How is a computer programmer like a dead salmon?

One statement, at least, in a June 5, 2020 press release would be hard to dispute: “Our goal was to develop a completely new approach to better understand the cognitive processes involved in programming.” The press release, issued by the Chemnitz University of Technology, comes with the headline “Programming ‘language’: Brain scans reveal coding uses […]

Dead salmon, again in the service of science

Just a few years after dead salmon helped neuroscientists analyze data more carefully, other dead salmon are helping other scientists better understand how trees grow. The neuroscience salmon figured in the Ig Nobel Prize-winning study “Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An argument for multiple comparisons correction,” Craig M. Bennett, Abigail […]

Reduced Anxiety in Forensic Inpatients after a Long-Term Intervention with Atlantic Salmon

This is, so far as we are aware, the first published study that concentrates on anxiety levels in forensic inpatients after a long-term intervention with Atlantic salmon: “Reduced Anxiety in Forensic Inpatients after a Long-Term Intervention with Atlantic Salmon,” Anita L. Hansen, Gina Olson, Lisbeth Dahl, David Thornton, Bjørn Grung, Ingvild E. Graff, Livar Frøyland, […]

More Bite than an Old Saw? A Saw Made with Shark Teeth

Francie Diep’s article “Watch a Power Saw Made with Shark Teeth Slice Through Salmon“, in Popular Science magazine, is well headlined, and has a video that shows a power saw, made with shark teeth, slicing through salmon. The research Diep describes was itself described by the researchers at a meeting earlier this month: “Jawzall: Effects of […]

The Case of the Bagel, the Bite, and the Ticking Clock

“A New, Occasional Instrument for Measuring Marital Quality: The Time Required to Make a Cream Cheese and Salmon Bagel Following Funnel-Web Spider Bite,” Gary Walter, Medical Journal of Australia, vol. 171, nos. 11–12, December 6–20, 1999, pp. 674–5. [AIR 16:2] The author is a psychiatrist in Concord West, NSW, Australia. His firsthand account includes a […]