The special Viruses and Pandemics issue of the magazine—Annals of Improbable Research—has been released into the populace. Among its delights you will find: Pandemic Dining: Gelato, Candy, Lettuce, Frozen Meat Virus Toiletometry Pandemic-Fingering: Manning and His Digits Anti-Pandemic Drinking and Drugging Pandemic-Handling: Toilet Paper, Horror, and the Wealthy Beauty and Masks in Pandemic Time Eyeglasses […]
Tag: virus
Training Ferrets to Recognize Virus Odor in Duck Droppings
The effort to train ferrets to recognize virus odor in mallard duck droppings may be paying off, suggests a new study. The study is: “Biodetection of a specific odor signature in mallard feces associated with infection by low pathogenic avian influenza A virus,” Glen J. Golden, Meredith J. Grady, Hailey E. McLean, Susan A. Shriner, […]
COVID Vaccination and Fried-Chicken-Craving
A colleague in El Paso, Texas, writes: “I received a COVID vaccination today. By the time I was released to go home after receiving the shot, I had an unusual and insatiable desire for fried chicken. I had to make a detour to a chicken place on the way home. This [the video, of Doug […]
Ig Nobel Prize winner Trump teaches a new lesson
Donald Trump, one of the nine co-winners of the 2020 Ig Nobel Prize for Medical Education is in news headlines worldwide yet again, for his educational endeavors with the Covid-19 virus. The Washington Post reports today (December 11, 2020): White House orders FDA chief to authorize Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine Friday or submit his resignation In the […]
Today in Fluid Dynamics: “Can a Toilet Promote Virus Transmission?”
Pressure from the pandemic is bringing an urgent flow of partial information about the safety-or-danger of everyday activities. That flow brings us this new study: “Can a Toilet Promote Virus Transmission? From a Fluid Dynamics Perspective Featured,” Yun-yun Li, Ji-Xiang Wang, and Xi Chen, Physics of Fluids, vol. 32, 2020, 065107. The authors, at Southeast […]
Finger-Food Hygiene Attachments [new patent]
US-based inventor Peter Delgrosso points out that consuming finger foods can sometimes be a hygienically suboptimal process – with a (timely) reminder that, in the act of eating finger foods ; “Germs, bacteria, and other harmful elements (e.g., microorganisms, viruses, chemicals, etc.) on our hands and fingers can then make their way into the body.” […]
Masked and Un-Masked Spittle Produced When One Says “Stay Healthy”
The biomedical race to understand and tame the COVID-19 virus proceeds rapidly, drop by drop. This new spittle study is the very latest addition to the literature: “Visualizing Speech-Generated Oral Fluid Droplets with Laser Light Scattering,” Philip Anfinrud, Valentyn Stadnytskyi, Christina E. Bax, and Adriaan Bax, New England Journal of Medicine, April 15, 2020. (Thanks […]
Saying “FACE”, in gatherings in pandemic times
How to get people to pay more attention to NOT touching their eyes, nostrils, or mouth? We invited people, in a gathering, to say “FACE” whenever they saw a speaker touching a hand to their face. And most of those people said “FACE”, cheerily—appreciating that they were talking to themselves as much as to the […]
Is Facial Hair Biologically-Hazardous When a Pandemic Looms?
As a newly discovered corona virus spreads through an increasingly anxious world, advice is being offered—and sometimes mocked—about the mundane-seeming question of facial hair. The basic safety question was investigated more than fifty years ago—and that investigation was honored ten years ago with an Ig Nobel Prize. Also: Today the Trump administration took a new […]
“Overtaken by curiosity” Users Really Do Plug in USB Drives (which) They Find
“We investigate the anecdotal belief that end users will pick up and plug in USB flash drives they find by completing a controlled experiment in which we drop 297 flash drives on a large university campus. We find that the attack is effective with an estimated success rate of 45–98% and expeditious with the first […]