Research and other stuff that makes people LAUGH, then THINK.
“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 […]
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 […]
Words can be used to describe things. A study published in 2019 presents a striking example: “Transformative resources of the terminological internationalization (on the material of German and English),” Vladimir V. Elkin [pictured here], Elena N. Melnikova, and Anna M. Klyoster, in The International Conference Going Global through Social Sciences and Humanities, Springer, Cham, 2019. […]
Things take a turn in this roundabout technical study of lasagna: “Multiphysics modeling of microwave heating of a frozen heterogeneous meal rotating on a turntable,” Krishnamoorthy Pitchai, Jiajia Chen, Sohan Birla, David Jones, Ric Gonzalez, and Jeyamkondan Subbiah, Journal of Food Science, vol. 80, no. 12, 2015, pp. E2803-E2814. (Thanks to Mason Porter for bringing […]
A new study can fuel old arguments and grievances about how other people should go about parking their cars. The study is: “Parallel Parking Vehicle Alignment Strategies,” Benjy Marks and Emily Moylan, Findings, March 2022. (Thanks to Kurt Verkest for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at the University of Sydney and UNSW Sydney, […]
“Once I asked him to explain to me, so that I could understand it, why spin-1/2 particles obey Fermi-Dirac statistics. Gauging his audience perfectly, he said, “I’ll prepare a freshman lecture on it.” But a few days later he came to me and said: “You know, I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t reduce it to […]
Yuri Nakahashi, a student at Hosei University, Japan, wrote a thesis about sleeping with a cat night after night in locations chosen by the cat. IT Media News reports that the thesis is called “Creation of new sleep value in search with cats,” and has been or will be published in Information Processing Society of […]
Researchers point out that as a field of research becomes big, much of the attention sinks into a middling pool of ideas. Unlikely ideas tend to get squeezed out. They explain, in this study: “Slowed Canonical Progress in Large Fields of Science,” Johan S.G. Chu and James A. Evans, Proceedings of the National Academy of […]
The special Viruses and Pandemics issue of the magazine—Annals of Improbable Research—has been released into the populace. Among its delights you will find: Pandemic Dining: Gelato, Candy, Lettuce, Frozen Meat Virus Toiletometry Pandemic-Fingering: Manning and His Digits Anti-Pandemic Drinking and Drugging Pandemic-Handling: Toilet Paper, Horror, and the Wealthy Beauty and Masks in Pandemic Time Eyeglasses […]