Improbable Research

Scientists marvel at how other scientists – the ones who study something other than what they themselves study – give strange meanings to common words.

Evan Shellshear, at Fraunhofer Chalmers Centre in Gothenburg, sent me an example, a study called Fast Robust Automated Brain Extraction.

Shellshear said: “I stumbled across this article somehow [whilst] looking for optimal code to quickly compute the distance between two triangles in three-dimension space for computer games. It sounds almost like something out of a game itself … After careful reading, [the paper] justifies the initially shocking title.”

The author is Stephen M Smith [pictured here] who, back in 2002 when the paper came out, was at the Department of Clinical Neurology at Oxford University’s John Radcliffe Hospital, and is now a professor of biomedical engineering.

Certain details might give you the willies,…

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

In the last decade or so, researchers investigating human preferences for male and female body shapes have turned to a previously under-explored academic resource – in the form of double-page gatefolded magazine spreads. Specifically, the centerfolds of so-called ‘top-shelf’ publications.
For example, researchers at the School of Kinesiology and Health Science, York University, North York, Ontario, Canada have examined – Thinness and body shape of Playboy centerfolds from 1978 to 1998. (Int J Obes Relat Metab Disord. 2001 Apr;25(4):590-2.)

Whilst the Department of Psychology, American University, Washington, The Biological Psychiatry Laboratory, McLean Hospital, Belmont, Massachusetts and the Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts looked at – Cultural Expectations of Muscularity in Men: The Evolution of Playgirl Centerfolds (Int J Eat Disord 29: 90–93, 2001)

Here are some of the people putting together this year’s Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. For lots more people, with biographies and such, click on the picture.

A group of researchers at Medical University of Graz, Austria and Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada invite you to consider cell phones and semen.

You may be dubious about claims that cell phones cause cancer and various other ills. In that you would be in broad company — nearly all of the scientists who carefully looked for such links found little, if any persuasive evidence. But other people are convinced that cell phones spell medical doom.

Now comes the Graz/Queen’s team, with a chain of arguments so provocative, so exciting, that we can all join the authors in leaping to their conclusion.  Their study is:

“Impact of Cell Phone Use on Men’s Semen Parameters,” Thomas Gutschi, Badereddin Mohamad Al-Ali, Rany Shamloul, Karl Pummer and Harald Trummer, Andrologia, vol. 43, 2011, pp. 312–6. The authors, at Medical University of Graz, Austria and Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, explain:

We speculate that mobile phones negatively affect sperm quality in men and may impair male fertility…. We speculate that frequent callers, compared with those who do not use cell phones, are exposed to more stress, which possibly could negatively affect semen quality and impair male fertility.

(Thanks to Ig Nobel Prize winner Richard Wassersug for bringing this to our attention.)

NOTE: The photo displayed here, showing a man using a non-cell telephone, has no direct connection to the subject of the study. Therefore it is possible that an important connection exists, and that the study will hasten the discovery of that connection.

If you like your physics scary-sounding, freighted with impressive phrases and ultimately reassuring, dink deep from this study:

“Ruling Out Bosonic Repulsive Dark Matter,” Zachary Slepian and Jeremy Goodman, arXiv:1109.3844v1, September 18, 2011. The authors explain:

“We develop the model first proposed by Goodman (2000) and derive the equation of state at finite temperature. Isothermal spherical halo models indicate a Bose-Einstein condensed core surrounded by a non-degenerate envelope, with an abrupt density drop marking the boundary between the two phases. Comparing this feature with observed rotation curves constrains the collisionality of our model’s DM particle, and Bullet Cluster measurements constrain the scattering cross section. Both ultimately can be cast as constraints on the particle’s mass. We find these two constraints cannot be satisfied simultaneously…”

(HT Rig Gilman)