Research and other stuff that makes people LAUGH, then THINK.
Video of two shows on the 2026 Ig Nobel EuroTour: Lund University Lund University, in Lund, Sweden, with Minna Lyons (2014 Ig Nobel Prize winner, for amassing evidence that people who habitually stay up late are, on average, more self-admiring, more manipulative, and more psychopathic than people who habitually arise early in the morning.) Marie […]
The word “really”, expressed forcefully, was the crux of a long-running comedy routine more than a decade ago, on the American TV program Saturday Night Live. A recent study takes a really good look at the equivalent word in the Mandarin Chinese language. The study is: “Stance-taking and (inter)subjective roles of Mandarin zhende (ma/a),” Shuang […]
Some children especially, and some adults especially especially, love to find a way to pronounce names so that those names sound “naughty” (vulgar) — which makes those children and adults (and their friends) laugh and laugh and laugh. The beetle whose official scientific name is Ceratoderus fukuii is an example of this. The second word […]
There are many twists in the story of how Joanne Mikl estimated the inertial properties of athletes who do somersaults. Mikl explains some of them, in this study: “Methods Of Estimating Athlete Inertial Properties And Their Implications For The Study Of Somersaults,” Joanne Mikl, ISBS-Conference Proceedings Archive, vol. 1, no. 1. 2013.