Piecost.Net

Well known scientific journal The Telegraph provides us with this gem of a headline: Red wine increases women’s sexual desire.

One theory put forward by the team of Italian doctors who carried out the study is that chemical compounds found in red wine may improve sexual functioning by increasing blood flow to key areas of the body.

So, to put it another way, a bunch of Italian doctors took a bunch of women out on the piss, and the ones who they’d fed more red wine to seemed keener to want to shag them.  A further conclusion was:

The researchers, who reported their findings in the Journal of Sexual Medicine last week, say the outcome is even more striking because the red wine drinkers were, on average, older than the other two groups, and age tends to be associated with a declining sex drive.

One can safely conclude therefore that the doctors were young & naive, and consequently surprised to find that if you give a bunch of older ladies a load of red wine they’ll enthusiastically try to latch on to any high-income-earners in the room.

[thanks Bruce]

According to science, shouting expletives has been proven by empirical measurement to reduce pain, in a study at Keele University.

Dr Stephens, from Keele’s school of psychology, came up with the idea for the study after swearing when he accidentally hit his thumb with a hammer as he built a garden shed.

It’s not all free-licence for Messrs Ramsey, Connolly, and Bloody-Wilson, as the study suggests that frequent casual swearers will gain less benefit than people who ordinarily mind their P’s and Q’s.

The scientific method was described, thus:

He recruited 64 volunteers to take part and each individual was asked to submerge their hand in a tub of freezing water for as long as possible while repeating a swear word of their choice.

They were then asked to repeat the experiment, this time using a more commonplace word that they would use to describe a table.

The article doesn’t mention how many swearwords Dr Stephens heard when he went around asking people if they’d submerge their hand in a tub of freezing water.  It’s a shame that frequency of casual swearing has a dilutive effect on the efficacy of the phenomenon, because it would be disadvantageous to all those people who commonly refer to a table as a “cock-platform”.

You know who you all are…

Surely in order to be an effective scientific exercise they should have filmed a control group of girls without bras?  This would serve 2 purposes:

1. give an idea of the relative improvements in support that each brassiere offered
2. provide an opportunity for scientists to look at boobies

I’m only thinking of the importance of methodical rigour.

Apparently it’s quite scientifically sound to construct a “thermal lance” for cutting through metal by piping oxygen through a tube of prosciutto and igniting it.  Theodore Gray has an article about it here.

Part of me thinks it’s undeniably awesome, but part of me is a little disappointed that the article’s been up for 2 days now and yet not one of the comments has included the phrase “pork sword”.

Handy to know if you’ve got a big vat full of mercury, and you want somewhere to store your cannonballs so that you can still see them – cannonballs float in mercury.

[via BoingBoing]

If your mum thought it was tedious of you to bring home a drum kit one afternoon and proclaim you were learning to play that, at least she could take solace in the fact you hadn’t brought back a pair of high voltage resonance transformers and calibrated them to emit sounds to emulate your favourite TV theme songs.

On the balance of it, it’s got to be said that this would make quite an irritating ringtone.

[Singing Tesla Coils via BoingBoing]

There’s some pretty damn cool demonstrations of physics principles out there on youtube – some of them entertaining, and others just plain interesting.

Visual representation of soundwaves using fire via a Rubens Tube

Surface properties of non-newtonian fluids demonstration – running and jumping on custard

Professor Julius Sumner Miller getting excited about Bernoulli’s theorem

Paul Hewitt demonstrating pressure via the bed of nails concept

[ball set into motion by Isacc Newton, and in this case, Steve Tilling]