“Why are they using SALIVA to clean works of art?” is a short video in the Química por aí series. It explores the Ig Nobel Prize winning research about using human saliva — spit — to preserve and repair valuable paintings, sculpture, and other art works: The 2018 Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize was awarded […]
Statistics can be used in intensely creative ways, especially in the business world. A CBC news report (on December 19, 2023) tells how this is visible in the automobile industry: New Kia vehicles that have arrived from overseas are sitting on a storage lot in Wolverton, Ont., purposely locked up even though customers have been […]
In some cases, a professor’s legal testimony can be very valuable. A judge has now stated on the record how valuable: “a million dollars or so”. A December 18, 2023 Associated Press report, headlined “Judge criticizes Trump’s expert witness as he again refuses to toss fraud lawsuit“, says: Judge Arthur Engoron issued a written ruling […]
LIttle things complicate humans’ attempts to explore places other than the earth. Here’s a study about a small example: “The Damage to Lunar Orbiting Spacecraft Caused by the Ejecta of Lunar Landers,” Philip T. Metzger, James G. Mantovani, arXiv.2305.12234, 2023. The authors explain: “This manuscript analyzes lunar lander soil erosion models and trajectory models to […]
Mark Benecke, forensic entomologist and international theatrical star, sends this review of the dining facilities at CERN, the vast particle physics laboratory located on and under both sides of the Swiss-French border, partly in Geneva. [This continues a long AIR tradition of reviewing dining facilities at science research facilities.] Two of the restaurants (for U.S. […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Increasing perimeters — Some people are big on holidays – bigger than they were before those holidays. A team at the University of Castilla-La Mancha and the University of Valladolid, Spain, sized up some first-year undergraduate nursing students, […]
This week’s Ambiguous Paper Title is: “Coffee and heart failure: A further potential beneficial effect of coffee,” Anna Vittoria Mattioli and Alberto Farinetti, Nutrition, Metabolism and Cardiovascular Diseases, 2023.
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Gearing up for happiness — … The news headline says it all: “Toyota has built an EV with a fake transmission, and we’ve driven it – Five minutes behind the wheel, and you’ll be a believer.” This is […]
Titled “Shingo Fujimori has a shocking taste experience! What is the laboratory of Professor Yoshiaki Miyashita, who won the Ig Nobel Prize?”, this video shows a visit to the lab at Meiji University. Yoshiaki Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura were awarded the 2023 Ig Nobel Nutrition Prize, for experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Best interests at heart? — Feedback is fascinated by the final eight words in this statement: “Disadvantages include the competitive element associated with racing, which creates a strong incentive to kill birds where this is not in […]