This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Gearing up for happiness — … The news headline says it all: “Toyota has built an EV with a fake transmission, and we’ve driven it – Five minutes behind the wheel, and you’ll be a believer.” This is […]
The research that won an Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize for Volkswagen also involved monkeys watching cartoons while they inhaled automobile fumes — a fact that was not publicly known at the time the prize was awarded. Nor was it known to the Ig Nobel Board of Governors. The monkeys/cartoons news was reported today by Jack […]
Although a considerable body of scholarly work has examined the effects of Helium (2He) on human voice production [see, for example (Helium-assisted) High note research] we are by no means the only animals to have been investigated in this respect – here is a (non-exhaustive) list of examples of other creatures who have squawked, croaked, […]
From time to time, unusual animal behavior comes to the attention of the science community. Now comes this study: “Unusual Behaviour in Grey Woolly Monkeys (Lagothrix cana): Females Breastfeeding Adult Males,” Bárbara Cartagena-Matos, Hilton Ferreira Japyassú, Mariana Cravo-Mota, and Bruna Martins Bezerra, Mammalian Biology-Zeitschrift für Säugetierkunde, vol. 80, no. 1 (2015): 59-62. (Thanks to Ig Nobel Prize […]