Improbable Research

Two truths:

1. Professor Snape is a character in Harry Potter novels.
2. Professor Snape conjures conjugate vaccines.

These are not the same Professor Snape. The second is likely sick unto death of hearing about the first. The first likely could not care less about the second.

The second Professor Snape is Matthew Snape, MBBS, FRACP, FRCPCH, a Senior Research Fellow and Honorary consultant paediatrician at Oxford University (or as some call it, the University of Oxford). His photograph is reproduced here.

Professor Snape conjures up combination glyco-conjugate vaccines. Add Salt, and you get this study:

“Serogroup C Meningococcal Glycoconjugate Vaccine in Adolescents: Persistence of Bactericidal Antibodies and Kinetics of the Immune Response to a Booster Vaccine More Than 3 Years after Immunization,” Matthew D. SNAPE, Penny SALT, et al., Clinical Infectious Diseases, (2006) 43 (11): 1387-1394.

(Thanks to investigator Ivan Oransky for bringing this to our attention.)

BONUS: The other Professor Snape #1:

A look back at groundhog research we published in the year 2001. The study authors were at the time in Pennsylvania:

The Groundhog Oscillation: Evidence of Global Change

by Andrew J. Gerrard, Christina M. Gerrard, Mark A. London, Keith A. Soldavin, Timothy J. Kane and Alan Freed

There is a fierce debate about whether the earth’s climate is changing. In this paper we describe an overlooked — but reliable — remote sensing instrument that can provide crucially pertient information. We also describe an extensive long-term data set that was obtained by using the instrument…[see the entire article]

This video comes from a camera attached to a homebuilt device that rose to great heights. The Guardian describes it in a short paragraph (and also, elsewhere, in more detail):

Two teenagers from Toronto sent a Lego man carrying a Canadian flag into the stratosphere. Mathew Ho and Asad Muhammad, both 17, attached four cameras to a balloon carrying the toy astronaut 24km above Earth. A week after launch they recovered their Lego man in a field, and discovered they had captured stunning space footage

(Thanks to investigator Greg Johnson for bringing this to our attention.)

Today’s Headline of the Day is from a Reuters report by Tan Ee Lyn. The headline manages to implicitly make both the mythic, astrological connection between cancer and crabs and the dietary connection between crabs and the stomach, and to include a trendy mention of robots (which are in fact the focus of the story):

Experts build crab-like robot to remove stomach cancer

The article goes on to say:

SINGAPORE | Feb 1, 2012 – Inspired by Singapore’s famous chili crab dish, researchers have created a miniature robot with a pincer and a hook that can remove early-stage stomach cancers without leaving any scars….

They developed the robot after a seafood dinner in Singapore in 2004 with top Hong Kong surgeon Sydney Chung, who suggested they fashioned their device after the crab. Chung is best known for fighting SARS in Hong Kong in 2003.

“He (Chung) suggested we used the crab as a prototype. The crab can pick up sand and its pincers are very strong,” said [enterologist Lawrence] Ho.

BONUS: How to cook crab in Hong Kong:

(HT Debra Sherman)

Two bits of opera/science pasticcio, sort of:

Hai-Ting Chinn sings the ingredients of a twinkie (the chemical constituents of an endangered American junk food):

Maria Ferrante sings the essence of the Big Bank Opera (how the financial crisis mirrored the birth of the universe):