication, vol. 35, no. 1, 2021, pp. 118-125.] is a featured study in “Pandemic Dining: Gelato, Candy, Lettuce, Frozen Meat“, which is a featured article in the special Viruses and […]
One would do well to know that Gerkin is not a gherkin, if and when one reads the study “Parsing Sage and Rosemary in Time: The Machine Learning Race to Crack Olfactory Perception,” by Richard C. Gerkin, Chemical Senses, volume 46, 2021, bjab020. (Thanks to Scott Langill for bringing this to our attention.) About the […]
What’s in a surname, if one wants to see portents about the medical fates of persons who have those surnames? This study aims to answer that question, focusing on British surnames: “British Surname Origins, Population Structure and Health Outcomes—An Observational Study of Hospital Admissions,” Jakob Petersen, Jens Kandt, and Paul A. Longley, Scientific Reports, vol. […]
The city of Rotterdam plans to prohibit people from feeding bread to ducks. The news organization NRC reports, on April 7, 2022, about the pushback on that, especially from the city’s most eminent duck biologist. Here is a machine translation (into English) of that report: Doubts in Rotterdam about the usefulness of the ban on […]
Rightness is big in America, suggests this study done two decades ago: “Right-Handers and Americans Favor Turning to the Right,” Angelique A. Scharine and Michael K. McBeath, Human Factors, vol. 44, no. 2, Summer 2002, pp. 248-56. The authors, at Arizona State University, report: “We tested a finding by E. S. Robinson (1933) that people […]