Improbable Research

When parents warn children not to play with their food, there’s now reason to add a menacing “even if”: “even if the food begins playing with you”. Recently, food was given a new ability to play, a little, the moment it encounters milk.

Researchers have patented a way to make breakfast cereal change colour as it sits in the bowl, awaiting its roller-coaster ride down somebody’s throat.

The patent documents explain why the world needs this to occur, as well as how, chemically and mechanically, to do it.

Hideo Tomomatsu of Crystal Lake, Illinois, filed a patent application in 1987 for what he called “colour-changing cereals”. Eight years later, Joseph Farinella of Chicago, Illinois, and Justin French of Cedars, Iowa, used much of the same stilted wording in filing their own application. Both patents were granted, with the rights being assigned to the Quaker Oats Company….

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

A new medical study recommends a method called “nasal packing with strips of cured pork” as an effective way to treat uncontrollable nosebleeds.

Ian Humphreys, Sonal Saraiya, Walter Belenky and James Dworkin [pictured here], at Detroit Medical Centre in Michigan, treated a girl who had a rare hereditary disorder that brings prolongued bleeding. Publishing in the Annals of Otology, Rhinology and Laryngology, they pack the essential details into two sentences:

“Cured salted pork crafted as a nasal tampon and packed within the nasal vaults successfully stopped nasal hemorrhage promptly, effectively, and without sequelae … To our knowledge, this represents the first description of nasal packing with strips of cured pork for treatment of life-threatening hemorrhage in a patient with Glanzmann thrombasthenia.”…

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

BONUS (January 31): But be aware of this: ”Drug-Resistance in Pork: More Going On Than Appears” (Superbug)

Jerry Leath Mills [pictured here] reigns as the unchallenged authority on the subject of dead mules in 20th-century American southern literature.

Professor Mills established his reputation – almost instantly – in 1996, with the publication of a long essay called “Equine Gothic: The Dead Mule as Generic Signifier in Southern Literature of the Twentieth Century”.

He retired that year after three decades of teaching English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His dead mule treatise appeared in The Southern Literary Journal. “Equine Gothic“ reads as if the accumulated dead mules had been stewing in Mills’s head, and were at last in a fit state for him to ladle out….

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

BONUS: A related-in-spirit web site called “The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature”

The Effect of Wok Size and Handle Angle on the Maximum Acceptable Weights of Wok Flipping by Male Cooks, a report in the journal Industrial Health, does more than its title reveals. It also shows how to standardise an intricate physical test.

Many professional wok-users use a big one. Almost all of those woks have a straight handle. That’s bad, say Swei-Pi Wu and Cheng-Pin Ho at Huafan University, and Chin-Li Yen at National Pingtung University of Science and Technology, Taiwan.

“[We found that] a small wok [about 36 centimetres across] with an ergonomically bent handle is the optimal design, for male cooks, for the purposes of flipping.”

Professional Asian cooks are prone to shoulder, neck, lower back/waist and finger/wrist aches and injuries. Wok-flipping brings some glaring risk…

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

BONUS: Video of one cook’s technique for flipping a wok:

In a study called Sudden Whitening Of The Hair: An Historical Fiction?Anne-Marie Skellett, George Millington and Nick Levell, at Norfolk and Norwich University Hospital, try to chop off a myth at its roots. People’s hair, they believe, does not all of a sudden turn white. It just doesn’t. Goodbye, ye hoary tales of Queen Marie Antoinette of France and Sir Thomas More of England each turning whitehaired the night before being beheaded.

Hair whitening – “canities” in medical lingo – takes longer than days or even weeks, they report in a 2008 issue of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.

If somebody’s hair did suddenly turn white, they say, it would most likely have an unnatural cause: “the washing out, or lack of access to a temporary hair dye”….

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