Ig Nobel Prize-winning Gadgeteer Ron Popeil has finished inventing

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 […]

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&gt; (NOTE: The Improbable Research session is a public session, which means that you can probably watch it even if you have not paid to […]

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 […]

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 […]