Pimples take center stage in the brain, in this new study: “Enjoyment of Watching Pimple Popping Videos: An fMRI Investigation,” Albert Wabnegger, Carina Höfler, Thomas Zussner, Harald H Freudenthaler, Anne Schienle, Behavioural Brain Research, vol. 402, March 26, 2021, 113129. The authors, at the University of Graz, Austria, explain: We administered a total of 96 […]
Category: Boys Will Be Boys
Research — that makes people LAUGH, then THINK — by and for teenage boys of all ages and genders.
Effect of Sex-With-Strangers on Sand Dunes
A new study about erosion might attract more attention than most studies about erosion. It is: “Sand, Sun, Sea and Sex with Strangers, the “five S’s.” Characterizing “cruising” activity and its environmental impacts on a protected coastal dunefield,” Leví García-Romero, Carolina Pena-Alonso, Patrick A. Hesp, Antonio I. Hernández-Cordero, and Luis Hernández-Calvento, Journal of Environmental Management, […]
The Possible Advantages of Square Cigarettes [focus-group report, 1999]
What might be the advantages of “square” cigarettes? In 1999, the US tobacco company R.J Reynolds employed the Opinion and Marketing Research firm Delta Research to investigate. Participants of two “Consumer Idea Generation” (CIG) focus groups from Indianapolis were paid $35 each (plus dinner) to list (amongst other things) possible advantages of “Square” cigarettes. The findings : […]
Embodying a new cross-sectional paradigm for a smokable rod [square cigarettes patent]
“A cigarette typically is employed by a smoker by lighting one end thereof and burning the tobacco rod. The smoker then receives mainstream smoke into his/her mouth by drawing on the opposite end (e.g., the filter end) of the cigarette.” – explains a patent granted to Big Tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds. U.S. patent 7,967,018 B2, […]
Pubic Hair Forensics (Improbable Research)
The review column “Public Hair Forensics” is a but one of many featured items in the special Forensics issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. The article is free to download: