Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans. Do Humans Prefer Beautiful Chickens?

“Chickens Prefer Beautiful Humans“, according to the title of the research study by Stefano Ghirlanda, Liselotte Jansson, and Magnus Enquist of Stockholm University, honored by the 2003 Ig Nobel Prize for Interdisciplinary Research. That study was published in the journal Human Nature (vol. 13, no. 3, 2002, pp. 383-9.) Twenty-three years later, a Reuters video news […]

Of Use to Whiskered Men in the Dark?

Might this study about whiskers in mice be educational for whiskered humans — about similar human capabilities they may be under-utilizing? The study is: “Detection and neural encoding of whisker-generated sounds in mice,” Ben Efron, Athanasios Ntelezos, Yonatan Katz, and Ilan Lamp, Current Biology, vol. 35, no. 6, 2025, pp. 1211-1226. The authors report: Whisking […]

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 […]

Improbable Research