The special ANIMALS issue (volume 25, number 3) of the Annals of Improbable Research is now out and about. It’s packed with improbable research about animals, and parts of animals, and things that animals, some of them, do. The special section on animals research brings to you: Flies in the Face of Death Animal Odors […]
Tag: animals
Vertebrates in the Vegetable Package, in the News
Humans are more omnivorous than some of us realize, sometimes, suggests this new study: “There’s a Frog in My Salad! A Review of Online Media Coverage for Wild Vertebrates Found in Prepackaged Produce in the United States,” Daniel F. Hughes, Michelle L. Green, Jonathan K. Warner, and Paul C. Davidson, Science of the Total Environment, […]
Stripes and tails against flies
“The Surprising Reason Zebras Have Stripes,” Ed Yong’s essay in The Atlantic, celebrates the most recently published research about how some large mammals manage to protect themselves against flies. Tim Caro and colleagues experimented with striped blankets, publishing their story in the research journal PLoS ONE. Ig Nobel Prize winners Gábor Horváth, Susanne Äkesson, and […]
Modelling heat loss from a semi-spherical cow udder
Theoretical physicists are sometimes accused of making over-simplifications for mathematical models. This has lead to many variations on the spherical cow story, where a physicist claims to be able to cure a sick cow, but only if it is a spherical cow in a vacuum. Oddly, most iterations of this tale ignore heat radiated from […]