Despite everyone’s carefree joy in singing Happy Birthday to You, this simple song puts you in legal jeopardy every time it exits your mouth. A considerable amount of money flows to the corporation that owns the copyright. But … maybe that company doesn’t own the copyright, and maybe you are in no legal peril. Professor […]
Category: Extra-Improbable columns
Our columns in other publications — The ‘Feedback’ column in New Scientist magazine, beginning in September 2022, and the “Improbable Research”column that ran for 13 years in The Guardian newspaper.
Birdwatching without innocence
Birdwatching is reputedly a wholesome, innocent pastime. But it can be a richer experience than that. Some years ago, an ornithologist of my acquaintance, while looking through his telescope in Van province in Eastern Turkey, saw bimaculated larks, crimson-winged finches and black-bellied sandgrouse. Then he saw an elderly male shepherd engaged in congress with a […]
Mmmm, yummy … mummies!
Nowadays, powdered mummy may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but for many years it was just what the doctor ordered. That’s one of the takeaway messages of Richard Sugg‘s study Good Physic but Bad Food: Early Modern Attitudes to Medicinal Cannibalism and its Suppliers. Sugg is a research fellow in literature and medicine at […]
On the trail of evil and wickedness
Some men and women love to study the men (and the women) who see women as evil. Many of these misogyny scholars will gather in Budapest, Hungary, in May next year, at the first global conference on Evil, Women and the Feminine. The conferees will choose among wickedly inviting topics, including monstrous motherhood; menstruation and […]
Guéguen’s big bust experiments
Professor Nicolas Guéguen finds significance, or at least fascination, in what might be called voyeuristic microscopy, watching how people react to mundanely noticeable sights and sounds. Many of his experiments involve young female confederates who are shaped or perfumed or who lay a hand upon strangers in particular ways. Generally, the test subjects who respond […]
Dishing up dormice delight
The edible dormouse is the star of Giuseppe Carpaneto and Mauro Cristaldi‘s 1995 study Dormice and Man: A Review of Past and Present Relations, published in the journal Hystrix. The two Rome-based scholars, Carpaneto at Terza University, Cristaldi at the University of Rome, savour one of the tasty rodent’s two major historical roles. Though some […]
When punks grow old
Can punk rockers remain orthodox when they grow old? Joanna R Davis, a sociologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, confronts this painful question in her study Growing Up Punk: Negotiating Ageing Identity in a Local Music Scene, published in the journal Symbolic Interaction. “Punk developed in both the United Kingdom and the United […]
How Woody the living hammer hit the spot
While others tried to build a better computer or teapot or mousetrap, Julian FV Vincent, Mehmet Necip Sahinkaya and Will O’Shea of the department of mechanical engineering at the University of Bath tried to build a better hammer. Unlike most previous hammer smiths, they studied woodpeckers. Why? Because to mechanical engineers, when they are in […]
(L)Ode Upon a Creaking Chair
Contrary to what you might think, sitting is not a static activity, unless you are dead. In the study Chair Load Analysis During Daily Sitting Activities, Carla Paoliello and Edgar Vladimiro Mantilla Carrasco adopt the perspective of a chair. They quantify the shifting risks your furniture faces when someone sits on it. Now – right […]
Thinking on your feet
When one’s feet smell unpleasant, it’s polite to wonder why. But six scientists at the Shiseido Research Centre in Yokohama, Japan, pursued this interest more thoroughly than mere politeness alone would dictate. The pioneering research study, Elucidation of Chemical Compounds Responsible for Foot Malodour, by F Kanda, E Yagi, M Fukuda, K Nakajima, T Ohta […]