The human who, of all the humans who have tried living life as a goat has become the most celebrated by fellow humans, looks back on his experience. NRC interviews and profiles Thomas Thwaites, and also checks in with Charles Foster, who lived parts of his life as different kinds of animals. The NRC profile […]
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 […]
What are your pet fears? The review column “Cats Research: Do Cats Eat Human Remains?” is a but one of many featured items in the special Forensics issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. The article is free to download:
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 […]
The 2018 Ig Nobel Anthropology Prize winners explain their research about chimpanzees and humans imitating each other, in an essay published by The Conversation.
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 […]
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 […]
Two questions that are easy to answer, unless you care whether the answer is accurate: 1. Is your body mostly microbes? Actually, we have no idea. By Peter Andrey Smith, in the Boston Globe. 2. Are all the ants as heavy as all the humans? By Hannah Moore, for BBC News.
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. […]
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 […]