The first (documented) version of the famous ‘Duck-Rabbit’ illusion is an unattributed drawing from the 23 October 1892 issue of the German Humour Magazine Fliegende Blätter, Since 1892, many thousands of people have struggled to decide whether the image is a duck or a rabbit. Results are about 50/50, with viewers seeing either a duck […]
Tag: rabbit
Banana skins and rabbit cartilage mucus – with an Ig Nobel connection
Kiyoshi Mabuchi, Kensei Tanaka, Daichi Uchijima and Rina Sakai, were jointly awarded the 2014 Ig Nobel Physics Prize for measuring the amount of friction between a shoe and a banana skin, and between a banana skin and the floor, when a person steps on a banana skin that’s on the floor. REFERENCE: “Frictional Coefficient under […]
Bunny Facial Features Cuteness Survey
Naomi Harvey and colleagues at and around the University of Nottingham and Nottingham Trent University are collecting opinions about bunny cuteness. They invite anyone who has such opinions to take their Rabbit Facial Features Survey: The aim of this study is to assess people’s preference for rabbit facial features, to help us gain an understanding […]
Carrots, carrots, carrots, in a rabbit
Having looked at a case of too much carrot in a man, let us now peruse a rabbit: “Hyperostotic polyarthropathy in a rabbit‐a suspected case of chronic hypervitaminosis A from a diet of carrots,” J. L. Frater, Australian Veterinary Journal, vol. 79, no. 9, 2001, pp. 608-611. The author, at the Unviersity of Melbourne, reports: […]
Bye-bye bunny paper: Rabbit phone sex study retracted
Alexander Lerchl sent us this note: In 2010 you wrote a piece [in the Guardian] on a paper by Salama et al. about the effects of mobile phone electromagnetic fields on rabbits’ sex life. I read it just now since it was mentioned in Esowatch. Actually he published three papers with co-authors who were not informed about […]
Rabbit Rotation: Pleasing and not
We’ve seen that dog rotation can be pleasing (as in the instance we described recently) or not (as in the instance described even more recently). But what of rabbit rotation? Here’s one instance that, one can infer, was not terribly pleasing: “Changes in animal reactivity under the influence of prolonged rotation,” N.I. Arlashchenko and A.A. […]
Effect of mobile phones on rabbit sex
Lest anyone wonder why they studied the effect of mobile phones on rabbits’ sex lives, Nader Salama, Tomoteru Kishimoto, Hiro-Omi Kanayama and Susumu Kagawa spelled out their reasons. Many scientists had tried (though for the most part failed) to prove that repeatedly holding a mobile phone against a person’s head causes damage to the brain. […]
Europe puts a rabbit on the moon
From New Scientist‘s Feedback column: AN ARTICLE in London newspaper The Daily Telegraph about the first images from the European Space Agency’s orbiting Planck observatory ended with the paragraph: “The telescope is looking at the heat left behind by the big bang. It is a job comparable to measuring the body heat of a rabbit […]