Baseball / Medical Skills: The Hidden Ball Trick

This decades-old medical report has received surprisingly little attention from the baseball community. Baseball season is about to begin again, in the USA. Please alert anyone to whom this study could be useful: “An Unusual Foreign Body in the Rectum—A Baseball: Report of a Case,” M.P. McDonald and D. Rosenthal, Diseases of the Colon and […]

Ministerial Exploration: Ozone Up the Rectum in Brazil

The pandemic is inspiring a few individuals to new depths of innovation. The English translation of this headline is: “Minister of Health meets with supporters of ozone use in the rectum against covid-19“. The August 5, 2020 news report appears in the Brazilian magazine CartaCapital: The article begins by saying: “The interim Minister of Health, […]

Further findings from rectums: A look back at what was in behinds

Barry Petchevsky performed his annual data-gathering exercise “What Did We Get Stuck In Our Rectums Last Year?” in Deadspin: All reports are taken from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s database of emergency room visits, and they are occasionally not for the faint of spirit…. GOLF BALL PEANUT BUTTER JAR SPRAY BOTTLE CURTAIN ROD “STUCK A TOY UP […]

And Now, a Needle in the Rectum (podcast #97)

What do doctors do when they find a needle in a patient’s rectum? 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 oh-look-there’s-a-needle-in-this-patient’s-rectum study. Yale/MIT/Harvard biomedical researcher Chris Cotsapas lends his voice, and his scientific expertise, and his opinions —with dramatic readings from a research […]

Boys Will Be Boys: Eat or Be Eaten, and a Pestle

What’s the deal with people who yearn to eat or to be eaten — to literally consume, or to literally be consumed — during sex. And what’s a good example of an early medical report about a pestle found in a rectum? Those questions are addressed in studies that are profiled (in the column “Boys Will Be Boys: […]

Podcast #4: The rectum of the Bishop of Durham

The rectum of the Bishop of Durham is on display in this week’s Improbable Research podcast. The podcast is all about research that makes people LAUGH, then THINK — research about anything and everything, from everywhere —research that’s good or bad, important or trivial, valuable or worthless. CBS distributes it, both on the new CBS Play.it web site, and on iTunes. […]