News about the Ig Nobel Prizes — honoring achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK.
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 #1093, Marc Abrahams presents the 2021 Ig Nobel Prize for […]
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 #1092, Marc Abrahams presents the 2021 Ig Nobel Prize for […]
The city of Rotterdam plans to prohibit people from feeding bread to ducks. The news organization NRC reports, on April 7, 2022, about the pushback on that, especially from the city’s most eminent duck biologist. Here is a machine translation (into English) of that report: Doubts in Rotterdam about the usefulness of the ban on […]
Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow, co-winner of the 2020 Ig Nobel Prize for Medical Education, has stepped down as President of Turkmenistan, replaced by his son, according to an official government announcement and news reports. Caspian News reports: Serdar Berdimuhamedow Wins Turkmenistan’s Presidential Election The son of incumbent President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow has won snap presidential elections in Turkmenistan. […]
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. In Podcast Episode #1089, Marc Abrahams presents the 2021 Ig Nobel Prize for Transportation winners Robin Radcliffe, Mark […]
The essence of the Ig Nobel Prizes—bringing attention to things so surprising that they make people laugh, then think—continues to spread and grow. Institutions and countries are using it as a way to celebrate and encourage innovation. KAIST, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, has created a competition inspired by the Igs. The […]