Moti Fridman alerted us to the existence of the schnitzel-laser. Fridman wrote: “They showed how a laser can find by itself the correct phase to lase at in order to go through a thin chicken breast with no aberrations, when it is put inside the cavity. In a talk they called it the schnitzel-laser. This research shows beautifully the […]
Tag: chicken
Langmuir and Vonnegut together
This photo from General Electric shows a Nobel Prize winner and an eventual Ig Nobel Prize winner working together. GE describes it: “Thinking Outside the Cold Box: How a Nobel Prize Winner and Kurt Vonnegut’s Brother Made the Clouds Snow at GE in the 1940s… Irving Langmuir, Bernard Vonnegut, and Vincent Schaefer are seeding a […]
Tastes like chicken for millionaires (with a dinosaur twist)
Joe Staton’s classic article “Tastes Like Chicken” was the subject of a question on the September 25, 2013 edition of the “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” TV program: The question posed to contestants on that program: “Since the animals are thought to be distant relatives, biology professor Joe Staton once wrote ‘chances are that […]
A backwards film: chickens and Flannery O’Connor
British Pathe makes available one of their old films, in which animals are shown (though the magic of technology) walking backwards. The little girl in the film grew up to be the author Flannery O’Connor, so they say. (HT Jeff Betancourt)
Spectacular anatomy lesson
A spectacular new understanding or misunderstanding of anatomy is on display in Figure 1 of a new study (click on this link download a PDF of the study). The caption there says: Fig. 1. CT scan of abdomen and pelvis showing radio-dense bony foreign body perforating through the sigmoid colon (red arrow). Flecks of free intra-peritoneal […]
Chicken chicken chicken subways subways subways
Some say chicken chicken chicken, others say subway, subways, subways. Chicken Chicken Chicken Chicken (the academic study) by Doug Zongker, published in the Annals of Improbable Research, vol. 12, no. 5, September-October 2006, led to Chicken Chicken Chicken, the lecture by Zongker (the lecture was part of the Annals of Improbable Research session at the 2007 Annual Meeting of the […]
Diapers for modern domestic chickens (part 2)
Tobi Kosanke, Ph.D., inventor of a diaper for domestic chickens (profiled here yesterday), has filed a patent application for that device: “Poultry Harness Diaper,” US patent application 20120037094 A1, by Tobi Kosanke, filed August 11, 2011. “A diaper assembly for use on a bird includes an upper-body portion that has at least one first part […]
Diapers for modern domestic chickens (part 1)
This video shows Tobi Kosanke, Ph.D., showing how to use diapers for domestic chickens. These are diapers Dr. Kasanke specially designed, so she says, for chickens that or who live inside modern houses or apartments. The diapers are sold under the brand name Hen Holster. The manufacturer’s web site explains more about them. The site […]
American chicken-sexing update
Brendan Koerner looks at the past and present of one nation’s chicken-sexing industry: … This tale of economic triumph has a single hero: S. John Nitta, who founded the American Chick Sexing Association in 1938. During the war, when over 100,000 of his fellow Japanese-Americans were interned, Nitta continued to train and certify sexors; once […]
How does one measure the wind speed inside a tornado?
How does one measure the wind speed inside a tornado? Bernie Vonnegut looked back at an early state-of-the-art method, and wrote a report called “Chicken Plucking as Measure of Tornado Wind Speed” [published in “Weatherwise,” October 1975, p. 217]. Vonnegut told the world why that early method, which involved a chicken carcass and a cannon, may have […]