Improbable Research

Yesterday was molecular-dancing video day. Today, more or less for Halloween, it’s physics gravelly-voice video day, with this curious offering from UMass-Lowell:

(Thanks to investigators Raj Prasad and Stanley Eigen for bringing this to our attention.)

Sanford (”Spamford”) Wallace, winner of the 1997 Ig Nobel Prize for communications (”neither rain nor sleet nor dark of night have stayed this self-appointed courier from delivering electronic junk mail to all the world”), is in the news again. Reuters reports, on October 30, 2009 that:

Facebook gets $711 million damages in anti-spam case

Social networking website Facebook was awarded $711.2 million in damages relating to an anti-spam case against Internet marketer Sanford Wallace, court documents show….

[Fun fact from 1997: Sanford Wallace did not attend the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. Concerned for the safety of Mr. Wallace's person, the organizers did not invite him.]

Actors become molecules in a video produced by (or maybe for) the Marie Curie Actions project of the European Commission.

(Thanks to investigator David Kessler for bringing this to our attention.)

The University of Akron is overwhelmed with criminals who seek employment there. That, anyway, seems a reasonable way to interpret the news reported by InsideHigherEd, which says:

Many colleges now require criminal background checks of all new employees. But the University of Akron — in what some experts believe is a first — is not only requiring a criminal background check, but is stating that new employees must be willing to submit a DNA sample.

One way to do this: submit stool samples as the initial form of inquiry to the school’s employment office.

(Thanks to investigator Rebecca Skloot for bringing this to our attention.)

A new study helps answer the question raised in Thomas Nagel’s 1974 philosophy essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” A team of Chinese and British researchers focuses on one measurable aspect:

“Fellatio by Fruit Bats Prolongs Copulation Time,” Min Tan, Gareth Jones, Guangjian Zhu, Jianping Ye, Tiyu Hong, Shanyi Zhou, Shuyi Zhang and Libiao Zhang, PLoS ONE, vol. 4, no. 10, e7595. Doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007595. The authors, who are variously at Guangdong Entomological Institute in Guangzhou, China; at the University of Bristol, UK,, at Guangxi Normal University in Guilin, China, and at East China Normal University in Shanghai, China; report:

Action video of two bats (click to start)

Oral sex is widely used in human foreplay, but rarely documented in other animals. Fellatio has been recorded in bonobos Pan paniscus, but even then functions largely as play behaviour among juvenile males. The short-nosed fruit bat Cynopterus sphinx exhibits resource defence polygyny and one sexually active male often roosts with groups of females in tents made from leaves. Female bats often lick their mate’s penis during dorsoventral copulation. The female lowers her head to lick the shaft or the base of the male’s penis but does not lick the glans penis which has already penetrated the vagina. Males never withdrew their penis when it was licked by the mating partner. A positive relationship exists between the length of time that the female licked the male’s penis during copulation and the duration of copulation. Furthermore, mating pairs spent significantly more time in copulation if the female licked her mate’s penis than if fellatio was absent. Males also show postcopulatory genital grooming after intromission. At present, we do not know why genital licking occurs, and we present four non-mutually exclusive hypotheses that may explain the function of fellatio in C. sphinx.

(Thanks to investigator Andrew Francis for bringing this to our attention.)