Egg in Your Eye (podcast 101)

Can the public focus on the medical dangers of egg-throwing at Halloween? A research study explores that very question, and we explore that study, 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 egg-in-your-eye study. Psychologist Jean Berko Gleason lends her voice, and her scientific expertise, and her opinions —with dramatic readings from a research study you […]

Podcast 87: How kids learn to say “Trick or Treat!”

Jean Berko Gleason explains how kids learn to say “Trick or Treat!” —and how it helps them stride down the road to adulthood. That’s the story 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 “Trick or treat!” with Boston University psychology professor emerita Jean Berko Gleason. Early in her career, Gleason gained fame for […]

Shadows Cast by Spider Legs, Used in Physics Calculations

Anticipating Halloween, the American Chemical Society has published a study about using the shadows cast by (kinda sorta) spider legs, for scientific purposes. The paper is: “Elegant Shadow Making Tiny Force Visible for Water-Walking Arthropods and Updated Archimedes’ Principle,” Yelong Zheng, Hongyu Lu, Wei Yin, Dashuai Tao, Lichun Shi, and Yu Tian, Langmuir, 2016, 32 (41), pp. […]

Testing pumpkin-carving knives on cadaver arms

The knifing of pumpkins, an innocent-seeming yet carefully planned act of mutilation, sometimes results (accidentally or otherwise) in sprays, bits and smatterings of human, as well as vegetable, gore. In such cases, blood –human blood – flows, drips and coagulates. A hands-on experiment, or rather, an experiment on hands, in 2004, tried to determine the […]

Possible Influence of Halloween on Childbirth

One reason that people see relatively few brand-newborns trick-or-treating on Halloween is that fewer are born on Halloween than on an average day. That’s one of the possible implications certain people could draw if they wish to after reading the following study: “Influence of Valentine’s Day and Halloween on Birth Timing,” Becca R. Levy [pictured […]