Dan Simons, psychology professor and Ig Nobel Prize winner (together with Chris Chabris, for the invisible-gorilla study) casts a cool, appraising eye on a cold-shower-and-loneliness study, and looks at the way other investigators have looked at that study. Simons writes, on his blog: Replication, Retraction, and Responsibility Congrats/thanks to Brent Donnellan, Joe Cesario, and Rich […]
Tag: temperature
Planetary Tea, Relatively (the physics thereof)
British tea preparation now includes preparation for possible visits to other planets. This study presents some of the relevant calculations: “Tea Time in the Solar System,” Hannah Natasha Lerman, Benedict Irwin, and Peter Hicks, Physics Special Topics, vol. 12, no. 1, 2013. (Thanks to investigator Nigel Rawson for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, […]
Durian and paracetamol, mixed in rats
What happens when, for whatever reason, you feed both durian — the fruit with a smell that overpowers some people — and the painkiller paracetamol, mixed in rats, and from time to time take the rectal temperature of those rats? This study explores that question: “Hyperthermic effects of Durio zibethinus and its interaction with paracetamol,” […]
Experiments with inflatable & other life-size dolls
A generic life-size doll, with no modifications, was the key element in at least one unplanned experiment — the experiment documented in a 1993 monograph called Transmission of Gonorrhoea Through an Inflatable Doll, published in the journal Genitourinary Medicine. But generally, scientists who conduct planned experiments that rely on life-size dolls prefer to carefully optimise, or […]