The Ig Nobel Prizes exhibition in Taiwan has begun! The exhibition opened on June 25, and runs through September 11, 2022. It’s at the National Taiwan Science Education Center, in Taipei.
Category: Ig Nobel
News about the Ig Nobel Prizes — honoring achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK.
Throw a paper airplane at the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony!
The ceremony web page tells how to make your paper-plane-throwing video, and submit it.
Catching up with two humans who lived, for a time, as a goat and an otter, respectively
The human who, of all the humans who have tried living life as a goat has become the most celebrated by fellow humans, looks back on his experience. NRC interviews and profiles Thomas Thwaites, and also checks in with Charles Foster, who lived parts of his life as different kinds of animals. The NRC profile […]
Walking in a crowd, how do (and don’t) people go with the flow?
How don’t and do pedestrians collide? Ig Nobel Prize winner Alessandro Corbetta, a physicist based at Eindhoven University of Technology, explains, in this short video. The 2021 Ig Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to Alessandro Corbetta, Jasper Meeusen, Chung-min Lee, Roberto Benzi, and Federico Toschi, for conducting experiments to learn why pedestrians do not […]
Dead Duck Day 2022
The COVID era continues to take its toll on Dead Duck Day, the international celebration of an incident that took its toll on a duck in Rotterdam and yet gave inspiration to millions of people to wonder at the mysteries that abound in nature. In a one-year break with tradition, Dead Duck Day 2022 will […]
NHK special about walking-with-a-mobile-phone prize winner
Claudio Feliciani, co-winner of the 2021 Ig Nobel Prize for kinetics, is the subject of an NHK-World TV special, which you can watch online. NHK explains: Claudio Feliciani is a Swiss-Italian scientist whose main interest is the movement of crowds. He worked alongside 3 Japanese scientists on a study that examined why people bump into […]
A research project for the ages and ages
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 […]
Sunflower Orientation, Solar Panels, and the Sun
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 […]
Podcast Episode #1094: “Can You Navigate in a Crowd, While Distracted by Your Mobile Phone?”
The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK. In the Ig Informal Lectures, some days after the ceremony, the new Ig Nobel Prize winners attempt to explain what they did, and why they did it. We released these lectures one at a time. In Podcast Episode #1094, Marc Abrahams presents the 2021 Ig Nobel Prize for […]
New Cutting-Edge Research About Old Saws
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 […]