Podcast #33: Make sure colonoscopy patients will not explode

Chimpanzees recognizing photographs of the rear ends of other chimpanzees;  colonoscopy patients who explode, and the patent for the bagel-making machine — all these all turn up in this week’s Improbable Research podcast. Click on the “Venetian blinds” icon — at the lower right corner here — to select whichever week’s episode you want to hear: SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify […]

A dark, yet sunny, techno-apocalyptic paper

A dark, yet sunny, techno-apocalyptic paper by the prolific Alexander Bolonkin and a friend, a self-noted self-described thinker: “Explosion of Sun,” Alexander Bolonkin, Joseph Friedlander [pictured here], Computational Water, Energy, and Environmental Engineering, vol. 2, 2013, pp. 83-96. The authors, at Strategic Solutions Technology Group, New York, explain: “If we create higher temperature and density […]

Controversy upon controversy: Not “Float, explode, or sink”, but rather *implode*?

The 2012 study “Float, explode or sink: postmortem fate of lung-breathing marine vertebrates,” which [as we mentioned here yesterday] was awarded the prestigious Senckenberg Award, does have its detractors. Or rather, detractor. Who advances a theory that certain carcasses implode. A.J. Van Loon [pictured here] of Adam Miczkiewicz University, Poznan, Poland, published a commentary about explaining why he […]

Float/explode/sink carcass study wins Senckenberg Award

Joyous news about a contrarian study of upside-down-carcass theory, reported this month in the journal that published the study: “Authors of outstanding article receive Senckenberg Award!” Palaeobiodiversity and Palaeoenvironments, November 2013. We are pleased to announce, that the Alexander von Humboldt-Gedächtnispreis 2013 was awarded to authors of the following article, published in the special issue […]

The Men Behind Exploding Meat

Before John Long applied his expertise to the problem, people tried many ways to make meat more tender — chewing it, pounding it, soaking it in enzymes. The report, Hydrodyne Exploding Meat Tenderness, published in 1998 by the US department of agriculture (USDA), describes Long’s act of creation as “a peacetime use for explosives”. “Throughout John Long’s career as […]