News about the Ig Nobel Prizes — honoring achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK.
The Ig Nobel EuroTour comes to Denmark this week, with 2 events: Tuesday, April 9, 2024, 7 pm — Aarhus University (and specially livestreamed to more than 300 theaters, libraries and other venues, some also offering dinner, throughout the kingdom of Denmark) Wednesday, April 10, 7 pm — Copenhagen University, as part of the Vin […]
This week the Ig Nobel Prizes made another appearance on the Jeopardy! TV game show, this time as an answer. It refers to the 2011 Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize, which honored the inventor who tried to determine the ideal density of airborne wasabi (pungent horseradish) to awaken sleeping people in case of a fire or other […]
Frans de Waal has died. Among his smaller accomplishments was winning an Ig Nobel Prize in 2012, with colleague Jennifer Pokorny, for discovering that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends. [The photo you see here shows them giving their acceptance speech at the Ig Nobel ceremony at Harvard […]
The special Ants issue of the magazine (volume 30, number 2) has just gone out to subscribers. It’s got copious details about ants and ants research and ant researchers. And more. Lotsa stuff that makes people LAUGH, then THINK. The magazine is in PDF format. You can buy a copy, or buy a subscription.
Two Ig Nobel Prize winners and some of their colleagues collaborated in a discovery about how some whales are able to communicate. A report from the University of Southern Denmark announces it: Baleen whales evolved a unique larynx to communicate but cannot escape human noise Baleen whales are the largest animals to have ever roamed […]
This April, 2024, the Ig Nobel EuroTour will spring to life after several years of hibernation (the hibernation was caused by the Covid pandemic). It’s all about research (and researchers) that makes people LAUGH, then THINK. [NOTE: After the tour, we added some video to this blog post. See below] Events are scheduled in GERMANY, […]
If you will be in Denver, Colorado this Saturday, join us at the Improbable Research show. After three pandemic years when the annual special Improbable Research session was done online, it will return in 2024 to having lots of people all together in a room at the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) […]
Doc’nRoll tells (in French) about many of their favorite Ig Nobel Prize winners, in this short video:
“Anchovy Sex Is a Force of Nature” is the headline on a Hakai magazine report by Christina Crouch, on February 7, 2024. The report says, in part: …But Castro’s study—which was published in 2022 and won a 2023 Ig Nobel Prize for humorous, thought-provoking scientific achievement—shows that within ocean layers, anchovy spawning causes significant, if subtle, […]
The newspaper La Vanguardia reports about a new revival of the Ig Nobel Prize-winning virtual pet: Tamagotchi lives in Barcelona For an entire generation, Tamagotchi represented a toy that carried responsibility. Those first virtual pets that lived in oval-shaped devices caused a real sensation around the world. Its fame was so great that its authors, […]