Improbable Research

Though some prefer the Manchester Gesture Centre, others point instead to the Berlin Gesture Center.

Scientists like to tell what they have observed. Some scientists, sometimes, also offer up an amusing, possibly wild guess about exactly what it means. Sometimes a reporter writes up the possibly wild guess as if it were attached to reality by some sturdy chain of reasoning.

A March 24, 2011 CNN report tells about a scientist guessing at his newly reported research:

Frequent churchgoers frequently fatter

[F]requent religious involvement appears to almost double the risk of obesity compared with little or no involvement. What is unclear from the new research is why religion might be associated with overeating.

“Churches pay more attention to obvious vices like smoking or drinking,” said Matthew Feinstein [pictured here], lead author of the research and fourth-year medical student at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “Our best guess about why is that…more frequent participation in church is associated with good works and people may be rewarding themselves with large meals that are more caloric in nature than we would like.”

Drinking beer may mitigate some of the dire medical effects of radiation, say many hope-filled twitterings from Japan. Radiation is much on people’s minds because of the recent earthquake-induced nuclear power-plant problems.

Discussion centers on a 2005 report from Japan’s National Institute of Radiological Sciences. (HT Mark Schreiber.) The report is written in Japanese. A partial machine-translation renders this into English as:

Check the ingredients NIRS beer ・ radioprotective effect in mice demonstrated radioprotective effect in human blood cells and is up to 34% TUS research team also

NIRS (Yasuhito Sasaki Chairman), particle beam therapy is a biological research group in collaboration with the Radiation Laboratory of Pharmacy and Life Science Tokyo University of Science, human blood cells and that the protective effect of the radiation component of beer In experiments using mice revealed….

There is also earlier published research on the question, including this study, which is available free online:

“Drinking Beer Reduces Radiation-induced Chromosome Aberrations in Human Lymphocytes,” Manami Monobe and Koichi Ando, Journal of Radiation Research, vol. 43, no. 3, 2002, pp. 237-245. The authors, respectively at Chiba University and at the National Institute of Radiological Sciences, report:

“We here investigated and reported the effects of beer drinking on radiation-induced chromosome aberrations in blood lymphocytes. Human blood that was collected either before or after drinking a 700 ml beer was in vitro irradiated with 200 kVp X rays or 50 keV/μm carbon ions. The relation between the radiation dose and the aberration frequencies (fragments and dicentrics) was significantly (p < 0.05) lower for lymphocytes collected 3 h after beer drinking than those before drinking. Fitting the dose response to a linear quadratic model showed that the alpha term of carbon ions was significantly (p < 0.05) decreased by beer drinking…. It is concluded that beer could contain non-ethanol elements that reduce the chromosome damage of lymphocytes induced by high-LET radiation.”

Although there are more than five thousand recorded species of mammals, comparatively few have a scholarly journal exclusively* devoted to their scientific study. As an example, see the Journal of Camel Practice and Research a publication of Camel Publishing House, based in Bikaner, India. The journal’s editor, Dr. Tarun Kumar Gahlot, also maintains a dedicated website, where non-specialists are invited to ‘ know-your-camel ‘ – and discover some unusual facts. For example :
• “Camel can take sea water without any side effects and can excrete sea water with a salt concentration almost double that of sea water.”
• “Camels can withstand more than 3 weeks without drinking water and continue to eat.”
• “The urine production is greatly reduced in the dehydrated camel.”

Also don’t miss a previously featured Improbable article – ‘Camel urine – its use in medicine’

* Note : Despite its name, the journal also occasionally presents articles on Llamas, Alpacas, Vicuñas, and Guanacos.

In case you’ve wanted to build your own scanning electron microscope, but have not yet begun, here’s one option:

Ben Krasnow made a video explaining how he built his:

(HT @RBaguley and @hackaday)