Professor Haans’ less rubbery hands

Since first described by Botvinick & Cohen in 1998, The Rubber Hand Illusion (RHI) has been extensively investigated. But few researchers have explored the possibility of enhancing the illusion by making the fake hand a little less, shall we say, ‘rubbery’. Prompting Antal Haans, assistant professor of environmental psychology in the Human-Technology Interaction group at […]

Russian research on naked swimmers & wild dolphins

Olympic swimmers owe some of their success to research done by a Russian scientist. Here’s a look  back at our look back at his work: Yuri Glebovich Aleyev used an electric winch to tow naked women under water at speeds of two to four metres per second. Later, his colleagues, when they peered at Aleyev’s […]

Why casinos might ban gamblers who have tatoos

A press release from Northwestern University almost hints at why gambling casinos might decide to ban anyone who sports a tatoo: Researchers from Northwestern University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have developed “tattoo electronics” — wireless electronics so flexible and thin they can be applied to the skin and forgotten. “The blurring of electronics and […]

Gas on Hand

This is one of the few studies on the subject: “Gasoline on Hands: Preliminary Study on Collection and Persistence,” Melinda Darrer, Joelle Jacquemet-Papilloud, and Olivier Delemont, Forensic Science International, vol. 175, no. 2, March 5, 2008, pp. 171–8. [AIR 16:2] (Thanks to Tom Gill for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, who are respectively […]

Improbable Research