When a mobile telephone lodges in a person’s stomach, it can cease to be quite so mobile. A new medical paper offers proof of that: “An Ingested Mobile Phone in the Stomach May Not Be Amenable to Safe Endoscopic Removal Using Current Therapeutic Devices: A Case Report,” Obinna Obinwa, David Cooper, and James M. O’Riordan, International Journal of […]
Month: May 2016
Another spirited new book about the Ig Nobel Prizes
There’s another spirited new book about the Ig Nobel Prizes. Physicists Aleksandra Kroh [pictured here] and Madeleine Veyssié gave a good, long, gimlet gaze at fourteen (of the 250) Ig Nobel Prize winners, and then served up their deepest professional and personal opinions as to the merits and implications of each of those fourteen. They call the book Le Top 14 […]
‘Unperformable’ music – an ontological approach
There are some musical works which are, in some way or another, impossible to perform, viz. they are ‘Unperformable’. But how many varieties of unperformable music are there? Professor Wesley D. Cray of Grand Valley State University, Allendale, US, investigates the subject in a new paper for the British Journal of Aesthetics, finding that there […]
Early investigation of piezoelectric effects in chicken feathers
Modern investigators of piezoelectric effects in chicken feathers owe a tip of the beak to the people involved in this early attempt: “A preliminary investigation of piezoelectric effects in chicken feathers,” W. Van Dam, J.A. Tanner, and C. Romero-Sierra, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, vol. 17, no. 1, 1970, pp. 71-71. The authors explain: “Piezoelectric effects […]