“Frozen Poop Pills Fight Life-Threatening Infections” is the headline on this report by Nancy Shute, for NPR’s Shots blog: Fecal transplants can be life-saving for people with stubborn bacterial infections, but they’re not for the faint of heart. So doctors have come up with a way to make them more palatable – the frozen poop […]
Year: 2014
The Butcher’s Tongue Illusion (from the chip-crunch manipulator)
Charles Spence (who was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for earlier work, and who is pictured here) and his colleagues have demonstrated the “butcher’s tongue illusion”. Nicola Twilley, writing in Elements, conveys some of the new study’s flavor: The tongue in the title of Oxford University’s Crossmodal Research Laboratory’s new paper, “The Butcher’s Tongue Illusion,” does not […]
A denture-friction scientist analyses the banana-skin paper
Maria Pettersson, a friction scientist at the Ångström Laboratory at Uppsala University, who is professionally focusing on dentures these days, discusses the Ig Nobel physics prize-winning study that measured the slipperiness of a banana peel. You can listen to the discussion on Sverige Radio [P4]. The discussion is in Swedish. This action photo shows a moment […]
“Inappropriate”: Old vs. young vs. differing senses of humor
This study documents a great lesson of some sort that was sought and perhaps learned: “Age-related differences in judgments of inappropriate behavior are related to humor style preferences,” Jennifer Tehan Stanley, Monika Lohani, Derek M. Isaacowitz, Psychology and Aging, Vol 29(3), Sep 2014, 528-541. (Thanks to investigator Erwn Kompanjie for bringing this to our attention.) The authors […]