This is Improbable Too Read online

  Jaksic, Fabian M., and Stephen D. Busack (1984). ‘Apparent Inadequacy of Tail-loss Figures as Estimates of Predation upon Lizards’. Amphibia-Reptilia 5: 177–9.

  Adams, G.J., and K.G. Johnson (1994). ‘Behavioural Responses to Barking and Other Auditory Stimuli during Night-time Sleeping and Waking in the Domestic Dog (Canis familiaris)’. Applied Animal Behaviour Science 39 (2): 151–62.

  Research spotlight

  ‘Relationships of Toe-length Ratios to Finger-length Ratios, Foot Preference, and Wearing of Toe Rings’

  by Martin Voracek and Stefan G. Dressler (published in Perceptual and Motor Skills, 2010)

  On peg-leg coyotes

  ‘Running Speeds of Crippled Coyotes’ introduced itself in 1976, in a journal called Northwest Science. You’ll find few scientific studies that tell their story so clearly and efficiently. Bruce C. Thompson, of the department of fisheries and wildlife at Oregon State University, wrote everything he had to say in a plain two pages.

  It contains little jargon or lingo, and no clever metaphors. When the study speaks of crippled coyotes, it means exactly that: coyotes that are crippled.

  Thompson begins with some history, just enough so you learn that other people, in earlier days, spent time thinking about how fast coyotes run. He alludes to decades-old studies, by scientists named Cottam, Sooter and Zimmerman, that ‘reported running speeds of presumably uninjured coyotes being chased by cars’.

  Thompson brought something new to the table (so to speak): ‘On 21, 22, and 23 October 1974, I recorded running speeds of three wild-trapped coyotes that had lost the use of one foot due to damage from a steel trap.’

  How exactly did Thompson accomplish this? He tells you in just a few sentences: ‘During the tests, the coyotes were released from their cages singly and allowed to run along the perimeter fence of the enclosure. Each day the coyotes were timed with a stop-watch as they ran three measured courses along the perimeter fence. As a coyote approached the starting point of each course, I chased the animal on foot at a distance of 45 meters to 70 meters.’

  Thompson also measured the running speed of a coyote that had all its original equipment. On its best run, that animal had a speed of just under thirty-two miles per hour. One of the crippled animals matched that almost exactly, despite lacking a right foot. The other three-footed coyotes attained best speeds of 22.5 miles per hour and 25.4 miles per hour, respectively. (The full-bodied coyotes chased by four-wheeled cars decades earlier, by the way, ran much faster than the one chased in the 1970s by the two-legged Bruce Thompson.)

  Thompson also paid attention to style. ‘Although the crippled coyotes occasionally contacted the ground with their damaged appendage’, he wrote, ‘they typically adjusted their stride to prevent contact with the ground. The adjusted stride resulted in a noticeable bouncing movement when the crippled coyotes ran.’

  Bruce Thompson’s monograph refers, glancingly, to a 1939 study called ‘Food Habits of Peg-leg Coyotes’, by Charles C. Sperry of the US Biological Survey’s Food Habits Laboratory in Colorado. Sperry, too, knew how to tell a tale. Who could resist this beginning? ‘During the past two years, 164 peg-leg coyote stomachs that contained food remains were obtained and their contents examined in the Denver laboratory.’

  I will skip over Sperry’s other good parts, and get right to his thrilling conclusion: ‘It will be noted that two peg-leg coyotes eat as much livestock as three normal coyotes.

  Thompson, Bruce C. (1976). ‘Running Speeds of Crippled Coyotes’. Northwest Science 50 (3): 181–2.

  Cottam, Clarence (1945). ‘Speed and Endurance of the Coyote’. Journal of Mammalogy 26 (1): 94.

  —, and C.S. Williams (1943). ‘Speed of Some Wild Mammals’. Journal of Mammalogy 24 (2): 262–3.

  Sooter, C.A. (1943). ‘Speed of Predator and Prey’. Journal of Mammalogy 24 (1): 102–3.

  Zimmerman, R.S. (1943). ‘A Coyote’s Speed and Endurance’. Journal of Mammalogy 24 (3): 400.

  Sperry, Charles C. (1939). ‘Food Habits of Peg-leg Coyotes’. Journal of Mammalogy 20 (2): 190–4.

