Suck it up
Reader Simon Leach responded to Feedbackās call for papers in which The Title Tells You Everything You Need to Know with a cheery āWell, you asked for it!ā.
The āitā was a copy of a report published in the British Medical Journal in 1980 under the headline .
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āThe title,ā says Leach, ācontains everything you need to know. However, the report answers every question that might occur to you as well. The last sentence summarises by saying āThe present patients may well have thought that the penis would be clear of the fan but were driven to new lengths by the novelty of the experience and came to griefā.ā Leach adds: āAs junior doctors we may not have read the BMJ as assiduously as we should, but we all read this one!ā
Feedback muses that, whether professionally or personally, one should love oneās vacuum cleaner wisely, but not too well. If you know of another published research study with a title this satisfyingly complete, please send it to: Telltale titles, c/o Feedback.
How to de-cyst
Shiheng Zhao and Pierre Haas grossly grab your attention with the title of their study: . That done, they shift into a less folksy tone.
Zhao and Haas are based at two of the three Max Planck Institutes in Dresden, Germany. They demonstrate how to shepherd a discussion so as to minimise the yucky and maximise the technomechanical.
āJust as one is wont to poke the fruity wares peddled in supermarkets to evaluate the immediacy of their comestibility,ā they begin, āindentation of biological samples reveals mechanical properties that are intrinsically linked to their biological function.ā
After that, itās all about āthe relation between the indentation force F and the displacement e of the indenterā and ācalculation of the elastic deformation gradientā.
If you have a fascinating skin ailment but also have friends who cringe when you tell them about it, try using Zhao and Haasās genteel phrasing. Cysts, they point out, are simply āspherical monolayers of polarised cells surrounding a fluid-filled lumenā.
Hamburgers on meat
Several hundred Hamburgers ā residents of the city of Hamburg, Germany ā answered surveys about three kinds of sausage. These were select Hamburgers, all of a certain age range.
The surveyās senders, Stephan G. H. Meyerding and Magdalena Kuper at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, limited their questions to these varieties of sausage: āMeat, plant-based or in-vitro salami.ā
Meat-based is the most traditional of the three salamis, while the plant-based kind has grown in popularity in recent decades. In-vitro salami ā made using stem cells ā is the newest comer, still finding its way from laboratories to dinner tables.
The researchersā aim? .
The verdict, in their data, seems to them clear: āThe majority of Generation Y and Z in Germany prefer vegan meat over real meat, and in-vitro meat is more popular than beef or pork meat.ā
That verdict doesnāt seem as meaty as it might be if the study is done anew some years from now. āIn-vitro meat,ā say the researchers, āis still unknown and not yet on the German market.ā
Eat your liver
The old complaint that kids donāt want to do what adults tell them to do has new confirmatory evidence. Ā according to the title of Vira RĆ©ka Nickelās study about childhood nutrition.
Nickel is based at the Institute of Ethnology in Budapest and has gathered info about the past hundred years or so of .
During that time, eating and food preparation habits changed drastically in the nation, driven, says the study, by āthe obligation to provide public catering and the general obligation to workā.
Nickel illustrates the they-donāt-like-it problem with photographs, one of which bears the caption āFried, breaded luncheon meat with creamed split peas is one of the āclassicā school meals, although it has never been one of the most popularā.
There are certain meals that many children refuse to touch, a reluctance Nickel explores in some depth: āDuring our research, fried liver was one such meal. In Eger, the problem was addressed by serving only rice if the child did not want the liver. In Ćzd, the children were not given this option. The catering manager in Ćzd drew my attention to an important fact when we asked about the possibility of serving children only the part of their meal they wanted to eat: āitās against the law. The parents have paid for itā.ā
Statistics and baboons
āCan non-human primates perform linear regression on a graph?ā ask Lorenzo Ciccione and colleagues in a study that refers to āthe baboon as a statisticianā. Their tentative answer: somewhat, to a degree that āvaries among individualsā.
Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony andĀ co-foundedĀ the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website isĀ .
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