Superpowers for baristas

There’s reported progress in the struggle to give baristas (and their bosses, and their boss’s vendors, too) more reliable info about the identities of their coffee beans. Details are in the study “Voltammetric Electronic Tongue and Support Vector Machines for Identification of Selected Features in Mexican Coffee,” by Rocio Berenice Domínguez, Laura Moreno-Barón, Roberto Muñoz, […]

PR headline of week: “Attractive Men Have Less Nasal Bacteria”

This week’s Press Release Headline of the Week is from a press release pumped out for the American Journal of Human Biology: Beauty & Bacteria: Slim, Attractive Men Have Less Nasal Bacteria than Heavy Men (Thanks to investigator Erwin Kompanje for bringing this to our attention.) BONUS: For students with a strong mental stomach: Read […]

The Plunging Nose Tip: Reality or Illusion? (Aesthetic Surgery Journal)

The plunging nose tip is defined (in the aesthetic surgery world) as a nasal “deformity” where the nasal tip descends or “plunges” during smiling. But is the plunging nose tip a ‘real’ phenomenon? A new paper in the Aesthetic Surgery Journal, (January 2014 vol. 34 no. 1 45-55) describes experimental research which examined the syndrome. […]

Cutting Off the Nose to Save the Penis

A provocative study, from the American midwest, about safety: “Cutting Off the Nose to Save the Penis,” Steven M. Schrader, Michael J. Breitenstein, and Brian D. Lowe, Journal of Sexual Medicine, vol. 5, no. 8, 2008, pp. 1932–40. The authors, at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, Cincinnati, Ohio, report [AIR 15:5]: “The […]

A Flying Lizard (extinct) and a Famous Cartoonist (extant)

In answer to the question “How many monofenestratan pterosaurs are named after famous cartoonists?”, Improbable hazards a guess that the answer is :“One”. Being : Cuspicephalus scarfi which is named (say its describers David Martill and Steve Etches of the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Portsmouth, UK) “After artist/cartoonist Gerald […]

Physiology: Why Rudolph’s Nose is Red

A new Dutch study explains the likely physiology of Rudolph the reindeer’s red nose: “Microcirculatory investigations of nasal mucosa in reindeer Rangifer tarandus (Mammalia, Artiodactyla, Cervidae): Rudolph’s nose was overheated,” Ben van der Hoven, Eva Klijn, Michel van Genderen, Willem Schaftenaar, Lisette L. de Vogel, Ditty van Duijn and Erwin J.O. Kompanje (a member of the […]