Intimate Knowledge of the Ostrich Whisperer?

In this video, a person called “the Ostrich Whisperer” appears to display an intimate knowledge of how ostriches behave towards humans:   One can wonder many things about the Ostrich Whisperer’s knowledge. One can wonder how it compares with the knowledge reported in the study “Courtship Behaviour of Ostriches (Struthio camelus) Towards Humans Under Farming […]

Punch back from the anti-anti-alcohol forces

Having endured punch after punch, the anti-anti-alcohol forces rally once more against the anti-alcohol forces. A press release from the University of Exeter proclaims: Alcohol tolerance may have saved our ancestors from extinction The ability to process alcohol may have saved humanity’s ancestors from extinction, a new book suggests. About ten million years ago, our […]

How do muskoxen react to humans disguised as polar bears?

The recent experiment by Joel Berger and colleagues, to test how muskoxen react to humans disguised as polar bears, was inspired by the Ig Nobel Prize-winning experiment done by two Norwegian scientists. This brief video shows the new experiment: The 2014 Ig Nobel Prize for arctic science was awarded to Eigil Reimers and Sindre Eftestøl, for […]

Podcast #12: Ostrich courtship of humans

Ostriches, sea monsters, and sex figure heavily in this week’s Improbable Research podcast. LISTEN on Play.it or iTunes (or DOWNLOAD it, and listen later). SUBSCRIBE on Play.it or iTunes, to get a new episode every week, free. [NEWS: Soon, the podcast will also be available on Spotify.] This week, Marc Abrahams tells about: Ostrich courtship of humans, and also sea serpent mistakes. (Charles Paxton / Bubier, N. E., C. G. M. Paxton, P. Bowers, and […]

The stars in the heavens, the adults in the house

A new paper relates the apparent clumpings of stars to those of humans. Astronomer Alon Retter, who earlier posited a mathematical similarity between astronomical objects and human children, gives full details of his work: “An Intriguing Correlation between the Distribution of Star Multiples and Human Adults in Household,” Alon Retter, International Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics, vol. […]

Literary experiment: An attine ant’s perspective on human farming

Sedeer el-Showk [pictured here] does what might be called a literary experiment: describing human agriculture from the perspective of “attine ants, a group of ants which have evolved a mutualistic relationship with certain fungi that can only be described as a form of agriculture”: In addition to the difficulties of communication, other biological limitations of humans […]