Improbable Research

Here is a brief guide to some unfortunate explosions of a particular type. The details sit quietly in back issues of medical journals. Only occasionally does anyone come to see them. The visitor is, in most cases, either a doctor in sudden need of information or a scholar in search of violent titillation….

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

The "Puzzling Solutions" column in the special Security Issue of the Annals of Improbable Research presents several more from our collection of puzzle solutions to which we have lost the puzzles.

"Genealogists want psychotherapy to be made available for people who stumble across unpleasant discoveries while researching their family history." This statement, with copious supporting detail, is in a report in the April 17, 2005 issue of The Daily Telegraph.

(Thanks to Juanita Browne for bringing this to our attention.)

Ice spikes can, and do, form in freezer ice cube trays. The how and why of it are now fairly clear, thanks to research carried out by K. G. Libbrecht and K. Lui at the Caltech Physics Department.

There is the pre-print (it’s not clear where and when it will become a post-preprint) of Libbrecht and Lui’s study.

(Thanks to Hannah Pendergrast for bringing this to our attention.)

Investigator Carol Springs writes to clarify an item in the June issue of mini-AIR:

One point that dozens of others have probably made by now, but just in case:
>> "Ig Nobel Prizes" was a
>> category on the June 1, 2005
>> broadcast of the television program
>> "Jeopardy." Contestants were presented
>> with the following answers:
>>      karaoke   
>>      a car alarm
>>      Michael Milken
>>      Sun Myung Moon
>>      Ron Popeil
These just looked *wrong* somehow.  Were contestants supposed to guess the Ig Nobel prize category, or what?  Then, when I went to the specified Web site, I realized — these were the *questions*, not the answers!  As we all know, the questions come in response to the answers on Jeopardy.  The site in, er, question left out the "What is …" and "Who is …" for brevity’s sake.
A little poking around revealed a more coherent page:
    http://www.j-archive.com/showgame.php?game_id=357
If you pass your mouse cursor over the prize amount you see the answer, I mean the question.

Too bad two locals [contestants who are natives of Massachusetts, where the Ig Nobel Ceremony is held] were stumped on most of these!  Clearly they should’ve been attending the ceremonies, as we do nearly every year.