News about the Ig Nobel Prizes — honoring achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK.
Yes, the wombat-cubical-poo acceptance speech at the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony does get a moment in the sun in the NOVA television documentary “Secrets in the Scat.” NOVA describes the episode this way: “Scott Burnett is ‘Scatman’—an Australian ecologist on the trail of the secrets of poop. By identifying and analyzing animal scat for DNA […]
Back in 2013 The Economist magazine published this chart showing the amount of money awarded with each of the big science prizes. The amounts for most or all of these prizes has since risen. The amount for the Ig Nobel Prize now, in a way, tops the list. Each winner (or winning team) of an […]
Says the video’s maker: “What if I told you that a physicist earned a major award for magnetically levitating a frog, what would you think? It really happened and this story can only refer us to a central question in today’s scientific debate: is there scientific research that is useless? Today we are talking about […]
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 #1087, Marc Abrahams presents the 2021 Ig Nobel Prize for […]
The Croatian TV program “Treći Element” [The Third Element], with its 250th jubilee episode, celebrates the Ig Nobel Prizes: The program describes itself [this is a translation into English]: The 250th jubilee show of the Third Element has a slightly different edition. We gathered all four presenters to tell us about the Ig Nobel Prize […]
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 #1086, Marc Abrahams presents the 2020 Ig Nobel Peace Prize […]
The South China Morning Post reports, on January 12, 2022, that “China has built an artificial moon that simulates low-gravity conditions on Earth“. The report begins: China has built a research facility that simulates the low-gravity environment on the moon – and it was inspired by experiments using magnets to levitate a frog. Further details: […]
“Breatharianism is a type of belief system started by Jasmuheen… that hypothesizes and claims to prove that humans can live without consuming solid foods…. She even received the Ig Nobel prize, a satirical parody of the true Nobel Prize, which means she joined the likes of L Ron Hubbard, the founder of Scientology and the […]
“What Slime Knows” is an essay by Lacy M. Johnson, in Orion magazine: Here in this little patch of mulch in my yard is a creature that begins life as a microscopic amoeba and ends it as a vibrant splotch that produces spores, and for all the time in between, it is a single cell […]
“Ig Nobel Limericks: Stinky Feet, Community Dad” is a featured article of sorts in the special Ig Nobel Prizes issue (volume 27, number 6) of the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Read this article, free, on the web. Then, if research about improbable reality inspires you, subscribe to the magazine, or buy individual back issues.