Whether one person holds a door open for another is not simply a question of etiquette, says a study by Joseph P Santamaria and David A Rosenbaum [pictured here] of Pennsylvania State University. No, they say. Nothing simple about it. Santamaria and Rosenbaum worked to pursue the answer through a tangle of belief, logic, probability, perception […]
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.
Why do so many people so often say “so”?
So … in this era when so many people use the word “so” to begin so many of their sentences, one scholar has written three studies analysing what happens when people begin their sentences with the word. Galina Bolden’s first “so” study, in 2006, explains that sometimes people use the word as a way of […]
Beach study suggests tourists like good weather
Do not assume that tourists prefer good weather when they visit a beach. A study published in the International Journal of Biometeorology in 2013 challenges that easy-to-make assumption. The researchers gathered evidence – rather than relying on mere guesses and assumptions – as to what kind of weather brings beachgoers to the beach. Here is […]
Pippa Middleton’s backside – the Freudian and Marxist interpretations
The scholarly community, a portion of it anyway, is diving ever-deeper in the analysis of the rear end of the sister of the wife of the man whose father’s mother sits on the throne of the United Kingdom. The interest has spread westward, to the Republic of Ireland. Ireland has no monarch, and thus does […]
Toppling of the Pops: A sometimes fatal quest for soda pop
We all know that fizzy drinks can affect the health of people who drink them, especially in super-size quantities, but – even worse – fizzy drinks in a vending machine sometimes bring immediate violent death when the machines are attacked. This is documented dramatically by Dr Michael Q Cosio in a 1988 research study published in […]
Bird-feather counters exhibited pluck, tediously
Many humans have spent days, months or years counting feathers. Here are exciting highlights from some of their reports. In 1936 Alexander Wetmore, of the US National Museum in Washington, gathered all the published reports he could find about someone or other counting how many feathers were on particular birds. “The work of feather counting […]
Does chewing gum improve our mind and our productivity?
For advocates of chewing gum in school, if there are any, the past decade of research has brought data, and perhaps hope. A project called The Effects of Gum Chewing on Math Scores in Adolescents studied the mathematics grades and test scores of 53 teenage students who chewed gum and 58 who did not. Craig Johnston of the Baylor College of […]
To deal with climate change… make people smaller
The plan to engineer a shorter, smaller human race to cope with climate change is almost as big and bold as the schemes of people working to convince themselves climate change won’t affect them. The plan, at this point still sketchy, has three engineers. S Matthew Liao [pictured here] is a professor of bioethics at New York University. Anders Sandberg and Rebecca […]
Watson and Crick and Pippa Middleton’s bottom
A three-page study called “And Bringing Up the Rear: Pippa Middleton, Her Derrière and Celebrity“, written by a Birkbeck, University of London scholar, Janet McCabe, marks Britain’s instant new status as top dog and intellectual driver of an entire academic field. It is, in that respect, as mentally electrifying as was a one-page study called A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic […]
First attempts to model bipolar patients as harmonic oscillators
People with bipolar disorder swing between mood extremes. A team of mathematicians decided to see how much of that swinging they could describe mathematically. Mason Porter, then at the Georgia Institute of Technology and now at Oxford University, with several US colleagues, published a study in 2009, Mathematical Models of Bipolar Disorder. It appeared in the journal Communications […]