Improbable Research

We are proud (and surprised!) that we’ve been named a finalist—for Best Science Blog—in the 2008 Weblog Awards. Thanks to the many investigators who send us tips and detritus, and special thanks to whoever nominated us. The awards website says:

The Weblog Awards are the world’s largest blog competition with over 545,000 votes cast in 2007 edition and nearly two million votes cast in all editions since 2003.

Voting is open now and will be so until Monday, January 12, 2009 at 5:00 p.m. Eastern.

Please vote (for or against us—it’s your choice), and please spread the word.

[UPDATE: The award organizers apparently encourage ballot-stuffing. The voting page encourages people to vote "once every 24 hours in each category".]

Today’s lesson teaches that a scientist can make great discoveries by being creative.

A new kind of scientific detective work has, reportedly, paid off bigtime in the field of environmental science.

Thousands of scientists labored for decades to identify the most dangerous sources of environmental pollution—but despite all their slow, careful measurement and experimentation, they failed to identify what we now learn is a major source of pollution. A January 5, 2009 Catholic News Service report explains:

The birth-control pill is causing “devastating” environmental damage and plays a role in rising male infertility rates, said the Vatican newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano…. Pedro Jose-Maria Simon-Castellvi, president of the Vatican-based World Federation of Catholic Medical Associations, wrote the article that appeared in the paper’s Jan. 4 edition.

The pill has created “devastating ecological effects from tons of hormones being released into the environment for years,” the article said.

Details have not yet been made public. Students (along with every environmental scientist in the world!) can now giddily await the day when Dr. Simon-Castelvi publishes a formal study, in a good science journal, giving details of how he achieved his breakthrough discovery.

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

“Coco,” as the Colossal Colon is affectionately known, is a 40-foot long, 4-foot tall oversized model of the human colon that is designed to educate about colorectal cancer and other diseases of the colon. Visitors who crawl through the Colossal Colon will see Crohn’s disease, diverticulosis, ulcerative colitis, hemorrhoids, cancerous and non-cancerous polyps, and various stages of colon cancer.

So says the Colon Club.

(That’s an excerpt from the article “Puzzling Solutions,” published in AIR 14:3.)

Can humans live completely according to a theory? Apparently so, if one uses the logic in Peter Huber’s book Hard Green: Saving The Environment From The Environmentalists A Conservative Manifesto. Huber writes:

Cut down the last redwood for chopsticks, harpoon the last blue whale for sushi, and the additional mouths fed will nourish additional human brains, which will soon invent ways to replace blubber with Olestra and pine with plastic. Humanity can survive just fine in a planet- covering crypt of concrete and computers.