Improbable Research

With bedbugs much in the news [and see the the EPA/CDC joint statement on bedbug control], let us not forget the Ig Nobel Prize-winning life’s work of Prof. Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk of Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. She was awarded the 2007 Ig Nobel Prize in entomology for doing a census of all the mites, insects, spiders, pseudoscorpions, crustaceans, bacteria, algae, ferns and fungi with whom we share our beds each night.

See part of her Ig lecture in the video here. And you might enjoy reading her monograph “Huis, Bed en Beestjes” [House, Bed and Bugs], J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk, Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde, vol. 116, no. 20, May 13, 1972, pp. 825-31, and her many other related publications.

The manga magazine Young Jump has written a two-part series about the history of the Ig Nobel Prizes. Here, below, are a few (non-sequential) pages from part 1, which was published on August 26. (The magazine’s cover is reproduced here, at right.)

Part 1 features the founding of the Igs and of the magazine Annals of Improbable Research, and a few highlights from ceremonies. We see one of the inventors of Bow-Lingual, the computer-based dog-language-to-human-language translation device, and his son, who accompanied him dressed in a dog suit. We also see the incident in which Sir Robert May, chief scientific adviser to the British government, tried to ban the awarding of Ig Nobel Prizes to British scientists. We see other things…

Jasmuheen, who won the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize in nutrition for her book “Living on Light,” which explains that although some people do eat food, they don’t ever really need to, now tries to clarify her claims about her never-eat-food diet. In a newly distributed newsletter, she writes:

[I offer] books and CD’s that may help you with in-depth longer meditations to increase your cosmic particle flow. Please note that I can no longer support the 21 day process as we have found that it is too quick for most people on an emotional body level and that many do not follow the guidelines offered in the Living on Light (Pranic Nourishment) book. It also cannot guarantee your transition into living purely on prana and has a 10% long term success rate.

Your only guarantee into this successfully is your personal frequency which sets up a natural magnetic attraction into this reality once the mental paradigm is tuned.

NBC broadcast this quasi-intimate tribute to Bijan Pakzad, who was awarded the 1995 Ig Nobel Prize in chemistry for creating DNA Cologne and DNA Perfume, neither of which contain deoxyribonucleic acid, and both of which come in a triple helix bottle.

The Portugeuse program Ping Pong Top did a video tribute to its ten favorite Ig Nobel Prize winners:

Catherine Douglas, co-winner of the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize in veterinary medicine for determining that cows who have names give more milk than cows that don’t, has now done research on the happiness of pigs. In this inverview with the BBC, she explains that a glockenspiel figured prominently in the research:

(Thanks to investigator Scott Langill for bringing this to our attention.)