Looking at Tyrells potato crisp packets (image ecology study)

  Within the academic field of aesthetics, there aren’t all that many essays written   on   about potato crisp packets. There is, however, at least one. Karin Wagner, who is professor and associate head of department for research in art history and visual studies at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, specialises in the areas […]

The Visual Aesthetics of Snowflakes (new study)

Given a selection of snowflakes – some with simple structures and others more complex – which do people prefer? To find out, Olivia C. Adkins, who is a Graduate Research Assistant at Western Kentucky University, US, and J. Farley Norman, University Distinguished Professor, also at Western Kentucky University, devised at set of experiments. They showed […]

Further progress in male nipple positioning

Since 2009, progress has been made in devising techniques for determining ideal male nipple positions. (see previous Improbable item on Divine Proportions in male nipple re-positioning) A research team from the department of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the Keio University School of Medicine, Tokyo, have now contributed to the body of work – noting […]

Samuel Beckett meets the Teletubbies

Was the creation of the Teletubbies (1997) inspired by the work of Nobel Prize winning avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, Samuel Beckett? Specifically, his plays Quad I + II ? (1981) Univ.-Prof. Dr. Eckart Voigts-Virchow of the University of Siegen, Germany, draws attention to possible similarities (and possible differences) in his paper for […]

Quantifying ballet dancers’ leg-lift angles

Very few scientific studies have formally investigated the angles to which ballet dancers lift their legs. But in 2009, a team from : the Dipartimento di Neuroscienze and Centro di Biomedicina Spaziale, Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata, Roma, Italy, the Dipartimento di Fisiologia Neuromotoria, IRCCS Fondazione Santa Lucia, Roma, Italy, the Dipartimento di […]