  Young, S.P., and H.H.T. Jackson (1951). The Clever Coyote. Harrisburg, PA, and Washington, DC: Stackpole Co. and Wildlife Management Institute.

  An improbable innovation

  ‘Animal Track Footwear Soles’

  a/k/a shoes for laying stimulated animal tracks ‘for either educational purposes or mere amusement’, by Philip E. McMorrow (US patent no. 3,402,485, granted 1968)

  ‌The patented animal track footwear soles, compared to Kodiak bear cub tracks

  Pumpkin harvest

  The knifing of pumpkins, an innocent-seeming yet carefully planned act of mutilation, sometimes results (accidentally or otherwise) in sprays, bits and smatterings of human, as well as vegetable, gore. In such cases, blood – human blood – flows, drips and coagulates.

  A hands-on experiment, or rather an experiment on hands, in 2004, tried to determine the level of medical danger an amateur can and should expect when using a pumpkin-carving tool.

  Alexander M. Marcus, Jason K. Green and Frederick W. Werner at the State University of New York Upstate Medical University in Syracuse published a study, called ‘The Safety of Pumpkin-Carving Tools’, in the journal Preventive Medicine. ‘Pumpkin-carving accidents’, they inform their peers who read the report, ‘may leave people with compromised hand function’.

  There are several kinds of lacerations and puncture wounds that can lead to this hand-compromisation. Lacerations occur ‘when the knife blade travels across the surface of the hand’ or ‘when the knife is accidentally pushed too far forward and cuts the opposite hand stabilising the pumpkin’, or ‘when the cutting hand slips forward off the handle and on to the blade’, in which case ‘injury occurs across zone 2 of the volar surface [the palm] of the hand, while the flexor tendons are taut from gripping the knife’.

  Marcus, Green and Werner take pains to educate those among their fellow physicians who may lack experience in recognizing and treating puncture wounds. ‘Puncture wounds’, they write, ‘occur when the point of the knife contacts the hand while traveling perpendicular to it.’

  Their experiments compared two commercially offered pumpkin-cutting knives (the Pumpkin Kutter versus the Pumpkin Masters’ Medium Saw) and two ordinary kitchen knives, one serrated, one plain-edged.

  They measured how much force was required to make a cut.

  The first experiment used a machine to plunge each knife into a pumpkin, an actuator driving the weapon downward at a rate of three millimetres per second, each knife being inserted at four different penetration sites on each of three pumpkins, testing with the blade being oriented along the grooves of the pumpkin, and separately with it perpendicular to those grooves. One of the doctors also tested what happened when he, not a machine, attacked the pumpkins with a sawing motion. The pumpkin knives required ‘statistically’ less force than the kitchen knives to cut pumpkins.

  In keeping with the festive theme of the activity, the physicians used ‘a cadaver model’ in their second experiment. They obtained ‘six cadaver forearms … harvested at the elbow’. The report includes photographs showing how this played out.

  The results: First, it took less force to cut a person than a pumpkin. Second, the kitchen knives required statistically less force to penetrate cadaver skin, and ‘caused more skin lacerations that would require suturing than either pumpkin knife’.

  ‌‘Experimental setup to cause tendon laceration in cadaver hands’

  Marcus, Alexander M., Jason K. Green and Frederick W. Werner (2004). ‘The Safety of Pumpkin Carving Tools’. Preventive Medicine 28 (6): 799–803.

  In brief

  ‘Panti-Girdle Syndrome’

  by T.K. Davidson (published in the British Medical Journal, 1972)

  ‘The Tight-Girdle Syndrome’

  by P.D. White (published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 1973)

  ‘Panty Hose-Pants Disease’

  by M. Turner (publis
hed in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 1991)

  ‘Tight Pants Syndrome: A New Title for an Old Problem and Often Encountered Medical Problem’

  by Octavio Bessa Jr (published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, 1993)

  Cutting-edge engineering

  Through the clever use of cheese in 2004, researchers at the University of Reading claimed to have solved one of life’s great little mysteries. ‘Why is it relatively difficult, even with a sharp knife, to cut when simply “pressing down”, but much easier to cut as soon as some sideways sawing or slicing action is introduced?’

