Humor

Carbon Monoxide – dubbed “The Silent Killer” is a colourless and odourless gas – highly toxic to human beings. It’s a common pollutant in city air, coming mainly from vehicle exhaust emissions. But what if “CO, in small doses, is a boon to the well-being of urbanites, better equipping them to deal with environmental stress”? Recent research from professor Izhak Schnell and colleagues* at the Geography and Human Environment Department of Tel Aviv University, (published in the journal Environmental Monitoring and Assessment) indicates that : “… low levels of the poisonous gas can have a…

“Converging evidence indicates that blirtatiousness is unique in its ability to amplify people’s qualities, making these qualities more readily observable to perceivers.” Blirtatiousness in this case means the propensity to blurt* – bearing in mind that : “For some people, no sooner do thoughts come to mind than they fly out of their mouth.” One of the very few formal scientific studies to look at the psychological consequences of blurting was performed in 2001 of the University of Texas at Austin. Authors William B. Swann and Peter J. Rentfrow not only organised a complex series of…

I’ve already mentioned the nonsensical paper “published” in (surprise, surprise) arXiv in which the authors claim that the origin of life occurred long before the origin of the Earth based on the application of Moore’s Law to DNA. I won’t go into all the reasons that this is silly — for that, you can see critiques by PZ Myers and Massimo Pigliucci. Suffice it to say that the data, the analysis, and the interpretation are all problematic. Notably, the authors present this figure, which more or less sums up what is wrong with the entire paper. As I saw this, I couldn’t help but feel like it…

A team from the School of Family and Consumer Sciences at Eastern Illinois University have discovered a reliable method of persuading people to eat up to 50% less pistachio nuts – just leave them in their shells. Their paper on the subject : In-shell pistachio nuts reduce caloric intake compared to shelled nuts (published in the October 2011 issue of the journal Appetite) not only confirms the hypothesis that “…consuming in-shell pistachios, compared to shelled pistachios, causes individuals to consume less.” But also offers a highly plausible explanation for the effect : “The…

Some readers may well feel themselves in the dark when it comes to the usage of the interjection ‘oh’ in English and its translation in Catalan. Thus they could find a 2007 article published in the Catalan Journal of Linguistics, (Vol. 6, pp 117-136) of help. ‘The translation of oh in a corpus of dubbed sitcoms‘ is authored by  Dr. Anna Matamala, who is a Professora titular d’universitat, at the Departament de Traducció i d’Interpretació of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain. The Professora undertook the study to examine the functions of the interjection ‘oh‘ in an…

“The stereotype of women’s limited parking skills is deeply anchored in modern culture.” But has rarely been scientifically investigated, prompting Claudia Wolf, M.Sc. and Sebastian Ocklenburg M.Sc. and colleagues at the Fakultät für Psychologie, Institut für Kognitive Neurowissenschaft, Abteilung Biopsychologie, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Germany, to perform an experimental study. 65 participants (30 women, 35 men) were tasked with parking an Audi A6 (automatic) in both bay-parking and parallel-parking manoeuvres in a closed-off multi-storey carpark. And, perhaps reinforcing the stereotype…

“The modern drive towards mobility and wireless devices is motivating intensive research in energy harvesting technologies.” say two research fellows at Cranfield University in the UK, who are  currently examining the question – ‘Why not harvest energy from people’s knees?’Building on their previous research into plucked piezoelectric bimorphs for energy harvesting applications, Dr. Michele Pozzi and Dr. Meiling Zhu from the Department of Materials, School of Applied Sciences, at Cranfield present a new practical knee-driven application in the journal Smart Materials and Structures, Vol…

Before continuing, please bear in mind that : “The opinions or assertions contained herein are the private views of the authors and are not to be construed as official or as reflecting the views of the US Department of the Army, the US Department of Defense, the Department of the Navy or naval services at large.” The caveat refers to a case note in the medical journal Endoscopy, regarding the pros and cons of self administered coffee enemas – specifically, hot ones. The article, which is co-authored by practitioners from the Department of Gastroenterology, National Naval Medical Center,…

There are currently a number of research teams worldwide working towards the implementation of bionic heads and faces which can attempt to express human emotions, however “… most of them can not express continuous changing expressions effectively, and they just express limited pre-existing emotional state.” explain the developers of a new Chinese Bionic Head. Lun Xie, Zhiliang Wang, and Jiaming Xu of the State Key Laboratory of Robotics and System, Harbin Institute of Technology and the School of Information Engineering, University of Science and Technology, Beijing, present “… a procedure…

“Previous studies of slithering have rested on the assumption that snakes slither by pushing laterally against rocks and branches.” explain a joint research team from the Applied Mathematics Laboratory, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, of New York University and the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Biology, at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Suspecting that this overview of limbless locomotion might be an oversimplification, the team decided to probe the complex mathematics and mechanics underlying snake slithering in a series of experimental measurements with…