Gadgeteer Ron Popeil, who was awarded the 1993 Ig Nobel Prize for consumer engineering, has died, according to press reports. The famed inventor was cited, in winning that Ig Nobel prize, for “redefining the industrial revolution with such devices as the Veg-O-Matic, the Pocket Fisherman, Mr. Microphone, and the Inside-the-Shell Egg Scrambler.” Here is a […]
Category: Improbable Investigators
People who do research that makes people LAUGH, then THINK.
Dual Wiggle/Wriggle Nominative Determinism Corrections
It should be noted that the author of ‘The Physiology of Insect Metamorphosis’ (1954) was Sir Vincent Brian Wigglesworth CBE MD FRS [pictured] . . . . . . and not V. B. Wrigglesworth, as Cambridge University Press might suggest. (Neither was he V. P. Wigglesworth, as Google Books might have you believe) Research research […]
Doctor I.C. Notting— A classic case of nominative determinism
Doctor I.C. Notting, an ophthalmologist at Leiden University, is a classic case of nominative determinism.
Improbable Research at AAAS—Thursday, Feb 11, 2021
The AAAS Annual Meeting is happening this week. Join us at the Improbable Research session, on Thursday, February 11, from 2:15 to 3:15. Navigate to the AAAS Meeting live channel <https://virtual.aaas.org/landing> (NOTE: The Improbable Research session is a public session, which means that you can probably watch it even if you have not paid to […]
Adám Lovas-Kiss, Undersung Scientist
This month’s Undersung Scientist of the Month is Dr. Adám Lovas-Kiss of the DRI Wetland Ecology Research Group of the Centre for Research Ecology (which has been authorized to use the label “Hungarian Academy of Sciences Centre of Excellence”). Dr. Lovas-Kiss’ is not entirely unsung, just undersung. His work has achieved some fame, much of […]
“People ask me the strangest questions”
“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, […]
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 […]