How much saliva does a five-year-old kid produce? (podcast #92)

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 […]

Physicists try to analyze child custody

A team of physicists and mathematicians attempted to apply their physics knowledge to understanding how divorced couples can better deal with custody of the children: “The physics of custody,” Andres Gomberoff, Victor Munoz and Pierre Paul Romagnoli, arXiv:1305.0935v3, December 19, 2013. (Thanks to investigator Judith Weaver for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at […]

The spectra in the ring in the voice of the child solo singers

Some scientific papers seem meant—because of their topic—to be sung aloud, if only the wording were adjusted to make them easier to sing. Here’s one such study: “‘Ring’ in the Solo Child Singing Voice,” David M. Howard, Jenevora Williams [pictured here], Christian T. Herbst, Journal of Voice, epub November 11, 2013. The authors, at the […]

He invented a child-replacing robot camel jockey

In this three-minute video, Rashid Ali Ibrahim does some show-and-tell about his “top secret experiments” to develop a robot jockey to replace camel-racing child jockeys. The robots are now in their seventh year of competition on camelback. Children now are banned from taking jobs as camel jockeys in some (but not all) camel-racing countries.  The […]