Curative Properties of Chicken Soup?

This article --- and, especially, its opening picture --- makes me want to have some chicken soup.

(Tip of the cap to I Fucking Love Science.)

Randomized Controlled Trials of Parachute Intervention

Apparently, there are none. At minimum, the paper called Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials reported the following summary of their results in the preamble to their paper: "We were unable to identify any randomised controlled trials of parachute intervention."

The paper does have a serious undertone, however, as the authors are commenting about the limits of evidence-based medicine.

(Tip of the cap to Easter Eggs in Scientific Papers.)

Flaccid Mechanics: A Systematic Study of Penis Sizes

Scholars from King's College and other UK institutions have just published a new study with the scintillating title of Am I normal? A systematic review and construction of nomograms for flaccid and erect penis length and circumference in up to 15521 men.

The first sentence of the paper's introduction sums things up rather nicely: "The measurement of penis size may be important either in the assessment of men complaining of a small penis or for academic interest."

My first thought about the article was: But did they also measure elastic constants (to determine stiffness, under the assumption that the object is elastic) and other Lamé parameters?

My second thought was: Up to 15521 men? Where is the uncertainty? Despite the odd article title, this item turns out to have a simple explanation: there were multiple studies and that is the number of men involved in the largest one.

In the authors' own words, their objective was "To systematically review and create nomograms of flaccid and erect penile size measurements." Among other things, their methods included a simulation of 20000 observations of penis size from a normal distribution, though it may also have been interesting to consider a heavy-tailed distribution in case of extreme events.

(Tip of the cap to IFLS.)

Update (3/10/15): Here is the modified version of this entry that I wrote for the Improbable Research blog.

Update (3/10/15): Here is a snarky comment that I wish I had thought of earlier: Remember that "soft matter" is an important subject in condensed-matter physics.

Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine Awarded for Work on the Brain's Navigation System

This year's Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine went to a trio for their work on the brain's navigation system. It's also great that neuroscience (and systems neuroscience, no less) was recognized with a Nobel.

A particularly relevant Scholarpedia entry is the one on grid cells (which, along with "place cells", help the brain to determine where it is and where it is going), whose authors --- a team of wife and husband --- comprise two of the three newly-minted Nobel Laureates.

Now about my horrible sense of navigation...

Update (10/10/14): I neglected to post the official announcement.

Physicians Versus Physicists

At lunch today, there was some confusion on whether one of my colleagues was a physician or a physicist (he's the latter). My contribution went along the following lines:

'Both medicine and physics include operations, but many more of them are reversible in physics.'

[The gist and important specific words are accurate; this is not the exact sentence construction.]