“Green, nutrient-rich coffees may be on the horizon after researchers have developed a powder made from imperfect-looking broccoli that would have previously been wasted,” says a press release sent out earlier this year by CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency. Mary Ann Augustin is the lead researcher on the experiment. Ashitha Nagesh wrote an essay about this […]
Tag: James Bond
Second-hand smoking in James Bond movies [study]
As international politics comes to resemble the over-imaginative plotlines of James Bond movies, some research publications choose to look more closely at the details of those movies. This new study looks at smoking: “James Bond’s Smoking Over Six Decades,” Nick Wilson and Anne Tucker, Tobacco Control, epub January 16, 2017. The authors, at the University of Otago, New […]
Generating predictions while watching the movie Moonraker
Two decades ago, Rolf Zwaan — who likely at the time did not predict that he would one day be awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for an experiment involving the Eiffel Tower — published a study, with colleagues, about people generating predictions while watching the James Bond movie Moonraker. The study was and is: “Generating predictive […]
Effect of James Bond on Macaque Brains
This study tests previously untested extremes of the power of James Bond movies: “Functional Connectivity of the Macaque Brain across Stimulus and Arousal States,” Sebastian Moeller, Nambi Nallasamy, Doris Y. Tsao, and Winrich A. Freiwald, Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 29, no. 18, May 6, 2009, pp. 5897-5909. (Thanks to investigator Neil Martin for bringing this to […]
A Device to Deter a Bear
When a big bear approaches, some people choose to quietly stroll away. To give them an extra measure of safety, Anthony Victor Saunders and Adam Warwick Bell invented what they call a “pop-up device for deterring an attacking animal“. Saunders, a London-based mountain climber, and Bell, a California patent attorney, applied for a patent in […]
In Memoriam: James Bond
James Bond, the ornithologist whose name was purloined and bestowed upon a fictional spy, is more than 20 years gone. Bond’s life and work were celebrated in the monograph “In Memoriam: James Bond,” by Kenneth Parkes, Auk, vol. 106, October 1989, pp. 718-20. (Thanks to investigator Sally Shelton for bringing this to our attention.)
Was Bond a gourmet?
Ian Fleming’s most famous creation, James Bond, was famously keen on lightly-scrambled eggs, bacon, sausages, orange juice and espresso coffee. He also dabbled with grilled sole, foie gras, crawfish, asparagus with Béarnaise sauce, and caviar. But could he really be thought of as a gourmet? According to Edward Biddulph, tutor and Senior Project Manager at […]
Don’t mess with Bond
What are the survival prospects for female characters in the James Bond movies? A new research project from Cleveland State University and Kent State University performed a quantitative content analysis for 195 female characters in 20 out of the 22 Bond films – uncovering in the process some clearcut predictors of their survivability. “End-of-film mortality […]