The Ig Nobel Southern Cal Tour begins a few days from now, with events in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, and Irvine. It’s all about Ig Nobel Prize winners and other people who have done things so surprising that they make people LAUGH, then THINK.
All three events are open to the public, free. Here is the schedule:
May 2, 2025, 4:30 pm, Friday — UCLA, Los Angeles, California, USA, in the Mathematical Sciences building, room 5200 — Marc Abrahams and Mason Porter will talk about the Ig Nobel Prizes and Improbable Research.
May 3, 2025, 1:30 pm, Saturday — CALPACS (California Los Padres Section of the American Chemical Society), in the Faulkner Gallery of the Santa Barbara Public Library (Central library),40 East Anapamu Street, Santa Barbara, California, USA — Marc Abrahams will talk about the Ig Nobel Prizes and Improbable Research, with
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- 2012 Ig Nobel Neuroscience Prize winners Craig Bennett and Michael Miller (demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere — even in a dead salmon)
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May 5, 2025, 3:30 pm, Monday — University of California Irvine, Irvine, California, USA — in Natural Sciences 1, room 4112 — With Marc Abrahams and:
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- 2015 Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize winner Greg Weiss (a method to partially unboil an egg)
- 2023 Ig Nobel Medicine Prize winner Natasha Mesinkovska (using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person’s two nostrils)
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Special thanks to Payam Minoofar, Mason Porter, and (Ig Nobel Prize winner) Greg Weiss for taking the lead in organizing these events.
Observers will or won’t observe that this is happening just a few weeks after this year’s Ig Nobel Euro (and Brexitannia) Tour.