The Minnesota Medical foundation described, a while ago, a hamburgers-and-human experiment that took place a good while before that. Their blog in 2008 called it “an unusual hamburger experiment” done in the 1930s by Jesse McClendon [pictured here] of the University of Minnesota’s Department of Physiological Chemistry. Some details: He planned to feed a single experimental […]
Tag: experiment
Sub-fever-pitch for next pitch drop’s imminent dropping
Low key, steady excitement comes through in this News.com report about the Australian project that was honored with the 2005 Ig Nobel Prize in physics: Pitch drop experiment’s ninth drop is preparing to fall. Fingers crossed the live feed holds Eighth drop fell in 2000 Camera failed at crucial moment Ninth drop due within 12 […]
A look at Walter, the sweating manikin
This image shows Walter, the sweating manikin, whose wholesome story is told in the study “New Functions and Applications of Walter, the Sweating Fabric Manikin“: For more detail and context, see this week’s Improbable Research column in the Guardian.
Experiments with inflatable & other life-size dolls
A generic life-size doll, with no modifications, was the key element in at least one unplanned experiment — the experiment documented in a 1993 monograph called Transmission of Gonorrhoea Through an Inflatable Doll, published in the journal Genitourinary Medicine. But generally, scientists who conduct planned experiments that rely on life-size dolls prefer to carefully optimise, or […]
Dropping in on the Australian Pitch Drop Experiment
Dan Nancarrow, reporting for the Brisbane Times, drops in on World’s longest lab experiment a lesson in persistence No less than twice a week, Professor John Mainstone fields an inquiry from someone around the world about his pet project. Provocatively, you could say that he has gained worldwide interest over an experiment that in some respects […]
Self-stimulation on the brain, plus Maggie Gyllenhaal
“In this Curiosity video we follow Maggie Gyllenhaal in exploring how female brain activity changes as a woman reaches orgasm,” say the makers of the video. The investigation recalls the one personally documented (as the test subject) by Mary Roach in her stimulating book Bonk. (Thanks to investigator David Holzman for bringing the video to […]
Off-With-Their-Heads Research News
Today’s Icky Research Item award (with echoes from earlier French and British work—see below) goes to this new Dutch study: “Decapitation in Rats: Latency to Unconsciousness and the ‘Wave of Death’“, Clementina M. van. Rijn, Hans Krijnen, Saskia Menting-Hermeling, Anton M. L. Coenen, PLoS ONE 6(1): e16514. (Thanks to investigator and LFHCfS member Holly Brothers […]
Why companies don’t do experiments
Dan Ariely (who won an Ig Nobel Prize for showing that expensive fake medicine works better than inexpensive fake medicine) explains how corporations sometimes prefer to make decisions: Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus groups—a dozen people riffing on […]
Driving while blinding self with helmet
This video shows a man driving an automobile down a major highway while a helmet repeatedly flaps shut, blinding him. It documents the experiment described in “The attentional demand of automobile driving” [Senders, J. W., Kristofferson, A. B., Levison, W. H., Dietrich, C. W., & Ward, J. L., Highway Research Record, vol. 195, 1967, pp. […]