For badminton players: “The centre piece of the game is no doubt a shuttlecock which is made of either natural feathers or synthetic rubber with an open conical shape.”

But perhaps some are left wondering which is best from an aerodynamic point of view – a feathered ‘bird’ or a rubber one?

“Although a series of studies on aerodynamic behaviour of spherical and ellipsoidal balls have been reported in the open literature, scant information is available in the public domain about the aerodynamic behaviour of badminton shuttlecocks.”

Does one’s skull vibrate when chewing biscuits?  The answer is yes, up to a point – that’s according to a recentl experimental study performed by the Department of Oral-Maxillofacial Surgery, Prosthodontics and Special Dental Care Oral Physiology Group, at the University Medical Center Utrecht, The Netherlands, along with the Department of Prosthetic Dentistry, Faculty of Dentistry, Lutheran University of Brazil, Porto Alegre, Brazil.

Want to be more creative? No problem, just take a ball and squeeze it (but only in your left hand, otherwise the consequences are as yet unknown).
Dr. Abraham Goldstein (pictured) along with colleagues at the Brain Research Center of Bar-Ilan University, Israel, published their finding in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin&Review.

So the only food that we knew could survive the apocalypse has been driven out of business by its own employees, who also teamed up with single mothers, minorities and atheists to overwhelmingly re-elect a guy determined to jump off a fiscal cliff right just before the end of the world was long projected - December of 2012.

Well played, Mayans.

For Marcel Proust, one of the after-effects of eating asparagus, was that it  “…transforms my chamber-pot into a flask of perfume.’’

“ ‘Chills’ (frisson manifested as goose bumps or shivers) have been used in an increasing number of studies as indicators of emotions in response to music …”

But in a new research project, investigators from Hanover University of Music and Drama (hmtmh) in Germany focused their attention not just on chills which are exclusively musically-induced, but also on those initiated by aural, visual, tactile, and taste stimulation. 

A comprehensive set of experiments were devised to investigate.

What does “Well” mean? Or, more specifically, what does ‘Well’ mean when it’s used as the first word in response to so-called ‘Wh-questions’ (which, what, who, whom, whose, where, whence, whither, when, why, whynot, wherefore, whatever etc. etc.)? Professor Gene H. Lerner and Professor Emanuel A. Schegloff offer an explanation in the April 2009 issue of the journal Research on Language&Social Interaction.

“We show that these well-prefaces operate as general alerts that indicate nonstraightforwardness in responding …”

In 1987, unthinking, primitive pre-GMO breeders exploited an abandoned shelter cat in Montana, with no one to defend it, for their own nefarious ends when it was discovered that this feline pawn gave birth to a curly-haired kitten. The kitten was then raped by a Persian male and gave birth to a mixture of curly-haired and normal-haired kittens, resulting in a horrible mutation that was now dominant over nature: its presence on even one of the two copies of the gene involved was suddenly sufficient to cause cats to have curly hair. (1)