Improbable Research

Ryan Phillips has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. He says:

I am a first year Pharmacology graduate student at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and a member of the MD/PhD program.  I use capillary electrophoresis to measure enzyme activity in single cells, with the goal of developing new technologies for guiding the treatment of cancer.

Ryan Phillips, LFHCfS
Graduate Student
Pharmacology
University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA

Lawrence Souder of Drexel University found a new use for Richard Wassersug‘s Ig Nobel Prize winning study “On the Comparative Palatability of Some Dry-Season Tadpoles from Costa Rica” [Published in The American Midland Naturalist, vol. 86, no. 1, July 1971, pp. 101-9.] ” Souder made a PowerPoint file in which the palatability study becomes a writing instruction tool:

The Oxford Gallery Of Blackboards collects and shows images of blackboards.

Nearly all of them display writing, some of which is legible.

Jen St. Onje has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. She says:

I am interested in the neural circuits mediating decision making about risks and rewards and how these circuits & behaviours are disrupted by brain damage, disease and drug use. My master’s thesis examined the role of dopamine functioning in a rodent model of risk-based decision making. in highschool, my hair changed from straight to curly so who knows what the future will bring for these locks!

Jen St. Onge, MA,  LFHCfS
PhD Student in Behavioural Neuroscience
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Spurred by nice media coverage, “De eendenman” (The Duck Guy), Ig Nobel winner Kees Moeliker‘s new (and first) book, was reprinted almost immediately after its official publication date (which was just three days ago!). In celebration, the Natural History Museum Rotterdam, were Moeliker is curator, has mounted a nice little exhibition that shows most specimens that are featured in the book: a decapitated pigeon, a rail that died in a church, the iron nest of a pigeon, a hen pheasant that changed her sex and the 25 pubic lice that were recently collected in the few remaining pieces of natural habitat (in the Netherlands).

And making its first real appearance as a publicly exhibited item (after previously dwelling in the back rooms, with an occasional journey to other palces where it was shown but fleetingly) is NMR 9989-00232, the victim in the first scientifically recorded case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard duck. “In the thirteen years of his stuffed stage, the duck was never on display before, except for a few minutes on Dead Duck Day“, said Moeliker.