The pleasures of watching ironically-enjoyed movies (new study)

“So-called ‘trash films’ do not stand in opposition to taste and education. Quite the contrary, they are often watched by people with an above-average education and interest in culture.” – informs a recent online article from Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, München, Germany. The ‘delight-in-cheapness’ they are referring to is analysed in a paper for the journal Poetics Volume […]

Frogs: Trash exits via the bladder

New research about things that get under frogs’s skin, and what can happen to those things: “Removing the rubbish: frogs eliminate foreign objects from the body cavity through the bladder,” Christopher R. Tracy, Keith A. Christian, Lorrae J. McArthur and C. M. Gienger, Biology Letters. published online 2010. (Thanks to investigator Barry Pinshow for bringing […]

Tidy Swiss garbage collector up, up in the sky

Just as certain computer scientists and engineers dream of doing better garbage collection in computers (for a dream come true, see Microsoft’s “Fundamentals of Garbage Collection“), scientists and engineers at Ecole Polytechnique de Lausanne dream of doing better garbage collection in space. Dead satellites. Detritus from collisions between now-dead satellites and whatever slammed into them. Junk that […]