“Shigeru Watanabe Proves Art Is for the Birds”

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 […]

Prozac and the Happiness of Clams (Limerickally)

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 […]

Religious Devotion, Inspired by Black Goo

In an essay called “Patience Amid Long Experiments“, in the Adventist Review, Justin Kim says “The pitch-drop experiment teaches our faith community some lessons.” Kim goes on to explain: “A parody of the world-famous Nobel Prize, the Ig Nobel Prize was established in 1991 to recognize achievements that first ‘make people laugh, then think.’ In […]