The question of the wild giant pandas frequently roll in horse manure is explored in a new study called “Why Wild Giant Pandas Frequently Roll in Horse Manure.” “Why Wild Giant Pandas Frequently Roll in Horse Manure,” Wenliang Zhou, Shilong Yang, Bowen Li, Yonggang Nie, Anna Luo, Guangping Huang, Xuefeng Liu, Ren Lai, and Fuwen […]
Tag: horses
Experimental Evidence That Stripes Do Not Cool Zebras, by Ig Nobel Winners
The prize-winning researchers who discovered why white-haired horses are the most horsefly-proof horses has now probed a classic mystery about zebra stripes. They published this report: “Experimental Evidence That Stripes Do Not Cool Zebras,” Gábor Horváth, Ádám Pereszlényi, Dénes Száz, András Barta, Imre M. Jánosi, Balázs Gerics, and Susanne Åkesson, Scentific Reports, vol. 8, no. 9351, 2018. […]
Susanne Åkesson’s Ig Nobel horsefly triumph
Lund University produced this video celebrating the awarding of the 2016 Ig Nobel Prize for physics to Susanne Åkesson and her colleagues: The prize was awarded to Gábor Horváth, Miklós Blahó, György Kriska, Ramón Hegedüs, Balázs Gerics, Róbert Farkas, Susanne Åkesson, Péter Malik, and Hansruedi Wildermuth, for discovering why white-haired horses are the most horsefly-proof horses, and for […]
Much to chew on about many meats
Mark A Jobling [pictured here] of the University of Leicester writes about the genetic underpinnings of exotic meats. His essay, called “Flogging a dead horse“, appears in the journal Investigative Genetics [2013, 4:5]: People eat mules, as well as donkeys and horses, and in meat contamination testing, mule meat would appear to be horsemeat, because of the […]
Horses and the effects of flying
“Horses are the only species other than man transported around the world for competition purposes.” – say investigators Domingo Tortonese, Julie Townsend, Cathy Fuller, ‘Twink’ Allen and Roger Short in ‘Jetlag in the horse: Neuroendocrine mechanisms underlying the effects of transmeridian flying on equine performance.’ “Changes in the 24h light:dark cycle, such as those associated […]
The loadbearing capacity of the Taishuh horse (study)
The keeper of the ‘Bridge of Death’ (Terry Gilliam) made a grave error in not specifying to which breed of swallow his question applied. But authors A. Matsuura, S. Sakuma, M. Irimajiri and K. Hodate from the Department of Animal Science, School of Veterinary Medicine, Kitasato University, Towada, Aomori, Japan, have made no such mistake […]
Involuntary Hippophagia (4): Nothing new (the 1948 Horsemeat scandal)
Involuntary Hippophagia (the unintended ingestion of a horse, or part thereof ) is nothing new, it seems. Click on the image to be transported to a website that will show you video of the possibly shocking film ‘The Horsemeat Scandal 1948’: “Don’t think the horse meat scandal is a new phenomenon. In fact it’s an old […]
Involuntary Hippophagia (1): Horsemeat, a view from Croatia
As our UK readers will know, Britain is currently reeling from the effects of an outbreak of ‘Involuntary Hippophagia‘. (We hereby suggest that name.*) But not everyone agrees that eating horsemeat is inadvisable. If you’re going to eat meat, they say, then maybe horsemeat isn’t such a bad choice. For an example of this viewpoint […]
His “Mare Wives”: Higher class bestiality?
Between the yin of devoted love and the yang of bestiality lies the curious jumble of human behaviour reported in a monograph called A Case Study of Preferential Bestiality, published two years ago in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. Psychologists ML Lalumiere [pictured here], of the University of Lethbridge, Canada, and CM Earls, Montreal University, take us […]
Horvath: Like horseflies, like Vikings
Dr Gábor Horváth [pictured here], who discovered that white horses attract fewer flies (described here a few months ago), now may have shed light on an old, somewhat related question about Vikings. The study is “On the trail of Vikings with polarized skylight: experimental study of the atmospheric optical prerequisites allowing polarimetric navigation by Viking […]