Paying attention to small details

“Academics are often accused of ‘obsessing over the details,'” David Taylor told Feedback magazine. “This year my team and I have managed to do just that. We have built a machine that can literally split a single hair from end to end. This is the first time that anyone has been able to split a hair in a lab in a controlled environment and quantify the phenomenon. Were you planning any exciting beauty treatments like coloring or curling your hair? You’ll have to wait and see if this will cause split ends.”

He and his team called the adventure “Hair-splitting biomechanics“, published in Interface Focus.

This is based on research done in the 1980s by Y. K. Kamath and H.-D. Weigman, who sought to take a closer look at what happens when a hair splits.

in Journal of Applied Polymer Science “Fractographic analysis of human hairKamath and Weigman calmed their excitement and stated, “Electron microscopic evidence suggests that fracture propagation occurs via secondary cracks generated as a result of stress concentrations that build up around the primary crack.”

Water from the wreckage

Brazilian researchers have been searching outside the cemetery for the remains of people buried there. Their main question is whether the decaying bodies are sending a foul stench into the area’s deep groundwater. Elias Saba and his colleagues have summed it all up in a book with a macabre, geeky title: “The Deadly Sinisters: The Secrets of the Dead.”Assessing the impact of cemeteries on groundwater using multivariate analysis” “.

The team collected data from three “monitoring wells” dug at the cemetery and compared it with data from the local sewer company about water in nearby household cisterns. Multivariate analysis provided both good and not-so-good news.

The researchers explain that the soil, both inside and outside the cemetery, absorbs most of the problematic waste from the bodies, “preventing surface contaminants from reaching the aquifer.” That’s a good thing. But the problem is that water samples taken in areas outside the cemetery do not meet Brazil’s drinking water standards.

Grandma drinking alcohol

Ancestral water resources are not a new issue. Perhaps the most attention on this issue came in 2008. Journal of Environmental Health.

Reader Russ Hodge responded to the feedback with:Drinking Grandma: The Problem with Embalming” ,” by attorney Jeremiah Chiapelli and Ted Chiapelli, a health sciences professor at Western Carolina University in North Carolina.

The Chiappellis explain: “Modern embalming involves replacing organic blood with a variety of toxic and carcinogenic chemicals, particularly formaldehyde. The embalmed body is then buried underground, but even when placed in a coffin, bodily fluids inevitably leak into groundwater. The reasons embalming was first undertaken, and the rationale for the continued practice, do not justify the potential public health and environmental risks posed by embalming.”

The Chiappellis also talk about research done by others about why so many people in the U.S. choose embalming: “In states that require funeral directors to be embalming technicians or have embalming facilities, cremation rates have decreased due to funeral director solicitation.”

settlement

Nothing livens up the social atmosphere at a strange pub like axe throwing, but the sport can pose dangers for some of those who approach it in a obliging, professional manner.

According to researchers Kusha Dabar, Arthur Jeng, and Suzanne Donovan, one such risk factor is blastomycosis, a fungal disease that “manifests as a pulmonary disease” but can also affect the skin, bones, and genitourinary tract.

For more details, please see the three people’s study “Criticism of endemic diagnosis: disseminated blastomycosis due to a new occupational exposure” “.

The patient “worked at an axe-throwing factory after moving to Los Angeles,” and “his work involved cutting wood for customers.”

Dabber, Jenn and Donovan claim that the disease is “not routinely diagnosed” in Southern California. They say: Blastomyces The fungus was present in the wood before entering the patient’s body.

Telltale Title

Below are two titles recently added to our collection of feedback, “The Title Says All You Need to Know.”

“The effect of wet underwear on thermoregulatory responses and thermal comfort in cold weather“”teeth, Ergonomics 1994.

and “The pain one may experience when executed in various ways“This probably surprised magazine readers. Sensing 1993.

If you’ve come across similarly impressive examples, please submit them along with citation details to Telltale titles, c/o Feedback.

Marc Abrahams is the founder of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founder of the journal Annals of Improbable Research. He previously worked on unusual uses of computers. His website is Impossible.

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