As we tidy up, having moved the entire Improbable site to a new host, please pardon our smattering of dead links, detritus, and well-aged-whatnot. Most of the big parts are gamboling, but it might take a while to rehab some of the vast archival tunnels, galleries, and wormholes accumulated over three decades.
“Does the Sex of a Simulated Patient Affect CPR?” [by Chelsea E. Kramer, Matthew S. Wilkins, Jan M. Davies, Jeff K. Caird, and Gregory M. Hallihan, published in Resuscitation, vol. 86, 2015, pp. 82-87] is a featured study in “Medical Research: Rescuers’ Hands, Ponytail Headache, Elevation for Nursing“, which is a featured article in the special Women […]
Sunflowers have the reputation of all being dedicated to facing the sun. An Ig Nobel Prize-winning team has now tried to measure how well that reputation matches reality. They dispatched some drones and some software to do this. The research is documented in their new study “Mature Sunflower Inflorescences Face Geographical East to Maximize Absorbed […]
The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK. In the Ig Informal Lectures, some days after the ceremony, the new Ig Nobel Prize winners attempt to explain what they did, and why they did it. We released these lectures one at a time. In Podcast Episode #1094, Marc Abrahams presents the 2021 Ig Nobel Prize for […]
The physics of musical saws, explored by Ig Nobel Prize winner Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, was profiled in the New York Times: “Now L. Mahadevan, a professor of physics and applied mathematics at Harvard, along with two colleagues, Suraj Shankar and Petur Bryde, has studied the way the saw produces music and drawn some conclusions that help […]
If you read the following brief passage, you might invent the question “What Is High-Throughput Word Generation (HTWG)?” The passage is from the paper “It׳s all Greek to me: Towards a broader view of food science and ‘creativity’ in gastronomy,” by Will Goldfarb, in the research journal International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science (vol. […]
The Ig Nobel Prizes have again turned up in a crossword puzzle, this time as an answer in the May 3, 2022 puzzle in The New York Times. The clue for one of the across words is: 14 ___ Prize (satirical scientific award since 1991) By our lazy count, this is the sixth time the Ig […]
Louise Downham interviews someone who, despite and because of his fear of insects, now specializes in photographing them. The interview is in Fstoppers, a publication for readers who purchase photographic equipment. The interview begins: Terrified of creepy crawlies he may be, but Mofeed Abu-Shalwa has committed his career to photographing and researching tiny creatures. I […]
The scholars of wet floor signs commit scholarship to studying wet floor signs. Their web site displays pictograms, photos, and photo-realizations of many signs pertaining to wet floors. They are led by Elena Kamas, at Stanford University. (Thanks to Anna Beukenhorst for bringing this to our attention.)
Volume 20, number 4 of the magazine is a special Women (and Men) issue. The table of contents, and a few articles, are online. You can, if you are daring, purchase a PDF copy of the entire issue. If you are really daring, subscribe to the magazine.
The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK. In the Ig Informal Lectures, some days after the ceremony, the new Ig Nobel Prize winners attempt to explain what they did, and why they did it. We released these lectures one at a time. In Podcast Episode #1093, Marc Abrahams presents the 2021 Ig Nobel Prize for […]