Improbable Research

For New Year’s Eve, a traditional song: Beaker’s Ode to Joy:

BONUS: David Attenborough’s rendition of “What a Wonderful World” (HT Margo Howard and Ann Crichton-Harris):

BONUS: “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?”

The man [pictured here] who was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for using magnets to levitate a frog (a feat he accomplished together with a man who already had a knighthood) and then ten years later was awarded a Nobel Prize for having used scotch tape to tease graphene layers from a pencil, has now been awarded a knighthood. Rule Britannia.

Some oddities from the air and the sea:

A new study about what got Into Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” birds:

“Mystery behind Hitchcock’s birds,” Sibel Bargu [pictured here], Mary W. Silver, Mark D. Ohman, Claudia R. Benitez-Nelson and David L. Garrison, Nature Geoscience, vol. 5, nos. 2–3, 2012. Published online 22 December 2011.

“On 18 August 1961, a Californian newspaper reported that thousands of ‘crazed seabirds pelted the shores of North Monterey Bay, California’ regurgitating anchovies. Soon after reading the report, local visitor Alfred Hitchcock was inspired to produce his famous thriller The Birds. Three decades later, in 1991, another mass poisoning occurred in the same area — this time, of fish-eating, disoriented and dying brown pelicans. But on this occasion the culprit was identified: the pelicans had ingested domoic acid, a neurotoxin that is produced by the diatom Pseudo-nitzschia. Large quantities of this diatom, and the associated toxin, were found in the stomachs of fish in the region. It has been suggested that diatom-generated domoic acid was also responsible for the 1961 event1, but direct evidence has been lacking. Here we show that plankton samples from the 1961 poisoning contained toxin-producing Pseudo-nitzschia, supporting the contention that these toxic diatoms were responsible for the bird frenzy that motivated Hitchcock’s thriller.

Video clip of Hitchcock’s film “The Birds”:

Detail from the new study:

BONUS: An unrelated video curiously linking, by implication, the lives of pelicans and rays:

The Facial Action Coding System (FACS) was first described by Paul Ekman and colleague Wallace V. Friesen in their article entitled Measuring Facial Movement for Environmental Psychology and Nonverbal Behavior1(1) fall 1976.

The authors’ goal “… was to develop a comprehensive system which could distinguish all possible visually distinguishable facial movements.” The system presents a series of Action Units (or ‘AU’s in the FACS terminology) which can be used to taxonomize human expressions.

See, for example, a video of : AU2 the Cheek Raiser and Lid Compressor. (For copyright reasons Improbable is not permitted to reproduce the video here, but you can access it (AU6s.mpg) via this page)

Researchers can purchase the entire FACS system on CD-ROM here for US$260 (plus shipping).

There are lots of top ten lists, but this is the first Ten Tops List. Here are ten videos of spinning tops that scientists find interesting and or amusing.

[Want to take a whirl at learning the science of spinning tops? Download (free) Professor John Perry's 1890 book Spinning Tops— The "Operatives' lecture" of the British association meeting at Leeds, 6th September, 1890. It's a real page-, uh, -turner.]

Here, listed in no particular order, are the Ten Top Videos for 2011:

1. The Levitron

2. Kitten playing with a spinning top

3. Granpa’s nonstop top from NASA

4. PJ’s machine-made graviton

5. Origami spinning top

6. Bill Nye the Science Guy – “Spin Around”

7. Extreme spinning top

8. Singing Chinese Top

9. Russian horserace top

10. Tiny dog versus spinning top

BONUS BONUS BONUS BONUS: The Four Tops:

BONUS: Michael Berry explains the science of the Levitron