Improbable Research

Professor Ramakrishna Nunna, [pictured left] who is Dean of the Lyles College of Engineering, US, and Walter Mizuno M.S. [pictured right] who is a lecturer at the college, are the inventors of the world’s first (and newly patented) Graduation mortarboard display holder. (United States Patent 9,468,247, October 18, 2016, assigned to California State University, Fresno California.)

Here’s the raison d’être and the modus operandi :

“During graduation exercises, the graduating students are dressed uniformly in matching robes and mortarboards. From certain angles, the broad mortarboards can obscure the faces of graduating students. Parents, friends and loved ones have difficulty distinguishing the graduating student of interest in large graduating classes due to the uniformity of dress and the mortarboard acting to block facial features. Also, many graduating students chafe at the forced uniformity of graduation dress. Some wish to express their individuality during one of the most important days of their lives.

To express some individuality, some graduating students embellish the top of their respective mortarboards by drawing on or gluing designs to them. These modifications are generally permanent. Since many graduating students rent or borrow graduation outfits, permanent modification of the top of the rented or borrowed mortarboard is undesirable.

What is needed is a simple and non-permanent way for graduating students to individualize their mortarboards to make it easier for their loved ones to spot the individual in a crowd, and to express the wearer’s messages, feelings, and sentiments on graduation day.

[…]

This invention is a mortar board display holder comprising a board clip portion, a display supporter portion, and a connecting portion joining the board clip portion and the display supporter portion. The board clip portion has a flat upper prong having a first plane, a flat lower prong having a second plane, and a spacing member that holds the upper prong fixably spaced from the lower prong such that the second plane is substantially parallel to the first plane. The display supporter portion has a flat first leg having a third plane, a flat second leg having a fourth plane, and a holding member that holds the first leg and the second leg such that the third plane is substantially parallel to the fourth plane. ”

Note: Fresno State undergraduate regalia (cap, gown and tassel) ($31.50+ $2.59 tax) and graduate regalia (cap, gown, tassel and hood) ($64.50 + $5.30 tax) are available here (Improbable has made attempts to contact the inventors regarding commercial availability of the display holder, but with little, if any, success).

Your Annals of Improbable Research subscription will start with the special Ig Nobel issue — if you subscribe now.

The magazine brings you research that makes people LAUGH, then THINK.

Real research, about anything and everything, from everywhere —research that’s maybe good or bad, important or trivial, valuable or worthless. Compiled for you, by the producers of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. Six (6) new Improbable issues every year!

Does the left armpit smell like the right armpit? 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 armpitty study, with dramatic readings from biologist Christina Agapakis, who has smelled more armpits, mostly for scientific reasons, than most people ever will.

For more info about what we discuss this week, go explore:

• “Human Axillary Odor: Are There Side-Related Perceptual Differences?” Camille Ferdenzi, Benoist Schaal, and S. Craig Roberts, Chemical Senses, vol. 34, no. 7, 2009, pp. 565-571.

• Axilla.

The mysterious John Schedler or the shadowy Bruce Petschek perhaps did the sound engineering this week.

The Improbable Research podcast is all about research that makes people LAUGH, then THINK — real research, about anything and everything, from everywhere —research that may be good or bad, important or trivial, valuable or worthless. CBS distributes it, on the CBS Play.it web site, and on iTunes and Spotify).

NEXT POST: xxxxxxxx

From the SIAM obituary of applied mathematician George Carrier:

Not one to polish text, or to pursue a subject beyond the essence of what he wanted to know, he was nevertheless pleased when the late Sydney Goldstein (who, he said, introduced him to the use of the semicolon) praised his writing as concise and precise.

In real life, so to speak, does the brain keep on keeping on for a while after death? A newly published study, written by notably adventurous academics, says that yes, the brain can and does, kinda sorta:

“When Is the Brain Dead? Living-Like Electrophysiological Responses and Photon Emissions from Applications of Neurotransmitters in Fixed Post-Mortem Human Brains,” Nicolas Rouleau, Nirosha J. Murugan, Lucas W.E. Tessaro, Justin N. Costa, Michael A. Persinger, PLoS ONE, vol. 11, no. 12, December 2016, e0167231.  (Thanks to Dany Adams for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at Laurentian University, Canada, explain:

“The structure of the post-mortem human brain can be preserved by immersing the organ within a fixative solution. Once the brain is perfused, cellular and histological features are maintained over extended periods of time. However, functions of the human brain are not assumed to be preserved beyond death and subsequent chemical fixation. Here we present a series of experiments which, together, refute this assumption. Instead, we suggest that chemical preservation of brain structure results in some retained functional capacity. Patterns similar to the living condition were elicited by chemical and electrical probes within coronal and sagittal sections of human temporal lobe structures that had been maintained in ethanol-formalin-acetic acid…. these results suggest that portions of the post-mortem human brain may retain latent capacities to respond with potential life-like and virtual properties.”

Co-author Persinger has made his mark many ways in and about academia.

This photograph of Professor Persinger appears in the January 10, 2016 issue of The Star. The photo was taken by Nicolas Rouleau, another co-author of the zombie brain paper.

The article that accompanies that photo in The Star begins:

The ethical failure of the swearing Laurentian professor
The case of a Laurentian University professor pulled from his class after asking students to agree to his use of vulgar language holds important lessons for university teachers…

Professor Persinger is famed, also, for having co-invented the God Helmet. and for his other work in parapsychology. We profiled Professor Persinger here a couple of years ago, in three parts: 1, 2, and 3.

Professor Persinger and Professor Rouleau recently reported seeing signs of learning in a ball of dough.

BONUS (related to the brain activity study): The 2012 Ig Nobel Prize for neuroscience was awarded to Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford, for demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere — even in a dead salmon.