As we tidy up, having moved the entire Improbable site to a new host, please pardon our smattering of dead links, detritus, and well-aged-whatnot. Most of the big parts are gamboling, but it might take a while to rehab some of the vast archival tunnels, galleries, and wormholes accumulated over three decades.
The mystery of spice-induced lip tingling succumbed, partially, to investigation in the year 2013. Details are in this study: “Food Vibrations: Asian Spice Sets Lips Trembling,” Nobuhiro Hagura, Harry Barber, and Patrick Haggard, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, vol. 280, no. 1770, 2013: 20131680. The authors, at University College London, report: Szechuan […]
‘Struth, it is, that Struth is a co-author of this essay that deals with strategies for proving truths: “Proof Strategies,” Moller and Georg Struth [pictured here], in the book Modelling Computing Systems, pp. 131-154. Springer, London, 2013. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-84800-322-4_6
The Ig Nobel Prizes exhibition in Taiwan has begun! The exhibition opened on June 25, and runs through September 11, 2022. It’s at the National Taiwan Science Education Center, in Taipei.
The ceremony web page tells how to make your paper-plane-throwing video, and submit it.
Sit down, if you can, and read this study about what it takes to get a folding plastic chair to the point where you can sit in it: “A study of design demand of applying quality function deployment in plastic folding chairs,” Chun Tung Chen, Applied Mechanics and Materials, vol. 284, pp. 3632-3636. The author, […]
The human who, of all the humans who have tried living life as a goat has become the most celebrated by fellow humans, looks back on his experience. NRC interviews and profiles Thomas Thwaites, and also checks in with Charles Foster, who lived parts of his life as different kinds of animals. The NRC profile […]
Statistics an be compiled about anything, independent of the question: is there any point in gathering statistics about this thing? The following study may be good fodder for teachers who wish to discuss that question with students: “The Temporal Making of a Great Literary Corpus by a XX-Century Mystic: Statistics of Daily Words and Writing […]
“Chocolate Packaging Cues and First Moment of Truth: An Exploratory Study on Young Consumers’ Mind” [ by Suraj Kushe Shekhar and P.T. Raveendran, published in Management Science Letters, vol. 3, no. 7. 2013, pp. 1851-1862] is a featured study in “Chocolate Packaging Research Review“, which is a featured article in the special Women (and Men) issue of the […]
The field of banana-string detection has taken a big or little step with publication of this new study: “Target detection of banana string and fruit stalk based on YOLOv3 deep learning network,” Rihong Zhang, Xiaomin Li, Lixue Zhu, Maokun Zhong, and Yihua Gao, in 2021 IEEE 2nd International Conference on Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and […]
How don’t and do pedestrians collide? Ig Nobel Prize winner Alessandro Corbetta, a physicist based at Eindhoven University of Technology, explains, in this short video. The 2021 Ig Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to Alessandro Corbetta, Jasper Meeusen, Chung-min Lee, Roberto Benzi, and Federico Toschi, for conducting experiments to learn why pedestrians do not […]