An Empirical, 21st Century Evaluation of Phrenology

The old technique of judging people by examining their head bumps gets a new looking-at, in this study: “An Empirical, 21st Century Evaluation of Phrenology,” Oiwi Parker Jones, Fidel Alfaro-Almagro, and Saad Jbabdi, bioRxiv 243089, 2018. The authors, at the University of Oxford, UK, explain: Phrenology was a nineteenth century endeavour to link personality traits […]

Envenomations by Rattlesnakes Thought to Be Dead, Then and Now

Old rattlesnake research gains new bite, with the news reports of a man who decapitated a rattlesnake, and then was bitten by the detorsoed snake head [“Texas Man’s Near-Fatal Lesson: A Decapitated Snake Can Still Bite” — New York Times]. The most pertinently focussed study was published almost 20 years ago: “Envenomations by Rattlesnakes Thought to […]

Six Cups of Coffee Goes to Your Head, for Surgical Guidance [research study]

A special hat filled with six cups’ worth of ground coffee may make it easier for surgeons to succeed at some kinds of nose and throat surgery. This study presents the news: “Coffee: the key to safer image-guided surgery—a granular jamming cap for non-invasive, rigid fixation of fiducial markers to the patient,” Patrick S. Wellborn […]

Hats Off, or On, From a Medical Perspective

Are there hat-wearing patterns in spectators who attended baseball games — patterns that might be discernible over a ten-year period, patterns that might be exploitable? This study claims to begin to answer those questions. “Hat-wearing Patterns in Spectators Attending Baseball Games: a 10-Year Retrospective Comparison,” Aaron S. Farberg, Stephen Donohue, and Darrell S. Rigel, Cutis, […]

Questions about Jerry’s Maggot

The questions precede the text. The questions, presented on Ms. Barker’s Science Wiki, are: Read the attached article titled, Jerry’s Maggot. On a separate sheet of paper respond to the following questions, using complete sentences, based on your knowledge of biology and your personal opinion. 1. What is Jerry’s “problem” and how did he get […]

The special HUMAN HEADS issue of the magazine is out!

The special HUMAN HEADS And GARLIC issue (vol. 22, no. 1) of the magazine (the Annals of Improbable Research) is now out! It’s bursting (as are all our issues) with carefully culled, improbable research snippets about everything, from anywhere, more or less. This is the very first issue of our all-PDF era. We hope you enjoy it, and that you will […]