The human who, of all the humans who have tried living life as a goat has become the most celebrated by fellow humans, looks back on his experience. NRC interviews and profiles Thomas Thwaites, and also checks in with Charles Foster, who lived parts of his life as different kinds of animals. The NRC profile […]
The special Small Animals issue (volume 26, number 3) of the magazine is chock full of improbable research about small animals.
“Hard, hard to be a baby—Baby animals like you’ve never seen them” is more or less the English translation of the French title of Brooke Barker’s book Dur, dur d’être un bébé—Les bébés animaux comme vous ne les avez jamais vus. The book is full of facts and drawings about many kinds and sizes of […]
The special Big Animals issue (vol. 26, no. 2) of the magazine tramples forth with reports about improbable research about animals that are big. And improbable. And real. Perhaps this is the psychologically right moment to subscribe, or to buy one of the more than 150 back issues that explore all sorts of improbable things.
Color Preference in the Insane, Can Consumers Recognize the Taste of their Favorite Beer?, Effect of Audience Boredom on the Power Hungry, You Never Sleep Alone, Improbable Medical Review, Extracting the Wrong Tooth, and Telephones for Animals. In episode #206, Marc Abrahams shows some unfamiliar research studies to Jean Berko Gleason, Chris Cotsapas, Maggie Lettvin, […]
Benno Meyer-Rochow, who won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2005 for calculating the pressures produced when penguins poo [see diagram, below] is now investigating a different kind of biological mystery. Meyer-Rochow wrote an essay that begins: You can lock arms with someone, you can lock on to something or be locked in or even be […]
If you are a researcher studying, say, concrete bridge structures, or microprocessors, then you probably wouldn’t have to be overly concerned about potential criticism from peers regarding the possibility that you might eat your research subjects. But this is not the case for all academic fields. Take for example, ‘Animal Studies’. A 2018 paper published […]
The special ANIMALS issue (volume 25, number 3) of the Annals of Improbable Research is now out and about. It’s packed with improbable research about animals, and parts of animals, and things that animals, some of them, do. The special section on animals research brings to you: Flies in the Face of Death Animal Odors […]
Humans are more omnivorous than some of us realize, sometimes, suggests this new study: “There’s a Frog in My Salad! A Review of Online Media Coverage for Wild Vertebrates Found in Prepackaged Produce in the United States,” Daniel F. Hughes, Michelle L. Green, Jonathan K. Warner, and Paul C. Davidson, Science of the Total Environment, […]
“The Surprising Reason Zebras Have Stripes,” Ed Yong’s essay in The Atlantic, celebrates the most recently published research about how some large mammals manage to protect themselves against flies. Tim Caro and colleagues experimented with striped blankets, publishing their story in the research journal PLoS ONE. Ig Nobel Prize winners Gábor Horváth, Susanne Äkesson, and […]