  The scientists, A.G. (‘Tony’) Atkins, George Jeronimidis and X. Xu, published a monograph called ‘Cutting, by “Pressing and Slicing” of Thin Floppy Slices of Materials Illustrated by Experiments on Cheddar Cheese and Salami’. It was the highlight of that April’s issue of the Journal of Materials Science.

  The team experimented on a piece of cheese that they identified only as ‘commercial Cheddar cheese’.

  They were equally cagey about the nature of the meat. The report employs the phrase ‘a commercial pepper salami’. Some salami experts understand that those four words, when huddled together, cover a multitude of possibilities: delicious or not, cheering or horrifying, mushy, stiff or adamantine. They and we learn nothing about this particular salami, save that thin slices of it become ‘floppy’. But that’s all right, because floppiness is the key thing here.

  Atkins, Jeronimidis and Xu write in fairly stiff, technical language. But they loosen up a bit when talking about floppiness. Then they use language suitable to the casual reader who might, say, peruse an issue of the Journal of Materials Science while lounging in a dentist’s waiting room: ‘Further examples of the sort of globally-elastic cutting considered in this paper’, say the scientists, ‘are to be found in the slicing of meat by the butcher … lawnmowing, hair cutting, the cutting of fabrics by the dressmaker, surgery and so on. These cases are characterised by the offcuts [the individual slices] being elastically very floppy (ie, have negligible bending resistance and are not permanently deformed).’

  Cutting into non-floppy material can be a different game. Atkins, Jeronimidis and Xu explicitly leave that for others to investigate.

  They chose cheese, they say, because ‘the cutting of cheese is notoriously affected by friction (hence the use of wire to cut cheese)’. They do not explain why they selected salami.

  The team did their cutting not with a wire, but with a delicatessen-style ‘bacon’ slicer. Its whirling blade can, depending on the substance and on the angle of the cut, fall prey to varying amounts of friction. To keep things from getting too, too floppy, they chilled the cheese before slicing it, and ditto the salami.

  They quantified, in unprecedentedly technical detail, what good butchers, lawnmowers, hair cutters, dressmakers and surgeons have always intuited. The faster the whirl of the blade (or the horizontal drawing of the knife), the less force is needed to drive the blade down, down, down into the material. But, because of friction – the rubbing of blade against substance – there’s a limit to how easy that downward slicing can get. Cutting-edge stuff.

  Atkins, A.G. (‘Tony’), X. Xu and George Jeronimidis (2004). ‘Cutting, by “Pressing and Slicing” of Thin Floppy Slices of Materials Illustrated by Experiments on Cheddar Cheese and Salami’. Journal of Materials Science 39 (8): 2761–6.

  In brief

  ‘ “Your Feet’s Too Big”: An Inquiry into Psychological and Symbolic Meanings of the Foot’

  by K.J. Zerbe (published in Psychoanalytic Review, 1985)

  The secret wealth in a cockroach leg

  Biscuits, rubbish and bugs in Texas raise hopes that Britain will grow a lucrative new technology-based empire soon, rather than just eventually. This is all about getting usable amounts of graphene – the two-dimensional form of carbon. An American experiment, so goofy-sounding that it has drawn little attention, points towards a cheap way of obtaining what is now a scarily expensive substance.

  Scientists had long known that graphene exists, and that it is common. The grey stuff in pencils is made of multitudinous layers of graphene, sticking to each other. When you scribble, a gob of layers slides away, clinging thereafter to your sheet of paper. A few years ago, physicists Andre Geim and Kostya Novoselov, at the University of Manchester, used cleverness, a pencil and sticky tape to separate out some single layers of graphene. They obtained only tiny amounts – but that was staggeringly more than anyone else had managed.

  For doing that, and for then using their graphene to discover a multitude of physical properties and likely industrial uses, Geim and Novoselov were given a Nobel Prize in 2010, and knighthoods in the 2012 New Year Honours. Later that year the British government announced it would spend £38 million to establish a Geim/Novoselov-centric National Graphene Institute at Manchester University, aimed at ‘taking this research through to commercial success’.

  But there is a big problem. Even tiny amounts of graphene still cost far more than industry can dream of affording.

  Enter the North Americans.

