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.

Advertising today, as prognosticated by T. Baron Russell in 1906 in his book  A Hundred Years Hence:

advertising will in the future world become gradually more and more intelligent in tone. It will seek to influence demand by argument instead of clamour, a tendency already more apparent every year. Cheap attention-calling tricks and clap-trap will be wholly replaced, as they are already being greatly replaced, by serious exposition; and advertisements, instead of being mere repetitions of stale catch-words, will be made interesting and informative, so that they will be welcomed instead of being shunned; and it will be just as suicidal for a manufacturer to publish silly or fallacious claims to notoriety as for a shopkeeper of the present day to seek custom by telling lies to his customers.

This month’s Quasi-Poetical-Research-Paper-Title-of-the-Month is “On Quartzite Lenticles in the Schists of South-Eastern Anglesey” read by Edward Greenly (who also read the abstract of the paper) at a meeting of the British Association, in Liverpool on September, 1896.

BONUS: Edward Greenly also wrote The metalliferous mines of Parys Mountain.

The August issue of mini-AIR just went out. Topics include: Survey Results – Lab Assistants Named Igor; Discovering Interesting Holes; Drug Snorting Fire-Eater Poet; Medieval-Scenes-of-Ritual-Circumcision Competition; The Man in the White Suit; Bronzed Grackle “Anting” with Mothballs; A Device to Improve the Schleger and Turner Method for Sweating Rate Measurements; etc.

Mel [pictured here] says, “It’s swell.”

(mini-AIR is the simplest way to keep informed about Improbable and Ig Nobel news and events. Just fill in the wee form, and mini-AIR will be emailed to you every month)

Big, albeit to some people icky, maggot news:

“Lucifensin, the Long-Sought Antimicrobial Factor of Medicinal Maggots of the Blowfly Lucilia sericata,” Lenka Monincova, Zdenek Voburka, Robert Bem, Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences, vol. 67, 2010, pp. 455–66. (Thanks to Mitch Dushay for bringing this to our attention.) The image here shows “Left toe neuroischaemic foot ulcer of female diabetic patient at the time of larvae removal”. The authors, in Prague, report:

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…