Q. What’s the surprising condition (four-letter word) that those naughty four-letter words might help you get rid of?

A. Although the news probably won’t stop parents from washing kids’ mouths out with soap, cussing a blue streak may actually help alleviate p-a-i-n, says Laura Sanders in “Science News.” “Swear words are unique,” explains psychologist Timothy Jay. “They’re really the link between the language system and the emotional system.” Inspired by the unsavory language his wife let loose during the throes of labour, psychologist Richard Stephens of Keele University in England experimented with undergraduate students to see if uttering emotion-laden choice words would alter their pain perception.

When the students dipped a hand into uncomfortably chilly water, the swearers were able to stand it for longer than controls uttering innocuous words, and afterward recorded feeling less pain. Swearing also increased heart rate, a possible signal of the fight- or-flight response that can increase tolerance for pain.

Q. How many engineering jobs let you take a van Gogh off the wall and hold it in your hands?

A. If you’re both an electrical engineering professor and a research fellow at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, like Cornell’s C. Richard Johnson Jr., you just might do this, says Susan Karlin of “IEEE Spectrum” magazine.

A big concern of his is “fraud and how to detect it.” Is that alleged van Gogh in hand authentic? Answering this can be done with high-resolution imaging associated with signal-processing algorithms that zero in at the brushstroke level.

Currently, Johnson’s focus is on canvas thread counts – the number of horizontal threads crossing a vertical line one centimetre long – to identify paintings from the same roll of canvas. This is telling for an artist who bought canvas in rolls, as van Gogh often did.

Radio-opaque material in an X-ray helps reveal signature weave density. Johnson’s team is currently distributing the software free to museums.

For me, he says, this kind of research is “like having a backstage pass. I go to conservation studios and can take a van Gogh out of its frame and examine it.”

Q. High-IQ friend confesses a curious reaction when she sees facial photos in magazines and newspapers: The men look a lot smarter than the women. What’s going on?

A. Likely she’s reacting to “face-ism,” a sweeping tendency among publications to show men’s faces more in closeup than women’s. On average, 2/3 of a male photo is given over to the face, compared to less than 1/2 for a female photo.

Sociologist Dane Archer confirmed this originally in 1,750 photos of people, then broadened his survey to include 11 nations, 920 portraits from the artwork of six centuries, plus amateur drawings by students, says David G. Myers in “Social Psychology.”

Further studies revealed that subjects depicted in closeup are generally viewed as being more intelligent and more ambitious – as if what is shown is taken to be what is important, with more of the face highlighting strength of character, more of the body accenting “physical” attributes. So next time you snap your friend’s photo, bring the camera in for a smart closeup.

Q. Getting really down and dirty, what do anthropologists learn about ancient peoples from coprolites?

A. These are artifacts of fossilized human dung sifted from the soils of caves, shelters and tombs, and bearing clues to how our ancestors ate and lived, says Paul Spinrad in “ReSearch Guide to Bodily Fluids.” Early last century, researchers simply broke apart coprolites, but by the 1950s “rehydration” hit, where deposits were “soaked, sliced, separated, centrifuged, sniffed, sieved, stained and smeared on slides.” Then the lab would figure out the foods involved – chemical composition, pollen, parasites, etc.

One leading paleo-scatologist took to varying his own diet to study the stools. He even went very high-fibre “to see how closely he could counterfeit the feces left by the Vikings – except for the parasites.”

Fibrous vegetable matter, insects, meat with bone chips, even human flesh (cannibalism) are all identifiable. Food preparation – grit means milling, charcoal means parching or roasting – can also be copro-read.

To researchers, this is serious business, says Spinrad. One 100-year-old stool was said to be in “mint condition” and valued at 20,000 pounds.

Q. Most of us are lucky to remember a 10-digit phone number. How about recalling 36 random digits, or 36,000? Is this humanly possible?

A. Rajan Mahadevan made “The Guinness Book of Records” for reciting the first 99,000 digits of pi, a mathematical number most of us know simply as 3.14, or maybe 3.1416. Call out 50 random digits that you just dreamed up and he can repeat them forward or backward.

Mahadevan said his secret is “chunking” the numbers into manageable units. For example, explains Rod Plotnik in “Introduction to Psychology,” here’s how Mahadevan broke up one substring of 14 digits – 11131217351802: “He chunked 111 and named it ‘Nelson’ because Admiral Nelson had one eye, one arm and one leg; he chunked 312 and named it the ‘area code of Chicago’; he chunked 1735 and named it ‘29’ because Ben Franklin was 29 in 1735; and he chunked 1802 as ‘plus 2’ because John Adams occupied the White House in 1800.” Then, to recite the number, he recalled: Nelson, Chicago area code, Ben Franklin, John Adams.

Q. “I was famous for the kites I made, and my sleds were the envy...of all the boys in town.” What invention is this woman world famous for today, more than a century after a court battle for the patent and after she was awarded the Decoration of the Royal Legion of Honour from Queen Victoria? You probably don’t know her name but have doubtless used countless of this product when shopping.

A. She was Margaret Knight (1838-1914), one of the first American women to be awarded a patent, says Jack Challoner in “1001 Inventions That Changed the World.”

She was a prolific inventor from the age of 12, when an accident in a textile mill prompted her to design a safety feature to protect workers from the loom. However, of her 20+ patents, the flat-bottomed paper bag is her most widely remembered invention.

Knight was working in a paper-bag factory after the American Civil War when she saw the need for a boxier shape to replace the envelope-slim bags unsuitable for bulky items. Since the flat-bottomed bag could be made only by hand, Knight designed a wooden prototype of a bag-maker that she sent to a machine shop, where an unscrupulous employee stole her design and got the patent.

But the decision was overturned in court, with Knight bagging what was rightfully hers from the beginning.

Send STRANGE questions to brothers Bill and Rich at Strangetrue@cs.com