Improbable Research

If you like shrews, especially if you like them parboiled, you’ll want to devour a study published not long ago in the Journal of Archaeological Science. Called Human Digestive Effects on a Micromammalian Skeleton, it explains how and why one of its authors - either Brian D Crandall or Peter W Stahl; we are not told which - ate and excreted a 90mm-long (excluding the tail, which added another 24mm) northern short-tailed shrew (species name: Blarina brevicauda)

This was, in technical terms, “a preliminary study of human digestive effects on a small insectivore skeleton”, with “a brief discussion of the results and their archaeological implications”….

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

Here’s episode 102 (”Jacksonization, bomb bay door, duck”) of the Improbable Research TV series.

To see it, click on the image at right, and you will be whisked to YouTube (where you can subscribe, if you like, to the Improbable Research channel). Improbable TV can also be seen on MySpace and elsewhere.

These are three-minute videos about research that makes people laugh, then makes them think.

For links about each episode’s content, and an FAQ, see the Improbable TV page.

Kristina Uban has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. She says:

I am pursuing my PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, BC.  I received my master of arts in Clinical Psychology from the University of Colorado at Denver, and loved studying the brain and conducting research so much that I switched over to Neuroscience.  I am currently investigating the underlying neural mechanisms of vulnerability to addiction.  Specifically, I am interested in how stress and gonadal hormones interact with drug reward across the lifespan.  I am a natural sandy blonde, but like to lighten my locks with highlights.

Kristina Uban, B.Sc.(Hons), MA, LFHCfS
PhD Student in Behavioral Neuroscience
University of British Columbia
Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

“Poetry or Pathology? Jesuit Hypochondria in Early Modern Naples,” Yasmin Haskell, Early Science and Medicine, vol. 12, no. 2, 2007, pp. 187–213 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/157338207X194686).

(That’s an excerpt from the article “Possible Consequences of Writing Poetry,” published in AIR 14.2)

Concord-based Project Laundry List wishes New Hampshire was more like Ontario, where the utility is handing out free clotheslines to encourage people to abandon their electric clothes dryer and the government prevents subdivisions from banning clotheslines. The New Hampshire legislature refused to pass such “right-to-dry” legislation.

So writes David Brooks.