The Ig Nobel Prize-winning study about why strings get tangled got an appreciative nod in the Veritasium video about knots and knot theory. The mention moment comes at about 31:50 in the video:
Of course the video is not not worth watching in its entirety:
The 2008 Ig Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to Dorian Raymer and Douglas Smith, for proving mathematically that heaps of string or hair or almost anything else will inevitably tangle themselves up in knots.
Their prize-winning study is: “Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String,” Dorian M. Raymer and Douglas E. Smith, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 104, no. 42, October 16, 2007, pp. 16432-7.
(Thanks to Dean Grodzins for bringing the new mention to our attention.)