The Baby Einstein videos accomplished great things, at least commercially. Sarah Conrad Gothie, a graduate student at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, tried to understand why. Her master’s thesis, completed in 2006, is called Great Minds Start Little: Unpacking the Baby Einstein Phenomenon. “The Baby Einstein Company began in 1997 when former teacher and […]
A skeptical (not cynical!) marriage
Two members of the extended Improbable Research gang have just gotten married under officially amazing and skeptical — and completely not cynical — circumstances: at The Amazing Meeting, in Las Vegas. Our congratulations and fond good wishes go to Sid Rodrigues and Rebecca Watson. Here’s video: (Thanks to Phil Plait for bringing this to everyone’s […]
The spider and the 747
It is suggested that one strand of pencil thick spider silk can stop a Boeing 747 in flight. So says the study “Molecular spring: from spider silk to silkworm silk,” Xiang Wu, Xiang-Yang Liu, Ning Du, Gang-Qin Xu, Bao-Wen Li, arxiv.org/abs/0902.3518, 2009. The study tries to explain why this is so (or at least approximately […]
Parnell and his pitch drop, and then some
It’s still rare when someone writes fan fiction about a scientist who did Ig Nobel Prize-winning work. Here’s an example of what it looks like: Parnell’s experiment, the only one he achieved notoriety for before his death in 1948, involved placing a similar chunk of pitch into a funnel and setting a graduated cylinder below. […]