Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 53

Impact of Posing with Cats on Female Perceptions of Male Dateability [research study]

“Not the Cat’s Meow? The Impact of Posing with Cats on Female Perceptions of Male Dateability” [by Lori Kogan and Shelly Volsche, published in Animals, vol. 10, no. 6, June 9, 2020, E1007] is a featured study in “Cats Research: Girls, and Men and Datability“, which is a featured article in the special Women (and Men) issue of the magazine—Annals of Improbable Research. The study reports:

The aim of this study was to investigate whether men were considered more attractive when posing for a photo alone or holding a cat. Prior research suggests that women view pet owners as more attractive and dateable than non-pet owners; however, this effect was strongest with dog owners. We hypothesized that men posing with cats would be more attractive than those posing alone. Using an online survey, women viewed images of a man posing alone or with a cat and rated the men on the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) and the Big Five Inventory. Women viewed men as less masculine when holding the cat; higher in neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness; and less dateable.

Podcast Episode #1095: “Saliva and Frog Puppets”

In Podcast Episode #1095, Marc Abrahams shows an unfamiliar research study to psycholinguist Jean Berko Gleason. Dramatic readings and reactions ensue.

Remember, our Patreon donors, on most levels, get access to each podcast episode before it is made public.

Jean Berko Gleason encounters:

“A Salivary Collection Method for Young Children,” Laura K. Zimmermann, Psychophysiology, vol. 45, no. 3, May 2008, pp. 353-355.

Seth Gliksman, Production Assistant

Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Google Podcasts, AntennaPod, BeyondPod and elsewhere!

Kitchen Tool for the Ultra-precise Over-cooking Chef

If you do high precision over-cooking — extremely high precision, compared with most cooks — feel free to savor and salivate on the details of this new study about a very new cooking tool. Its use in cooking would apply mainly (or exclusively) to those times when you are cooking dish to the point where the food becomes a hard, hard mass. You will of course want to then test how far a very sharp fork, or tooth, or drill, or whatever, would easily (depending on your definition of “easily”) penetrate the surface. If that’s your need or desire, try this tool. Details are in the study:

“Practical method to determine the effective zero-point of indentation depth for continuous stiffness measurement nanoindentation test with Berkovich tip,” Diancheng Geng, Hao Yu, Yasuki Okuno, Sosuke Kondo, and Ryuta Kasada, Scientific Reports, vol. 12, no. 6391, 2022. The study says:

This study proposes a practical method to determine the effective zero‐point of indentation depth, which was obtained linearly at the zero‐point of contact stiffness and extrapolated from the depth‐dependent contact stiffness values, except for those at initially unstable contact depths. The proposed method enables nanoindentation tests to obtain a constant indentation elastic modulus and low deviation of nanoindentation hardness of homogenously fused silica and metallic materials, which provides an efficient way to obtain more accurate test data.

Impaled stork survives two centuries

Two hundred years ago today, on May 21, 1822, a stork was shot (with a gun) by Christian Ludwig Reichsgraf von Bothmer at his estate in Mecklenburg, Germany. The dead bird was and still is remarkable — the stork had been flying despite the handicap of an eight-foot-long African arrow that pierced its neck lengthwise from back to front. The arrow jutted out just below the bird’s head, apparently without touching vital body parts.

Bird-and-arrow were taxidermized, and donated to the zoological collection of the University of Rostock, where ‘der Pfeilstorch’ (arrow-stork) is still preserved, gaining fame and attracting as many as 20.000 visitors in recent (non-covid) years.

Because of the corona safety measures — which only recently were lifted in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern — a grand bicentennial celebration could not be organized. So you can have your own event, great or small, to commemorate the arrow-stork that bravely returned to Germany together with its fateful, half-internalized African arrow.

The arrow-stork forced people to realize, just two centuries ago, that the European white stork (Ciconia cicona) migrates from Europe to Africa and back. The general — erroneous — belief in Europe had been that during winter, storks ‘hibernate in the mud’ or transform into some other kind of creature.

This stork was shot with an arrow. Then it was shot with a gun. Now you can shoot it with a camera.

To see this historic specimen, visit the Zoological Institute, Universitätsplatz 2, Rostock, Germany. Open on weekdays 10am – 4pm, entrance free.

