Improbable Research

Football games vary measurably from city to city because of down-to-Earth differences in the air pressures, temperatures and other physical conditions. But those differences are slight in comparison to those described in a University of Leicester study called Association Football on Mars.

Calum James Meredith, David Boulderstone and Simon Clapton published the analysis early this year in the university’s Journal ofPhysics Special Topics….

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

The study “Kansas is Flatter Than a Pancake“, described ever so briefly during the Ig Nobel show at the University of Dundee this past March (2011), seen in this video snippet:

It’s time for a look at Keith the wombat. The narrator says “Keith doesn’t like to eat the way we do.” This curious statement can be taken at least two different ways. See if you can figure out which meaning was intended:

(Thanks to investigator Danielle Wang for bringing this to our attention.)

When different species meet, interesting things can happen. Here’s a case in point:

“Digestion of herring by indigenous bacteria in the minke whale forestomach,” Monica A. Olsen, Tove H. Aagnes and Svein D. Mathiesen, Applied and Environmental Microbiology, December 1994, p. 4445-4455. The authors, at the University of Tromso, Norway, report:
“Northeastern Atlantic minke whales (Balaenoptera acutorostrata) have a multichambered stomach system which includes a nonglandular forestomach… Scanning electron microscopic examinations revealed large numbers of bacteria, surrounded by a glycocalyx, attached to partly digested food particles in the forestomach. These data support the hypothesis that symbiotic microbial digestion occurs in the forestomach and that the bacteria are indigenous to minke whales.”

“….one evening, after working at CERN, I stopped on my way back to my apartment to visit some friends living in Meyrin where I smoked some illegal substance. Later, when I got back to my apartment and continued working on our paper, I had a sudden flash that the famous diagrams look like penguins. So we put the name into our paper, and the rest, as they say, is history.”

The speaker is John Ellis, FRS, currently Clerk Maxwell Professor of Theoretical Physics at King’s College London, and he is describing a crucial stage in the origin of Penguin Diagrams back in 1977. (details here, page 7)

More than thirty years have passed since their inception, but now there’s a new twist – the Warped Penguin Diagram. They are described in a new paper from professor Csaba Csáki, and colleagues at the Institute for High Energy Phenomenology, Newman Laboratory of Elementary Particle Physics, Cornell University, NY, and they assist in the visualisation of loop-induced magnetic dipole operators in the Randall-Sundrum model of a warped extra dimension with anarchic bulk fermions and an IR brane-localized Higgs.
For full details see:Warped Penguins, published on April 1st , 2011 in Physical Review D , Volume 83 , Issue 7,

Notes:

1) For more background on the genesis of the original penguin diagrams, and the parts played by Melissa Franklin, (now Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics; and Chair, Department of Physics, at Harvard) and a dartboard, see the Quantum Diaries Survivor blog.

2) The illustration shows a ‘traditional’ penguin diagram [top] and a ‘warped’ penguin diagram [below] which, for comparison, Improbable has overlayed onto an image of a real penguin (photo courtesy NASA).

3) The paper also introduces the Yin-Yang and Double Rainbow topologies of two-loop diagrams.