Dog Nose-Tip Temperature Dynamics and Distant-Heat Sensing Ability

“Why do dogs have cold noses?” wonder many humans who, most of them, have warmer noses than dogs have. Here are two research studies by Ronald H.H. Kroger and colleagues, that sniffed into the question and may have found some answers. Dog Nose-Tip Distant-Heat Sensing Ability? “Dogs Can Sense Weak Thermal Radiation,” Anna Bálint, Attila […]

Modelling heat loss from a semi-spherical cow udder

Theoretical physicists are sometimes accused of making over-simplifications for mathematical models. This has lead to many variations on the spherical cow story, where a physicist claims to be able to cure a sick cow, but only if it is a spherical cow in a vacuum. Oddly, most iterations of this tale ignore heat radiated from […]

How now, warm cow [Podcast 50]

Heat loss from a cow — that’s the deal 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  —with dramatic readings by Daniel Rosenberg — tells about: Heat loss from a cow — Khan, Zahid A., Irfan Anjum Badruddin, G. A. Quadir, and K. N. Seetharamu (2006). ‘A Quick and Accurate […]

Phoenix: Cooling down the buildings, but maybe not the city

People use air conditioning to, on a small scale, cool off . This report measures the degree and degrees to which it can, on a larger scale, do the opposite: “Anthropogenic Heating of the Urban Environment due to Air Conditioning,” Francisco Salamanca [pictured here], M. Georgescu, A. Mahalov, M. Moustaoui, and M. Wang, Journal of […]

Experiments with inflatable & other life-size dolls

A generic life-size doll, with no modifications, was the key element in at least one unplanned experiment — the experiment documented in a 1993 monograph called Transmission of Gonorrhoea Through an Inflatable Doll, published in the journal Genitourinary Medicine. But generally, scientists who conduct planned experiments that rely on life-size dolls prefer to carefully optimise, or […]