Chimpanzees recognizing photographs of the rear ends of other chimpanzees; colonoscopy patients who explode, and the patent for the bagel-making machine — all these all turn up in this week’s Improbable Research podcast.
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This week, Marc Abrahams tells about:
- The rest (following on from the last two weeks) of the things that won Ig Nobel Prizes in 2012. (“Faces and Behinds: Chimpanzee Sex Perception” Frans B.M. de Waal and Jennifer J. Pokorny, Advanced Science Letters, vol. 1, 99–103, 2008. Here’s detail from the study:
- List of everything that won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2012.
- Farewell, bagel-making-machine inventor (“Daniel Thompson, Whose Bagel Machine Altered the American Diet, Dies at 94,” New York Times, September 21, 2015. / “Apparatus for making a toroid,” U.S. 2584514, granted to Meyer Thompson and Daniel Thompson, priority December 9, 1947. Featuring dramatic readings by Sue Wellington.) Here’s part of the bagel-making-machine patent:
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, on the CBS Play.it web site, and on iTunes and Spotify).