Left and right and hobbies in Greece all existed for a long time before anyone took a long look into whether they might be connected or interrelated. That long look gets a writeup in the study: “Handedness and Hobby Preference,” O. Giotakos, Perceptual and Motor Skills, vol. 98, no. 3, part 1, June 2004, pp. […]
Rightness is big in America, suggests this study done two decades ago: “Right-Handers and Americans Favor Turning to the Right,” Angelique A. Scharine and Michael K. McBeath, Human Factors, vol. 44, no. 2, Summer 2002, pp. 248-56. The authors, at Arizona State University, report: “We tested a finding by E. S. Robinson (1933) that people […]
“It seems axiomatic to assume that handedness is unrelated to actual placement on the political spectrum. Nevertheless, primed by my longstanding research interest in personality and political preference (e.g., McCann, 1997, 2014a, 2014b), I was struck by the rough similarity of a map of the percentage of left-handers in each state in 1986 (McManus, 2009, […]
Does the left armpit smell like the right armpit? 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 armpitty study, with dramatic readings from biologist Christina Agapakis, who has smelled more armpits, mostly for scientific reasons, than most […]
“Our experience of explaining polarimetry to the general public is that they frequently ask how molecules rotate light, which is difficult to explain using non-technical language. Therefore we were keen to find an analogous large scale system which mimicked the polarimeter and used everyday left- and right-handed objects.” – explain Claire Saxon, Scott Brindley, Nic […]
Slime moulds (Physarum polycephalum for example) are quite dexterous when it comes to solving complex 2-D puzzles – their skills having been documented in research which led to the double Ig Nobel prizes (2008 & 2010) awarded to Toshiyuki Nakagaki [full details via here]. Now a new study performed by Alice Dimonte and Victor Erokhin […]
No matter how careful a beetle might be, there’s a fair chance that, sooner or later, it’ll find itself on its back. Raising the question, how does it right itself, i.e. get onto its feet again? For current beetle-righting research turn to volume 28, Issue 2, 2016, of the journal Ecological Psychology where researchers professor […]
This experimental attempt to ride a left-right-swapped bicycle raises a big fat question about how the human brain works. Destin, he of the Smarter Every Day video series, tells and shows what he did, and why he did it, and wonders about what it means: Is it the same big, fat question raised by the Erismann-Koehler […]
If you’re looking for a (documented) example of an occasion when Professor Wright encountered Professor Wrong, then your search is over. One such event happened somewhere around March 1921, at the University of Toronto Winter Short Course for farmers. Here’s an account, in Volume XXI of the University of Toronto Monthly, March 1921, No. 6. […]
Scicurious wrote a nice essay, a while back, about realizing you’ve been wrong: So I posted something the other day on bees and cell phones. The science in the paper itself wasn’t convincing to me, but the other references they pulled out in the discussion made me pull an about face. I thought, hey, maybe the […]