French medical journalist Marc Gozlan reminds us that the most viewed article in the history of the British Medical Journal led to the creation of what became “The most viewed medical video in the world“. Here is that video: Where did that come from? Here’s the story of how that video came to be, and […]
Tag: MRI
“MRI Sex: The most viewed article in BMJ”, after 20 years
An editor of the British Medical Journal (The BMJ) told us a few years ago that one particular BMJ paper, published in 1999, has—from the moment that paper was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in the year 2000— consistently drawn more web visitors—many, many more—than anything—anything—else published in the history of The BMJ. Everything every […]
An Empirical, 21st Century Evaluation of Phrenology
The old technique of judging people by examining their head bumps gets a new looking-at, in this study: “An Empirical, 21st Century Evaluation of Phrenology,” Oiwi Parker Jones, Fidel Alfaro-Almagro, and Saad Jbabdi, bioRxiv 243089, 2018. The authors, at the University of Oxford, UK, explain: Phrenology was a nineteenth century endeavour to link personality traits […]
The insides of a singer singing, and a talker talking
The insides of a singer singing are on display in this video, produced by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry. And here’s a look inside a talker talking: The Max Planck Institute is celebrating some of the work that made this kind of video possible. In particular, they say: The European Patent […]
Using an MRI scanner as a guitar amp and speakers
Dr Donald McRobbie, who is director and head of magnetic resonance physics at the Radiological Sciences Unit of Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, UK, is one of the few, perhaps the only, researcher(s) to have plugged an electric guitar into an MRI scanner and used the scanner as amp and speakers. Improbable has been unable […]
Pek on Sex in London at The Curious World of Radiology on July 14
On July 14th, 2015, BIR – the British Institute of Radiology – presents a special program, titled ‘The Curious World of Radiology’: An evening intended to astonish and amaze, this interesting selection of talks will appeal to your curious nature and take you into an undiscovered world of radiology. Encompassing art, history, and scientific research, […]
Three million looks at sex-in-an-MRI video
Medical students and other interested persons have now made more than three million (3,000,000) examinations of the historic, Ig Nobel Prize-winning, first-ever MRI video of human sexual organs performing their traditional role. The 2000 Ig Nobel Prize for medicine was awarded to Willibrord Weijmar Schultz, Pek van Andel, and Eduard Mooyaart of Groningen, The Netherlands, and Ida Sabelis of Amsterdam, for their illuminating report, “Magnetic Resonance […]
Ballet Dancers doing splits in an MRI scanner [hip study]
Quite a number of professional ballet dancers suffer from medical conditions brought about by their requirement to perform very extreme leg movements. To accurately evaluate such problems physicians would, ideally, like to be able to carry out MRI scans of ballet dancers whilst performing the splits. [that’s the dancers, not the physicians] And, impractical as […]
MRI: tool use progresses from medicine to pork pie development
A tool often used to assess the quality of, or damage to, human bodies can also be used to assess the quality of, or damage to, an object that will be ingested into one of those human bodies. Details appear in this study: “Magnetic Resonance Imaging: A Tool for Pork Pie Development,” Adam P. Gaunte, Robert […]
Science royalty, yes. And/but there are those retractions….
The Retraction Watch blog writes: Authors of retracted sex paper won Ig Nobel for MRI study of coitus — and had another retraction Yesterday we reported on the retraction for data misuse and plagiarism of a 21-year-old paper on sex and female cancer patients. Turns out we missed a couple of rather interesting details about the […]