Leaning to the left makes the Eiffel Tower seem smaller; Converting old Russian ammunition into new diamonds; A machine that you can point at someone to induce them to get confused, and shut up; How to see brain activity in a dead salmon; and The puzzle of why some blonde people in Sweden suddenly found their hair turning green— all these all turn up in this week’s Improbable Research podcast.
Click on the “Venetian blinds” icon — at the lower right corner here — to select whichever week’s episode you want to hear:
SUBSCRIBE on Play.it, iTunes, or Spotify to get a new episode every week, free.
This week, Marc Abrahams tells about:
- Some of the things that won Ig Nobel Prizes in 2012. (“Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller: Posture-Modulated Estimation,” Anita Eerland, Tulio M. Guadalupe and Rolf A. Zwaan, Psychological Science, vol. 22 no. 12, December 2011, pp. 1511-14.
/ The SKN Company / “SpeechJammer: A System Utilizing Artificial Speech Disturbance with Delayed Auditory Feedback“, Kazutaka Kurihara, Koji Tsukada, arxiv.org/abs/1202.6106. February 28, 2012. / “Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An argument for multiple comparisons correction,” Craig M. Bennett, Abigail A. Baird, Michael B. Miller, and George L. Wolford, poster, 15th Annual Meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping, San Francisco, CA, June 2009. It was later published as: “Neural Correlates of Interspecies Perspective Taking in the Post-Mortem Atlantic Salmon: An Argument For Multiple Comparisons Correction,” Craig M. Bennett, Abigail A. Baird, Michael B. Miller, and George L. Wolford, Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results, vol. 1, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1-5. / Johan Pettersson and the mystery of the green-haired blondes. Featuring a dramatic reading by Jean Berko Gleason.) - List of everything that won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2012.
The mysterious John Schedler or the shadowy Bruce Petschek perhaps did the sound engineering this week.
The Improbable Research podcast is all about research that makes people LAUGH, then THINK — real research, about anything and everything, from everywhere —research that may be good or bad, important or trivial, valuable or worthless. CBS distributes it, both on the new CBS Play.it web site, and on iTunes and Spotify).