The 2022 Insect Fear Festival is coming. Run! Jump! Fly! One way or another or another, get to it on Saturday, February 26, 2022! The festival is organized by swarms of entomologists at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This year it begins with a special presentation by Ig Nobel Prize winner Justin Schmidt, creator of […]
While others study pictures at an exhibition, Wanja Rast, Leon M.F. Barthel, and Anne Berger study hedgehogs at a music festival. They wrote this report about it: “Music festival makes hedgehogs move: How individuals cope behaviorally in response to human-induced stressors,” Wanja Rast, Leon M.F. Barthel, and Anne Berger, Animals, IX/7 [2019] pp. 2–19. (Thanks […]
Technological innovations have facilitated widespread illegal downloading of recorded music (which points towards a decreased willingness to pay for music) nevertheless, people still go to pop concerts – which they usually have to pay for – raising the question ‘Why?’ Behavioural scientist Dr Steven Caldwell Brown [pictured] from The University of Edinburgh, Scotland, (and also […]
December 5 will be the 25th anniversary of the historic 1987 King’s Birthday Vasectomy Festival, which may have been the most biomedically intriguing King’s Birthday Vasectomy Festival of them all: “No-Scalpel Vasectomy at the King’s Birthday Vasectomy Festival,” by Apichart Nirapathpongporn, Douglas H. Huber and John N. Krieger, The Lancet, no. 335, 1990, pp. 894- 895. The […]
This medical report suggests a possible drawback to having children get their faces painted, at least at some Dragon Boat Festivals: “A cultural practice of drinking realgar wine leading to elevated urinary arsenic and its potential health risk,” Ying-Nan Zhang, Guo-Xin Sun, Paul N. Williams, Qing Huang, Yong-Guan Zhu, Environment International, 2011 Jul;37(5):889-92. The authors, […]