Tom Gill sent this to us, with the suggestion “Why can’t more scientific papers have evocative, poetic titles like this? I mean, it sounds more like a song than a technical article.” The study is: “The Strength of the Evening Wind,” A. Lapworth, Boundary-Layer Meteorology, vol. 183, 2022, pp. 215–225.
“Not the Cat’s Meow? The Impact of Posing with Cats on Female Perceptions of Male Dateability” [by Lori Kogan and Shelly Volsche, published in Animals, vol. 10, no. 6, June 9, 2020, E1007] is a featured study in “Cats Research: Girls, and Men and Datability“, which is a featured article in the special Women (and Men) issue of […]
If you do high precision over-cooking — extremely high precision, compared with most cooks — feel free to savor and salivate on the details of this new study about a very new cooking tool. Its use in cooking would apply mainly (or exclusively) to those times when you are cooking dish to the point where the […]
Two hundred years ago today, on May 21, 1822, a stork was shot (with a gun) by Christian Ludwig Reichsgraf von Bothmer at his estate in Mecklenburg, Germany. The dead bird was and still is remarkable — the stork had been flying despite the handicap of an eight-foot-long African arrow that pierced its neck lengthwise […]
Sinuhé Perea-Puente has joined the The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists™ (LFHCfS). He says: I’m a predoctoral student in Photonics and Nanotechnology at King’s College London, literally trying to see (with light) what is hidden. I like to solve problems, but since I rarely find any solution, preferring to learn and ask. I Graduated in […]
The delightfully iffy game called “Fifty-Fifty Trivia” was created by Martin Eiger, who invents many concepts and games, using words and ideas as the main building material. Eiger is, among other things, our Limerick Laureate—you can see his limericks, in any issue of the magazine (Annals of Improbable Research, with each limerick describing something that […]
Andrew Stafford took a look at the current state of the Ig Nobel Prize-winning pitch drop experiment. His report, in The Guardian, bears the headline ” ‘It’s literally slower than watching Australia drift north’: the laboratory experiment that will outlive us all“. The 2005 Ig Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to John Mainstone and […]
“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 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 […]