Dr Richard Stephens, of Keele University, UK, was a co-recipient of the 2010 Ig Nobel Peace Prize for confirming the widely held belief that swearing relieves pain. Since then, his work on swearing has continued, and he’s the lead author of a 2018 paper for the journal Psychology of Sport and Exercise (Volume 35, March 2018, Pages […]
Tag: strength
Tongue-Strengthening Exercises for Rats
Investigator Ben Broughton writes: “I came across this paper while looking to settle an argument about whether muscles need hinges to produce significant power. The researchers fabricated an apparatus to measure the force of a rat’s tongue. The paper explains that with training, a young rat can increase the force its tongue can produce by 250%, […]
The spider and the 747
It is suggested that one strand of pencil thick spider silk can stop a Boeing 747 in flight. So says the study “Molecular spring: from spider silk to silkworm silk,” Xiang Wu, Xiang-Yang Liu, Ning Du, Gang-Qin Xu, Bao-Wen Li, arxiv.org/abs/0902.3518, 2009. The study tries to explain why this is so (or at least approximately […]