“I once performed an autopsy on a deceased pedestrian who had been wearing 23 layers of clothing. It took us longer to undress him than to perform the autopsy.” —from the book Risking Life for Death, by Ryan Blumenthal (Jonathan Ball Publishers, Johannesburg, 2023). Here is a brief video of the author describing a different […]
The UK-based team that shared an Ig Nobel Physics Prize in 2012 for exploring the physics of why ponytails (the hair style) are shaped like pony tails, has now looked into a different question from everyday life: Why clothes don’t fall apart. They published a study about it: “Why Clothes Don’t Fall Apart: Tension Transmission […]
A researcher named Gray and his research about combinations of clothing — that’s the possibly vexing heart of 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 — with dramatic readings by Harvard physicist Melissa Franklin — tells about: Fifty shades, by Gray— “The Science of Style: In Fashion, Colors Should Match […]
If you tie a knot in a necktie, you may have noticed that (in general) there are three major probabilities regarding the outcome. Sometimes the thin end is longer than the wide end, sometimes the wide end is longer than the thin end, and sometimes they are (roughly) equal. In 2010, Tomoyoshi Motohiro of the […]