The 24/7 Lectures are a long-running part of the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony – a history long enough that there have now been exactly 100 of them! That’s 100 attempts by great thinkers to: give a complete, technical description of a topic in just 24 seconds; and then give a clear summary of a topic […]
The 31st First Annual Ig® Nobel Prize ceremony happens Thursday, September 9, 2021, at 6 pm (US eastern time). Watch it right here. Alternatively, watch the Japanese webstream. [VIDEO NOTE, added September 12, 2021: YouTube’s notorious takedown algorithms sometimes block the ceremony recording that lives there. We have so far been unable to find a […]
The pile of props and artifacts from past Ig Nobel Prize Ceremonies has grown into a remarkable collection (several people have remarked on it). Some items sit on a shelf, but others must be worn and used, if they are to be meaningful. For instance, audiences who tuned in early to the 2016 ceremony, saw […]
Winners of 2019 Ig Nobel Physics Prize showed up to accept the prize, dressed as a wombat, or as pieces of wombat feces (they received the prize for researching and publishing, “How Do Wombats Make Cubed Poo?“). You might have seen them onstage dressed this way in the ceremony video. If you were wondering how […]
The “World’s First Phone with Ultrasonic Mosquito Away Technology” is on the market in India. We were curious about this, so we consulted Bart Knols, a mosquito expert who received the 2006 Ig Nobel Prize in Biology “for showing that the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae is attracted equally to the smell of limburger cheese […]
The 2018 Members Gallery for The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists is now available to the public. Once a year, we gather the listings of all the new inductees into such a gallery – before that, new inductees are only seen individually (in the Improbable Blog) as they join throughout the year. We invite […]
If you spend enough time in a flight simulator or using Virtual Reality goggles, you’re likely to suffer “simulator sickness”. The simulator shows your eyes objects, motions, and distances which don’t match what your other senses are perceiving, which can cause nausea, vertigo, headaches, and other documented symptoms. Some designers try to lessen the effect […]
Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen (1845-1923) has joined the Historical Honorary Members of the Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists. Known as the “Father of Radiology”, he discovered and investigated X-Rays while experimenting with vacuum tubes in 1895. He named them "X-Rays" because they were an unknown form of radiation and he refused to patent his discovery. […]
The claims made in lawsuits – and the need to verify or disprove them – sometimes spark interesting research. The Acoustical Society of America’s Fall 2017 meeting included a report titled, “Sound pressures generated by exploding eggs”. Investigators Anthony Nash and Lauren von Blohn began this research thanks to a lawsuit: A restaurant had hard-boiled […]
Calling all Arisia fen: Improbable Research will return to Arisia on Friday night, January 12, 2018 and we’re asking the fen to nominate people to read from some research papers (that we will supply) on stage. What qualities should the person you nominate have to be a reader at this event: Charismatic stage presence Good […]