(And for further background on this whole story, see Kees Moeliker’s recent essay in NRC.)

Sinuhé Perea-Puente joins Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHfC)

Sinuhé Perea-Puente has joined the The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS). He says:

I’m a predoctoral student in Photonics and Nanotechnology at King’s College London, literally trying to see (with light) what is hidden. I like to solve problems, but since I rarely find any solution, preferring to learn and ask. I Graduated in Physics and in Mathematics at University of Oviedo (Spain)  where I was also Computational Assistant at Faculty of Chemistry, and awarded as best national young researcher by CEULAJ & ICMAT (CSIC). My current research focuses on near-field and topological photonics in (lossy) systems and geology, light nano-routing, skyrmions, algebraic number theory (odd perfect numbers conjecture because, remember, even primes are odd), and freshman Economics.

Sinuhé Perea-Puente, LFHCfS
PhD Student — Novel Nanophotonic Phenomena
King’s College London
London, UK

The World’s Most Iffy Game, Maybe? Fifty-Fifty Trivia

The delightfully iffy game called “Fifty-Fifty Trivia” was created by Martin Eiger, who invents many concepts and games, using words and ideas as the main building material. Eiger is, among other things, our Limerick Laureate—you can see his limericks, in any issue of the magazine (Annals of Improbable Research, with each limerick describing something that won an Ig Nobel Prize) or the newsletter (mini-AIR, with each limerick describing a published research study) over the past many years. Today he wrote us the following description of Fifty-Fifty Trivia:

Fifty-Fifty Trivia is a small, e-mail based trivia game.  The game consists of three components: writing questions, answering, and predicting.  Players submit a question, with the objective that half of the players will be able to answer it correctly.  Players then answer each other’s questions, and they predict, for each question, whether the actual number of correct answers will be greater than 50% or less than 50%.

In the recently completed game, this was one of the questions: Andre Geim received an award in 2000 for his work on magnetism and another in 2010 for his work with graphene.  Many people have received one or the other of these awards, but he is the only person who has received both.  What awards are they?  We are looking for the names of the two awards (e.g., Academy Award), not categories (e.g., Academy Award for Best Director).

Twenty people submitted answers.  Nine were correct (Ig Nobel Prize and Nobel Prize).  The incorrect answers all included Nobel Prize, but they paired off with the Fields Medal (4 answers), Pulitzer Prize (2), Medal of Freedom, MacArthur Grant, Science Prize (not sure what that is), and my favorite, the Darwin Award.

One person, whose answer was correct, added, “A guess, because it’s the funniest answer. Might be wrong, of course. I also considered the Darwin Award instead of IgNobel Prize.”  Another, whose answer was incorrect, added, “Now that I’ve submitted and looked up the answers, I want to commend Question 14.  Great piece of trivia!!”

Full disclosure: I invented this game over 25 years ago, ran it at a few games parties and other social events, and created the on-line version during the early days of Covid.  I moderate the game.  I submit a question every month, but I don’t submit answers or predictions.  I’ll let you guess whether that’s because it would be unfair, since I vet the questions, or because I know the answers to so few of them.  Spoiler: both.

If you want to play the game, or simply want more info from its inventor, email a pleasant query to

A research project for the ages and ages

Andrew Stafford took a look at the current state of the Ig Nobel Prize-winning pitch drop experiment. His report, in The Guardian, bears the headline ” ‘It’s literally slower than watching Australia drift north’: the laboratory experiment that will outlive us all“.

The 2005 Ig Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to John Mainstone and the late Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland, Australia, for patiently conducting an experiment that began in the year 1927 — in which a glob of congealed black tar has been slowly, slowly dripping through a funnel, at a rate of approximately one drop every nine years.

Does the Sex of a Simulated Patient Affect CPR? Where Do Your Hands Go? [research study]

“Does the Sex of a Simulated Patient Affect CPR?” [by Chelsea E. Kramer, Matthew S. Wilkins, Jan M. Davies, Jeff K. Caird, and Gregory M. Hallihan, published in Resuscitation, vol. 86, 2015, pp. 82-87] is a featured study in “Medical Research: Rescuers’ Hands, Ponytail Headache, Elevation for Nursing“, which is a featured article in the special Women (and Men) issue of the magazine—Annals of Improbable Research. The study reports:

While males and females are equally at risk of sudden cardiac arrest (SCA), females are less likely to be resuscitated. Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) may be inhibited by socio-cultural norms about exposing female victims’ chests. Empirically confirming this hypothesis is limited by lack of patient simulators modeling realistic female physiques….

