Drinking beer may mitigate some of the dire medical effects of radiation, say many hope-filled twitterings from Japan. Radiation is much on people’s minds because of the recent earthquake-induced nuclear power-plant problems. Discussion centers on a 2005 report from Japan’s National Institute of Radiological Sciences. (HT Mark Schreiber.) The report is written in Japanese. A […]
Tag: Japan
Female college students, and rats
A study called Similar Preference for Natural Mineral Water between Female College Students and Rats pulls off a nice bit of interspecies diplomacy. Reading it end to end, you would be hard pressed to say who – the college students or the rats – was most intended to benefit from the research. Written by Esumi […]
Self-denigrating humor value: Japan
A rare study of the vale of self-denigrating humor in Japan: “The value of constructing relationships through self-denigrating humor and regional-cultural differences in Japan: A focus on blunder-telling behavior,” Sora Niwa and Shun’ichi Maruno, Journal of Social, Evolutionary and Cultural Psychology, 3(2), 2009, 133-154. Here is a sampling of questions used in the research:
Dr. Nakamats, ultra-prolific inventor
Motherboard produced this eight-minute-long documentary of Dr. Yoshiro Nakamats. Dr. Nakamats, an inventor for whom the word “prolific” seems almost to be insufficient, was awarded the 2005 Ig Nobel Prize in nutrition for photographing and retrospectively analyzing every meal he has consumed during a period of 34 years (and counting)..