Nippon.com profiles Ig Nobel Prize winner Shigeru Watanabe. It begins: Japan’s Ig Nobel Prize Winners Monet or Picasso? Japanese Researcher Watanabe Shigeru Proves Art Is for the Birds Keiō University Professor Emeritus Watanabe Shigeru and colleagues won the Ig Nobel Prize in psychology in 1995 for showing that birds can distinguish between different styles of […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: A jerk and a creep — “Hidden jerk in universal creep and aftershocks” may sound like the name of a Hollywood movie – and maybe some day it will be. But for now, it is exclusively […]
1998 Ig Nobel Biology Prize — The prize was awarded to Peter Fong of Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, for contributing to the happiness of clams by giving them Prozac. The research is documented in the study “Induction and Potentiation of Parturition in Fingernail Clams (Sphaerium striatinum) by Selective Serotonin Re-Uptake Inhibitors (SSRIs),” Peter F. Fong, Peter […]
Kees Moeliker reports: Monday June 5th, 2023 is Dead Duck Day again. At exactly 17:55 h (CET) we will honor the mallard duck that collided with the glass facade of the Natural History Museum Rotterdam and became known to science as the first (documented) ‘victim’ of homosexual necrophilia in that species, and earned its discoverer (me) the 2003 Ig Nobel Biology […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are the beginnings of each of them: A spoonful of sugar? — Should one take sugar in one’s tea? Feedback is mindful of two things about this question. For one, nearly everyone, in the UK especially, considers (or pretends to consider) the […]
A few of the photos are not the right people, and not all the flags are from the correct countries, but otherwise this video by TopData shows a fun selection of one winner (well some individuals are actually part of a larger team) from each year of the 32 years (so far) of the Ig […]
Zeno Vendler chose, perhaps understandably, chose to write an article about understanding something. That article is: “Understanding Misunderstanding,” Zeno Vendler, Language, Mind, and Art, 1994, pp. 9-21. The publisher’s web site says, about it: Keywords: Black Hole, Moral Virtue, Wishful Thinking, Plain View, Indirect Question These keywords were added by machine and not by the […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Publish but be damned — … The article explains that Luque, whose full name is Rafael Luque Alvarez de Sotomayor, has already published about 700 papers, and that “so far this year, Luque has published 58 […]
“Winston Churchill: Inguinal Hernia Repair on 11 June 1947,” by J. Allister Vale and John W. Scadding,” is one of the research studies featured in the article “Medical Research: Sarsaparilla, Nose, Churchill’s Hernia“, in the special Formulas & Recipes issue of the magazine (Annals of Improbable Research). Read the article online. And if you like, […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them: The Kármán sutra — … The paper is almost Victorian in its voluminous discussion of possible regulatory mechanisms, but nearly complete avoidance of mentioning fornication. The highest moment of titillation comes in the following passage: “The […]