If you were to give (male) students a Desert Eagle™ automatic handgun (replica) to handle* for a few minutes, would their testosterone levels rise? If so, would they be more inclined to dose a cup of water with FRANK’S® RedHot® sauce which they believed another (male) subject would have to drink?* Such questions were asked […]
There’s new paper ammunition for all combatants in the eternal anger-and-joy-filled war to explain why more men than women officially keep on studying mathematics. The new paper that provides—that is itself—the ammunition is: “Girls’ Comparative Advantage in Reading Can Largely Explain the Gender Gap in Math-Related Fields,” Thomas Breda and Clotilde Napp, Proceedings of the […]
How do you measure how much saliva a five-year-old kid produces in a day? A Japanese study describes one approach, and we go with that flow (to an extent), in this week’s Improbable Research podcast. SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free. This week, Marc Abrahams discusses a published saliva-filled study, with dramatic readings from Nicole Sharp, creator of FYFD, the internet’s most popular […]
We have a column called “Boys Will Be Boys — Research by and for adolescent males of all ages and sexes“, that runs in every issue of our magazine, the Annals of Improbable Research. Occasionally, someone complains that the column appeals only to males, males who are especially juvenile. But our experience with readers says […]
Martino [pictured here] mucks around, in this study: “Mucking Around in Class, Giving Crap, and Acting Cool: Adolescent Boys Enacting Masculinities at School,” Wayne Martino, Canadian Journal of Education / Revue canadienne de l’éducation, Vol. 25, No. 2 (2000), pp. 102-112. The author, at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, explains: “I use a Foucauldian […]