Compare and contrast, if you will, this press release from the University of Colorado: “Artificial gravity breaks free from science fiction” …and the Ig Nobel Prize-winning patent by George and Charlotte Blonsky: “Apparatus for facilitating the birth of a child by centrifugal force”
Tag: child
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 […]
Advice to kids: Just say no (to fainting)
Mass inoculation programs for school children sometimes encounter problems – with considerable numbers of children fainting. Fortunately, in 1973, a very straightforward remedial strategy was discovered by Alan Hedberg and Audrey Schlong. It was described in the journal Nursing Research.
Extracting a stuck wine cork — or a new child [patent applications]
Extracting a stuck wine cork from a bottle inspired this method for bringing a child into the world. Jorge Ernesto Odon of Argentina invented a new method for assisting the birth of a child, using an insertable, inflatable bag to grip the child’s head, in the same way one can extract a cork that has […]
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 […]
Name That Child Computationally
A new study outlines how the Google PageRank algorithm is used to choose a name for a new child. In accord with mathematicians’ traditional practice, the study does not explicitly name the name of even one child: “Recommending Given Names – Mining Relatedness of Given Names based on Data from the Social Web,” Folke Mitzlaff […]
The eagle and child — a new case and a famous old one
This video — of an eagle trying to snatch a child in Montreal — echoes the once-famous case of “the Taung Child”. The historic case was discussed in the study “The Load of the Taung Child,” Lee R. Berger and Ronald J. Clarke, Nature, vol. 379, no. 29, 1996, p. 778. We held a limerick contest […]
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 […]
Headline of the Day: Criminal conclusions
Today’s Headline of the Day is from CNN: Kids’ brains may hold clues to future criminals The story then begins by saying: Who is going to grow up to become a criminal or psychopath? Current research in genetics and neuroscience may point towards answers to this question, opening up a whole host of ethical questions […]