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 […]
Tag: head
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 […]
Two Heads (One of Them Real) Are Somewhat Better Than One
A new test of the old idea that apparently having a head at your rear might save your life, if you are a butterfly: “Two-headed butterfly vs. mantis: do false antennae matter?” Tania G. López-Palafox and Carlos R. Cordero, PeerJ, vol. 5, 2017, e3493. The authors, at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, report: “The colour […]