Results— Rescuers removed significantly more clothing from the male than the female, with men removing less clothing from the female. More rescuers’ initial hand placements for CPR were centered between the female’s breasts compared to the male, on which placement was distributed across the chest towards the nipples.

Sunflower Orientation, Solar Panels, and the Sun

Sunflowers have the reputation of all being dedicated to facing the sun. An Ig Nobel Prize-winning team has now tried to measure how well that reputation matches reality. They dispatched some drones and some software to do this.

The research is documented in their new study “Mature Sunflower Inflorescences Face Geographical East to Maximize Absorbed Light Energy: Orientation of Helianthus annuus Heads Studied by Drone Photography,” Péter Takács, Zoltán Kovács, Dénes Száz, Ádám Egri, Balázs Bernáth, Judit Slíz-Balogh, Magdolna Nagy-Czirok, Zsigmond Lengyel, and Gábor Horváth, Frontiers in Plant Science, vol. 13, no. 842560, March 2022. This builds on their earlier work, without drones. They report:

Mature sunflower (Helianthus annuus) inflorescences, which no longer follow the Sun, face the eastern celestial hemisphere. Whether they orient toward the azimuth of local sunrise or the geographical east? It was recently shown that they absorb maximum light energy if they face almost exactly the geographical east, and afternoons are usually cloudier than mornings. However, the exact average and standard deviation (SD) of the azimuth angle of the normal vector of mature sunflower inflorescences have never been measured on numerous individuals. It is imaginable that they prefer the direction of sunrise rather than that of the geographical east. To decide between these two photobiological possibilities, we photographed mature inflorescences of 14 sunflower plantations using a drone and determined the average and SD of the azimuth angle of the normal vector of 2,800 sunflower heads.

What they found is slightly (or more than slightly) complicated, as you will see if you dip into the study.

Solar Panels, Too

The team also looked at how well solar panels get a look at the sun. Details are in their new study “How the morning-afternoon cloudiness asymmetry affects the energy-maximizing azimuth direction of fixed-tilt monofacial solar panels,” published in Royal Society Open Science. (Thanks to Gabor Gadenics for bringing this to our attention.)

That Ig Nobel Prize

The 2016 Ig Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to Gábor Horváth, Miklós Blahó, György Kriska, Ramón Hegedüs, Balázs Gerics, Róbert Farkas, Susanne Åkesson, Péter Malik, and Hansruedi Wildermuth, for discovering why white-haired horses are the most horsefly-proof horses, and for discovering why dragonflies are fatally attracted to black tombstones.

They documented that research in the study: “An Unexpected Advantage of Whiteness in Horses: The Most Horsefly-Proof Horse Has a Depolarizing White Coat,” Gábor Horváth, Miklós Blahó, György Kriska, Ramón Hegedüs, Balázs Gerics, Róbert Farkas and Susanne Åkesson, Proceedings of the Royal Society B, vol. 277 no. 1688, pp. June 2010, pp. 1643-1650.

Podcast Episode #1094: “Can You Navigate in a Crowd, While Distracted by Your Mobile Phone?”

The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK.

In the Ig Informal Lectures, some days after the ceremony, the new Ig Nobel Prize winners attempt to explain what they did, and why they did it. We released these lectures one at a time.

In Podcast Episode #1094, Marc Abrahams presents the 2021 Ig Nobel Prize for Kinetics winners Hisashi Murakami, Claudio Feliciani, Yuta Nishiyama, and Katsuhiro Nishinari. They received the prize for conducting experiments to learn why pedestrians do sometimes collide with other pedestrians.

REFERENCE: “Mutual Anticipation Can Contribute to Self-Organization in Human Crowds,” Hisashi Murakami, Claudio Feliciani, Yuta Nishiyama, and Katsuhiro Nishinari, Science Advances, vol. 7, no. 12, 2021, p. eabe7758.

The video for this lecture—graphs, charts and all—can be found online at www.IMPROBABLE.com.

Seth Gliksman, Production Assistant

Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Google Podcasts, AntennaPod, BeyondPod and elsewhere!