Do academics really split hairs at work? They certainly do now!

Josie Ford

Splitting hairs

“Academics are often accused of ‘splitting hairs’,” David Taylor tells Feedback. “Well this year my team and I have done just that. We built a machine which can literally split a single hair from end to end. This is the first time that anyone has been able to split a hair in the laboratory under controlled conditions and thus quantify the phenomenon. Perhaps you were planning some exciting cosmetic treatment, like changing the colour of your hair or curling it? I can tell you whether it’s going to give you split ends or not.”

He and his team wrote up their adventure in a paper called “The biomechanics of splitting hairs“, published in Interface Focus.

This built on research done in the 1980s by Y. K. Kamath and H.-D. Weigmann, who took a crack at minutely examining what happens when a strand of hair splits.

In a Journal of Applied Polymer Science paper called “Fractography of human hair“, Kamath and Weigmann managed to restrain their excitement. They went only so far as to say “electron microscopic evidence suggests that fracture propagation occurs by secondary cracks generated as a result of stress concentrations building up at the periphery of the primary crack”.

Water from the remains

Researchers in Brazil looked for the remains outside a cemetery of the remains of people who are buried inside that cemetery. Their main question: are the decomposing bodies contributing nastiness to the region’s deep groundwater? Elias Saba and his colleagues wrote it all up with a ghoulishly geeky title: “Evaluating the impact of a cemetery on groundwater by multivariate analysis“.

The team took data from three “monitoring wells” dug in the cemetery and compared that with the local sewage water company’s data about water in household cisterns in the neighbourhood. A round of multivariate analysis brought both good and not-so-good news.

Both within and without the cemetery confines, the researchers explain, the soil was absorbing most of the problematic body waste substances, “preventing surface contaminants from reaching the aquifer”. That’s the upside. Here’s the but: “Water samples collected in areas outside the cemetery do not meet Brazilian standards for drinking water.”

Drinking grandma

Off-water from our forebears isn’t a new concern. Perhaps the splashiest look at the question came in 2008 in the Journal of Environmental Health.

Reader Russ Hodge sent Feedback a copy of the article, titled “Drinking grandma: The problem of embalming“, by Jeremiah Chiappelli, a lawyer, and Ted Chiappelli, a health sciences professor at Western Carolina University, North Carolina.

The Chiappellis explain: “The modern practice of embalming replaces organic blood with various toxic and carcinogenic chemicals, particularly formaldehyde. Then the embalmed body is placed underground where, despite the casket, the body’s fluids will inevitably leak into the groundwater… The initial reasons for the use of embalming and the rationale given for the continuance of the practice fail to justify the potential public health and environmental risks presented by embalming.”

The Chiappellis also tell of research, done by others, as to why so many people in the US opt to embalm: “In states that require funeral directors to be embalmers or have embalming facilities, cremation rates decrease due to funeral director inducement.”

Burying the hatchet

Nothing cuts the social ice in a strange pub quite as sharply as axe throwing. But the sport can bring hazards for some of the people who are exposed to it in a dutiful, professional way.

Word is out, from researchers Kusha Davar, Arthur Jeng and Suzanne Donovan, that blastomycosis is one of those hazards. Blastomycosis is a fungal disease “manifested as pulmonary disease” that can also affect the skin, bones and genitourinary tract.

Further detail is on display (including in colourful photographs) in the trio’s study, “Burying hatchets into endemic diagnoses: Disseminated blastomycosis in a novel occupational exposure“.

The patient had been “working at an axe throwing factory upon moving to Los Angeles” where “his duties included chopping wood for customers to use”.

This disease, Davar, Jeng and Donovan contend, “is not a routine diagnosis” in southern California. They surmise that the Blastomyces fungus was in the wood before it decamped into the patient.

Telltale titles

Here are two of the recent additions to Feedback’s collection called The Title Tells You Everything You Need to Know:

“Impact of wet underwear on thermoregulatory responses and thermal comfort in the cold“, which appeared in Ergonomics in 1994.

And “The possible pain experienced during execution by different methods“, which perhaps brought surprise to readers of the journal Perception in 1993.

If you find an equally striking example, please send it (with citation details) to: Telltale titles, c/o Feedback.

Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founded the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website is improbable.com.

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