Category: Improbable Investigators

We raise  a salute to Ray Tomlinson (at BBN in Boston), who began the now-universal practice of using  the symbol @ in email. He turned apparent blasphemy into simple communication. (Thanks to Ig Nobel Prize winner Michael Turvey for bringing this to our attention.)

“He wanted to use the 100-hour punishment to read books about endangered species statutes and lobby Congress to change the law he violated, according to documents filed in the U.S. court,” says a Hearst Newspapers report, published July 31, 2005 in the Washington Examiner. He is Lawrence Small, who runs the Smithsonian Institution. The newspaper […]

"Professor?s Study Finds That Peppermint and Cinnamon Lower Frustration and Increase Alertness in Drivers." Thus rings the headline on a press release issued by Wheeling Jesuit University about its rising star, Professor Bryan Raudenbush. 

We’ve had many requests about film of Ig Nobel Prize winner Troy Hurtubise, the man who built and personally tested a suit of armor meant to be impervious to grizzly bears. The National Film Board of Canada has just prepared a DVD version of its feature film documentary Project Grizzly, which is all about Troy. […]

Computer science cognoscenti know what Ping is, and also know that Mike Muuss is the proud author of same. (Thanks to Dan Piette for bringing this to our attention.)

When Maurice Ward began tinkering with chemicals in a ladies’ hairdressing salon he never dreamed he was on the way to revolutionizing the American space program. All the Middlesbrough hairdresser was trying to achieve was a flame retardant wig but it eventually led to the discovery of a plastic that can stop a nuclear blast. […]

Sergei Speransky Institute of Hygiene in Novosibirsk is in the news again. A March 26, 2005 article in Pravda reports that: Doctor of Biological Sciences, Sergei Speransky, is a very well known figure in Novosibirsk. The doctor became one of the authors of the shocking whipping therapy. The professor used the self-flagellation method to cure […]

Investigator Carlos E. Figueroa Castro writes: I would like to make you aware of Mr. Fernando Vallejo, a Colombian writer. Two of his most recent books are La tautolog?a de Darwin (Darwin’s tautology) and Manualito de imposturolog?a f?sica (Little manual of physical imposturology"). Mr.Vallejo was able to prove, in less than two years, that Charles […]

The scientific publications of James Bond are not as widely read as the publications ABOUT James Bond. The man himself is greatly missed: it was said of him that The nidification of birds  was one of his most compelling interests, after Caribbean zoogeography, which explains his admiration for Skutch.