Improbable Research

Who is a new Mythbusters — meticulously debunking pernicious (or just plain silly) myths about science? A report by William Weir in the Hartford Courant — in his profile of Pepsi’s science laboratory (which is in New Haven, Connecticut), reveals the secret:

Eric Milgram, senior fellow at the lab, used to work in the pharmaceutical industry. “I always thought pharmaceutical research was the most challenging research that you could do, because it’s very difficult to find a new drug, but in some ways, it’s easier than what we do here,” he says. The focus at the Pepsi lab is nutrition, which Milgram says has always been a fuzzy concept…. As a result, questions about food abound….

“You can think of us as a sort of the ‘Myth Busters.’ ” he says.

(Thanks to investigator Jesse Eppers for bringing this to our attention. Thanks to Alice Kaswell for assembling the symbolic image.)

BONUS: The Pepsi-Cola Company of the Philippines was awarded an Ig Nobel Peace Prize in 1993 for sponsoring a contest to create a millionaire, and then announcing the wrong winning number, thereby inciting and uniting 800,000 riotously expectant winners, and bringing many warring factions together for the first time in their nation’s history.

This week’s Classic Louse Poem is Robert Burn’s “To A Louse. On seeing one on a lady’s bonnet at church.” It begins:

Ha! Whare ye gaun, ye crowlin ferlie?
Your impudence protects you sairly,
I canna say but ye strut rarely
Owre gauze and lace,
Tho’ faith! I fear ye dine but sparely
On sic a place….

The full poem, and a translation into so-called “standard English”, are on the Robert Burns Club web site.

For Marcel Proust, one of the after-effects of eating asparagus, was that it  “…transforms my chamber-pot into a flask of perfume.’’ This unusual phenomenon is well known by a (disputed) percentage of asparagus-eaters who are lucky (or unlucky) enough to be able to nasaly detect the vegetable’s odorous metabolites in their (or others’) urine. And it has been the subject of fairly intense scientific scrutiny for more than a century.

The first formal study came from Wilhelm Marceli Nencki, who, in 1891, published his paper -  ‘Ueber das vorkommen von methylmercaptan in menschlichen harn nach spargelgenuss’. (Arch Exp Path Pharmak. 28:206–209) And, extraordinarily perhaps, to this day full agreement in the scientific community regarding the exact nature of the phenomenon is still wanting. For example, only a (disputed) percentage of people actually excrete the odorant(s), and the biological basis for the inability to produce the metabolite in detectable quantities is unknown. More perplexing still, as mentioned above, not everyone can smell the excreted chemical – even if it is present.
Progress towards a full description is still being made however,

As New Year’s day approaches, take a look back to Peter Tyrer’s words of advice, in 2007, to prospective authors for the British Journal of Psychiatry:

A NEW YEAR MESSAGE TO ALL OUR AUTHORS

No, your failure to have your paper accepted for publication is not because you have offended me or another of the editors. Nor is it because you made rude remarks from the floor about that terrible paper I presented at that international conference, or that we only accept this kind of paper from countries with a gross national product of less than the Isle of Man, or that my institution is in perpetual combat with yours because you open your eggs at the blunter end, or that you missed me out on the invitations to your wedding/inauguration/party/shindig. I have not turned you down because your articles only seem to be written with the apparent intention of discrediting all the research I have ever done, or ever will do, or that I regard qualitative papers as a scientific joke, or that papers on PTSD give me the symptoms of the syndrome, or that I feel your paper is so old hat it should be in Henry Rollin’s section One Hundred Years Ago.

The answer is much simpler. I and my colleagues, in our honest and detached way, have turned you down because we have too little space to publish all the good papers we receive. It is as simple as that.

The December issue of mini-AIR just went out. Topics include: Odd Balls; Agony-of-the-Leaves Tea Insights; UK Tour Cities; Stinkbugs-in-Cotton Competition; Accuracy-of-100.4% Poet; Singers/Musicians for our Cambridge Science Festival Show; A Bid to Identify a Skull; etc.

Mel [pictured here] says, “It’s swell.”

(mini-AIR is the simplest way to keep informed about Improbable and Ig Nobel news and events. Just fill in the wee form, and mini-AIR will be emailed to you every month)