Alyssa Pelish writes about the difficult cases handled by the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). Pelish’s essay, called “The Bureau of Hards“, appears in the Fence blog. Close attention is paid there to a modest experiment: Indeed, an experiment run in 2000 by a group affiliated with the eccentrics behind the annual Ig Nobel Prize found that […]
Barry Petchevsky performed his annual data-gathering exercise “What Did We Get Stuck In Our Rectums Last Year?” in Deadspin: All reports are taken from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission’s database of emergency room visits, and they are occasionally not for the faint of spirit…. GOLF BALL PEANUT BUTTER JAR SPRAY BOTTLE CURTAIN ROD “STUCK A TOY UP […]
What do doctors do when they find a needle in a patient’s rectum? A research study explores that very question, and we explore that study, in this week’s Improbable Research podcast. SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free. This week, Marc Abrahams discusses a published oh-look-there’s-a-needle-in-this-patient’s-rectum study. Yale/MIT/Harvard biomedical researcher Chris Cotsapas lends his voice, and his scientific expertise, and his opinions —with dramatic readings from a research […]
What’s the deal with people who yearn to eat or to be eaten — to literally consume, or to literally be consumed — during sex. And what’s a good example of an early medical report about a pestle found in a rectum? Those questions are addressed in studies that are profiled (in the column “Boys Will Be Boys: […]
