“Luckily we found a great collaborator in Australia who studies wombats, and he sent us one through the mail. We opened the intestines up and there were these cubes inside. There are moments when you wonder if your life is real, or if it’s just some big joke.” —Double Ig Nobel Prize winner David Hu, […]
Category: Improbable Investigators
People who do research that makes people LAUGH, then THINK.
Huh? Ig Nobel Prize winner wins Heineken Young Scientist Award
Mark Dingemanse was awarded the Heineken Young Scientists Award in Humanities 2020. The official announcement says: Mark Dingemanse studied African languages and cultures at Leiden University. He carried out research for his PhD in Ghana, receiving his doctorate cum laude in 2011 at Radboud University Nijmegen. That work contributed to a fundamental shift in research […]
A reminder: How to stimulate the appetite of a medical leech
The 1996 Ig Nobel Prize for biology was awarded to Anders Barheim and Hogne Sandvik of the University of Bergen, Norway, for their tasty and tasteful report, “Effect of Ale, Garlic, and Soured Cream on the Appetite of Leeches.” Recently, Bradley Allff, writing in Atlas Obscura, looked at the role medical leeches sometimes play in medicine in the USA. […]
Troy and the Grizzly Bear
Anyone seeking distraction can find it in this documentary video, “Project Grizzly.” See Troy Hurtubise in his self-mythic quest to personally build and test a suit of armor that he hopes will let him spend time with grizzly bears. Troy was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for safety engineering, in 1998, for the work documented […]
Mathematics and the end of the world, predictably
A prize-winning profession confidently confronts a new challenge. Some professionals—professionals who professionally calculate a date on which the world will end—have calculated that the COVID-19 pandemic is not a goodbye-everyone harbinger. The Washington Post reports, on March 17, 2020: This is not the end of the world, according to Christians who study the end of […]
Michael Milken, First Winner (in 1991) of the Ig Nobel Economics Prize, Pardoned
Michael Milken, the very first winner of the Ig Nobel Economics Prize, was pardoned today by the current President of the United States, Donald Trump. The 1991 Ig Nobel Prize for economics was awarded to “Michael Milken, titan of Wall Street and father of the junk bond, to whom the world is indebted”. Fox Business […]
Forensic professor news: Piano-sentence and Poker/Rock/Scissors
El Espagnol reports “The rocambolesque story of the psychiatrist who ‘scammed’ the US and was sentenced to play the piano“. The news article begins [here machine-translated from Spanish to English]: An American psychiatrist has recently been reprimanded by the US Government Office of Integrity in Research, after having already been convicted. His crime: steal several […]
The special Ig Nobel issue of the magazine
The magazine’s special Ig Nobel issue (vol. 25, no. 6) shows and tells all about the 2019 Ig Nobel Prize winners and the 29th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, and also the opera (“Creatures of Habit”) that premiered as part of the ceremony). Read some of the articles online. You can buy the entire […]
The dead are rising up against their national leaders
Led by Ig Nobel Prize winner Lal Bihari, the dead are rising up against their national leaders. Here’s a look back at notable happenings in 2019. The Times of India reported, on January 19, 2019: In Varanasi, ‘living dead’ to contest against PM Modi If Prime Minister Narendra Modi decides to contest the upcoming Lok […]
“How Did Bulgaria Get to the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony?”
The Bulgarian bTV network asks and answers the question “How Did Bulgaria Get to the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony?” Their November 28, 2019 report profiles Ig Nobel Prize winner Herbert Crepaz. The report begins with the statement “The winner of the Ig Nobel Prize in Biology is an Austrian who lives in our country.” Magnetic […]