Annals of Improbable Research

JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2010 (volume 16, number 1)

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Special Issue: Beards & Bagels & Paper Airplaness

Mobius bagel,
Paper-plane research,
Beards as sound baffles...

Contents

The features marked with a star (*) are based entirely on material taken straight from standard research (and other Official and Therefore Always Correct) literature. Many of the other articles are genuine, too, but we don’t know which ones.

Special Section: Beards & Bagels & Paper Airplanes

Time for a Shave? Does Facial Hair Interfere With Visual Speech Intelligibility? — Susanne Fuchs, Melanie Weirich, Christian Kroos, Natalie Fecher, Daniel Pape and Sabine Koppetsch
Beard Research Review* — Bertha Vanatian
Paper Airplane Producers: Morning Types vs. Evening Types — David L. Dickinson and Todd McElroy
Paper Airplane Research Review* — Bertha Vanatian
Mathematically Correct Breakfast: How to Slice a Bagel into Two Linked Halves — George W. Hart

Improbable Research Reviews*

May We Recommend* — Stephen Drew
Improbable Research Review* — Dirk Manley
Improbable Medical Review* — Bertha Vanatian
Ig® and Beyond* — Nan Swift
Soft Is Hard* — Alice Shirrell Kaswell and Bissell Mango
Ptak: Eiffel Tower and 10-Ton Bullet* — John Ptak
Boys Will Be Boys* — Katherine Lee
Icky Cutesy Research Review* — Alice Shirrell Kaswell
Plucked From Obscurity: Upside-Down Reliability* — Stephen Drew

News & Notes

AIR Vents (letters from our readers)
Puzzling Solutions — Emil Filterbag
Editorial Board
Teachers’ Guide
CARTOON: “Copier Jams” — Nick Kim
HMO-NO News: Healthy Lint!
XKCD: “Fields Arranged by Purity”— Randall Munroe
Back Issues
Unclassified Ads

On the Front Cover

Commodoroe J.C. Gillmore and copilot in a Curtiss Headless dual-control pusher plane, 1912. Photo: Library of Congress.

On the Back Cover

Images from a thoracic spine examination by Christopher Vittore and Kevin Tribble, radiologists in Rockford, Ilinois and clinical assistant professors at University of Illinois College of Medicine. MRI technologist, Deb Savala assisted with the technical data. This was performed on an open MRI machine, a General Electric Signa 0.35 Tesla MRI scanner. (Details: 40 x 40 cm field of view, sagital plane, frequency 256, phase 128, image slice thickness 5 mm with 2mm skip interval, no phase wrap.)

Coming Events

February 19, 2010 AAAS Annual Meeting, San Diego
March 2010 Ig Nobel Tour of the UK
April/May 2010 Ig Nobel Europe Tour
September 30, 2010 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony
October 2, 2010 Ig Informal Lectures

See WWW.IMPROBABLE.COM for details of these and other events.