Michelle Spierings wrote about the recent Ig Nobel show in Leiden, The Netherlands. A behavioral biologist at the Institute of Biology Leiden and the University of Vienna, Austria, Spierings had a starring role in the show. Her essay appears in the July 5, 2026 issue of Bionieuws. Here is a machine translation from the original […]
If you savor jargon-enriched descriptions of iffy much-touted computer-involved approaches to using small amounts of data about things that are difficult to measure and interpret, this study may be of special interest: “AI-driven prediction of consumer liking of coffee from sensory data,” Michael Gunning, Maite Pilar Serantes Laforgue, Jean-Xavier Guinard, and Ilias Tagkopoulos, npc Science […]
The June 2026 issue of mini-AIR, our teeny tiny free little e-newsletter of overflow detritus that did not fit in the magazine (Annals of Improbable Research), has just gone out. The issue contains (among other stuff) info about research on the topic of hammers. It includes announcement of a competition to a write a limerick […]
A business Powerpoint presentation — apparently genuinely made by someone at a company called Softbank — includes this educational image of a goose with a caption that says “Goose was not valued.” Call it a metaphor, call it whatever you like, this Powerpoint slide brings renewed meaning to the old business phrase “goosing the numbers”. […]