  In 2011, just three years after some Mexican scientists converted tequila into diamonds – which are just an expensive form of carbon – chemists in Texas quietly mucked around with some cookies, cockroaches and disgusting biological waste products. The Texans produced graphene, a form of carbon dearer – much dearer – than diamonds.

  The tequila-into-diamonds physicists, at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, published their story in a monograph called ‘Growth of Diamond Films from Tequila’. Co-author Javier Morales said they later made diamonds using the cheapest tequila on the market, to demonstrate their technique’s power.

  That same spirit is evident in the Texas experiment, performed by James M. Tour, Gedeng Ruan, Zhengzong Sun and Zhiwei Peng at Rice University in Houston, and documented in a study called ‘Growth of Graphene from Food, Insects, and Waste’.

  Others, elsewhere, had devised ways to grow graphene. Those other methods begin with costly, highly purified carbon-containing chemical feedstocks. Tour and his Rice colleagues write that ‘much less expensive carbon sources, such as food, insects and waste, can be used without purification to grow high-quality monolayer graphene’.

  They explain how they produced graphene from (at different times) Girl Scout cookies, chocolate, grass, a plastic dish, a cockroach leg and faeces from a dachshund. Their tools: copper foil, argon gas and a 1050-degree Celsius tube furnace.

  ‌Analysing graphene derived from a Girl Scout cookie, chocolate, dog faeces and a cockroach

  By their estimate, one box of Girl Scout cookies could theoretically, at then-current prices, be converted to about $15 billion worth of graphene.

  Morales, Apátiga and Casataño were awarded the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize in chemistry for creating their tequila-derived diamonds.

  Novoselov, Kostya, S., Andre K. Geim, Sergey V. Morozov, Da Jiang, Yuanbo Zhang, Sergey V. Dubonos, Irina V. Grigorieva and Anatoly A. Firsov (2004). ‘Electric Field Effect in Atomically Thin Carbon Films’. Science 306 (5696): 666–9.

  Novoselov, Kostya, S., Da Jiang, Frederick Schedin, Tim J. Booth, V.V., Khotkevich, Sergey V. Morozov and Andre K. Geim (2005). ‘Two-dimensional Atomic Crystals’. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 102 (30): 10451–3.

  Morales, Javier, Miguel Apátiga and Victor M. Casataño (2009). ‘Growth of Diamond Films from Tequila’. Reviews on Advanced Materials Science 22 (1): 134–8.

  Ruan, Gedeng, Zhengzong Sun, Zhiwei Peng and James M. Tour (2011). ‘Growth of Graphene from Food, Insects, and Waste’. ACS Nano 5 (9): 7601–7.

  In brief

  ‘Testing the Validity of the Danish Urban Myth that Alcohol Can Be Absorbed Through Feet: Open Labelled Self Experimental Study’

  by Christian Stevns Hansen, Louise Holmsgaard Faerch and Peter Lommer Kristensen (published in the British Medical Journal, 2010)

  The authors, at Hillerod Hospital, Hillerod
, Denmark, explain: ‘Objective: To determine the validity of the Danish urban myth that it is possible to get drunk by submerging feet in alcohol. Participants: Three adults, median age 32 (range 31-35) … Conclusion: Our results suggest that feet are impenetrable to the alcohol component of vodka.’

  ‌Six

  ‌Navel Gazing, Curious Consuming

  In brief

  ‘Biting Off More Than You Can Chew: A Forensic Case Report’

  by J.R. Drummond and G.S. McKay (published in the British Dental Journal, 1999)

  Some of what’s in this chapter: Query your belly • Synchronize your cows • Know thy fly • Colour-change thy cereal • Drink in your results • Meet your meat, in unintended circumstances • Peruse your hot potatoes • Disgust your carnivore shrink • Define your vegetarian, strictly • Weigh your falafel • Identify your water • Sneak-peek your hosts’ food • Slim up your fatter fellows • Chew your crisp cereal • Cereal-flake your cows • Scrawl your boozy scrawl • Note your neighbours in the pub

  Exposing the German beer belly

  A team of scientists has attacked the idea that beer is the main cause of beer bellies in Germans. As with many biomedical questions, an absolute, indisputable answer may be impossible. To obtain it would require continuously monitoring and measuring, over a span of years, every sip and morsel drunk and eaten by a vast number of people.