Biscuits, rubbish and bugs in Texas raise hopes that Britain will grow a lucrative new techology-based empire soon, rather than just eventually. This is all about getting usable amounts of graphene – the two-dimensional form of carbon. An American experiment, so goofy-sounding that it has drawn little attention, points towards a cheap way of obtaining […]
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.
Further doses of research about drinking booze
America, a rich source of alcohol, of alcoholics, and of aggressive alcoholics, is also rich in scholarship on those subjects. One must drink deep of that scholarship, in many cases, if one cares about the question: what, exactly, did some of those researchers hope to learn by doing that research? Last week, I wrote about some examples. Here […]
What One Learns By Studying Studies about Drinking
To answer the question, What happens when people drink alcohol? one can read through thousands of research studies published in respected scholarly journals. One must look a bit harder to answer a different question: What, exactly, did some of those researchers hope to learn by doing that research? Let’s take a quick hop through the literature in one […]
Faint laughter – a new study
A new medical study called Recurrent Laughter-induced Syncope documents the existence of a paradoxical malady. Prior to reading the report, physicians might assume the phenomenon to be nothing more than a joke. A joke, they will learn, is just the beginning of the problem. The two authors, Drs Athanasios Gaitatzis and Axel Petzold [pictured here], describe their case […]