Left and right and hobbies in Greece all existed for a long time before anyone took a long look into whether they might be connected or interrelated. That long look gets a writeup in the study: “Handedness and Hobby Preference,” O. Giotakos, Perceptual and Motor Skills, vol. 98, no. 3, part 1, June 2004, pp. […]
When people post pictures of chimpanzees to Instagram®, do they have a preference for choosing pictures which display the chimp’s right cheek – or the left cheek? Dr Annukka Lindell, who is a senior lecturer in psychology at the Department of Psychology and Counselling, School of Psychology and Public Health, La Trobe University, Bundoora, Australia, […]
“It seems axiomatic to assume that handedness is unrelated to actual placement on the political spectrum. Nevertheless, primed by my longstanding research interest in personality and political preference (e.g., McCann, 1997, 2014a, 2014b), I was struck by the rough similarity of a map of the percentage of left-handers in each state in 1986 (McManus, 2009, […]
Does the left armpit smell like the right armpit? A research study explores that very question, and we explore that study, in this week’s Improbable Research podcast. SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free. This week, Marc Abrahams discusses a published armpitty study, with dramatic readings from biologist Christina Agapakis, who has smelled more armpits, mostly for scientific reasons, than most […]
“Our experience of explaining polarimetry to the general public is that they frequently ask how molecules rotate light, which is difficult to explain using non-technical language. Therefore we were keen to find an analogous large scale system which mimicked the polarimeter and used everyday left- and right-handed objects.” – explain Claire Saxon, Scott Brindley, Nic […]
Slime moulds (Physarum polycephalum for example) are quite dexterous when it comes to solving complex 2-D puzzles – their skills having been documented in research which led to the double Ig Nobel prizes (2008 & 2010) awarded to Toshiyuki Nakagaki [full details via here]. Now a new study performed by Alice Dimonte and Victor Erokhin […]
This experimental attempt to ride a left-right-swapped bicycle raises a big fat question about how the human brain works. Destin, he of the Smarter Every Day video series, tells and shows what he did, and why he did it, and wonders about what it means: Is it the same big, fat question raised by the Erismann-Koehler […]
In this 1997 interview, Ed Yong asked Ig Nobel Prize winner Chris McManus about “The fall and rise of lefties in Victorian England“. McManus was awarded the 2003 Ig Nobel Prize for medicine, for his excruciatingly balanced report, “Scrotal Asymmetry in Man and in Ancient Sculpture.” [PUBLISHED IN: Nature, vol. 259, February 5, 1976, p. 426.]
Rolf Zwaan [pictured here], writing in his blog, explains how his (and colleagues’) Ig Nobel Prize-winning study, “Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller: Posture-Modulated Estimation,” came about: In a previous post I alluded to the fact that I had produced an amusing title a few years ago for an article that was published in Psychological Science (it was intended as […]
Rolf Zwaan writes, in his blog, about the experiment that led (among bigger things) to the 2012 Ig Nobel Prize in psychology: I alluded to the fact that I had produced an amusing title a few years ago for an article that was published in Psychological Science (it was intended as a parody on the article titles in that […]