Experimental Evidence That Stripes Do Not Cool Zebras, by Ig Nobel Winners

The prize-winning researchers who discovered why white-haired horses are the most horsefly-proof horses has now probed a classic mystery about zebra stripes. They published this report: “Experimental Evidence That Stripes Do Not Cool Zebras,” Gábor Horváth, Ádám Pereszlényi, Dénes Száz, András Barta, Imre M. Jánosi, Balázs Gerics, and Susanne Åkesson, Scentific Reports, vol. 8, no. 9351, 2018. […]

Progress in Automatic Giraffe Recognition

The Forsyth / Fleck ‘Human Nude Detector’ system attracted widespread media attention late last century – featuring, for example, in the pages of Wired magazine. (Paper for Reference: Forsyth, D.A. and Fleck, M. M., “Automatic Detection of Human Nudes,” International Journal of Computer Vision , 32 , 1, 63-77, August, 1999). Less well publicised though […]

Effect of zebra stripes on horseflies

In a relative sense, zebra stripes repel horseflies. That’s the latest discovery reported by Gábor Horváth [pictured here], who discovered that white horses attract fewer flies, and that Vikings knew a thing or two about how to use light for ship navigation. For details, see the study: “Polarotactic tabanids find striped patterns with brightness and/or polarization modulation least […]