Investigator Genevieve Reynolds alerts us to the existence of the Free Enterprise Radon Health Mine. She writes: It’s a "radon mine." That you spend time in. For your health. Because of the radon. They also have free high-speed internet service ("even underground!"), and you can bring your pet for radon therapy… (Note also that the […]
Month: July 2005
Scientific high hair
High-flying Dr. Margaret Kosal has joined the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS).
Name number for political scientists
Richard Neimi (whose name is misspelled) has calculated the name number for political scientists. His report appears in the July/August issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. The "Name Number concept" was pioneered by Kevin Krajick, in an article in the March/April issue of the magazine. AND… if you look at Professor Niemi (name non-misspelled)’s […]
VHS journey to the Museum of Toilets
Mr. Kewal Anand of Lokayata, India, and his colleagues announce that We have prepared a VHS telling how the evolution of toilets from 2500 BC to-date has taken place. We can drive you visually on, for about half-an-hour.
Ig winner’s nano breakthrough
Andre Geim, who shared the 2000 Ig Nobel Physics Prize with Michael Berry for using magnets to levitate a frog, is in the news again: A team of British and Russian scientists led by Professor Geim have discovered a whole family of previously unknown materials, which are one atom thick and exhibit properties which scientists […]
Mite be of interest
Nobody sleeps alone. This has little or nothing to do with morals. It is simply a law of nature, a fact. Census after census finds that, with or without the niceties of formal marriage, dust mites are the great silent majority in every bed…. So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian
Real or concocted?
Today’s entry in our ongoing series "Real or Concocted?" is a press release purportedly issued by the University of Buffalo. Here are excerpts: Results showed that in the first year of marriage for 20-somethings, husbands are more likely to start or resume smoking marijuana if their wives smoke marijuana. … [Husbands] do not seem to […]
Tollhouse cookie morphology
"‘Toll House’ Recipe Cookies Do Not Maintain Their Morphology Under Heat Stress Conditions." That’s the claim. It is also the title of a research report by Michael Cammer that appears in the July/August issue of the Annals of Improbable Research.
Bang! history repeats itself
The achievement that won the 2000 Ig Nobel Peace Prize for the British Royal Navy is now being repeated by the British Army. A report in the July 17, 2005 issue of The Daily Telegraph tells latest chapter: Soldiers forced to shout ‘bang’ as the Army runs out of ammunitionBy Sean Rayment, Defence Correspondent Soldiers […]
Snails and broadband
We describe an experiment in which a Giant African Snail, acting as a data transfer agent, exceeded all known ?last-mile? communications technologies in terms of bit-per-second performance, adding to the many paradoxes of broadband communications modules. So begins a report called "Sluggish Data Transport Is Faster Than ADSL," by Ami Ben-Bassat, Revital Ben-David-Zaslow, Shimon Schocken […]