Research — on any and all subjects — that makes people LAUGH, then THINK.
Sit down, if you can, and read this study about what it takes to get a folding plastic chair to the point where you can sit in it: “A study of design demand of applying quality function deployment in plastic folding chairs,” Chun Tung Chen, Applied Mechanics and Materials, vol. 284, pp. 3632-3636. The author, […]
Statistics an be compiled about anything, independent of the question: is there any point in gathering statistics about this thing? The following study may be good fodder for teachers who wish to discuss that question with students: “The Temporal Making of a Great Literary Corpus by a XX-Century Mystic: Statistics of Daily Words and Writing […]
“Chocolate Packaging Cues and First Moment of Truth: An Exploratory Study on Young Consumers’ Mind” [ by Suraj Kushe Shekhar and P.T. Raveendran, published in Management Science Letters, vol. 3, no. 7. 2013, pp. 1851-1862] is a featured study in “Chocolate Packaging Research Review“, which is a featured article in the special Women (and Men) issue of the […]
The field of banana-string detection has taken a big or little step with publication of this new study: “Target detection of banana string and fruit stalk based on YOLOv3 deep learning network,” Rihong Zhang, Xiaomin Li, Lixue Zhu, Maokun Zhong, and Yihua Gao, in 2021 IEEE 2nd International Conference on Big Data, Artificial Intelligence and […]
How don’t and do pedestrians collide? Ig Nobel Prize winner Alessandro Corbetta, a physicist based at Eindhoven University of Technology, explains, in this short video. The 2021 Ig Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to Alessandro Corbetta, Jasper Meeusen, Chung-min Lee, Roberto Benzi, and Federico Toschi, for conducting experiments to learn why pedestrians do not […]
Claudio Feliciani, co-winner of the 2021 Ig Nobel Prize for kinetics, is the subject of an NHK-World TV special, which you can watch online. NHK explains: Claudio Feliciani is a Swiss-Italian scientist whose main interest is the movement of crowds. He worked alongside 3 Japanese scientists on a study that examined why people bump into […]
Tom Gill sent this to us, with the suggestion “Why can’t more scientific papers have evocative, poetic titles like this? I mean, it sounds more like a song than a technical article.” The study is: “The Strength of the Evening Wind,” A. Lapworth, Boundary-Layer Meteorology, vol. 183, 2022, pp. 215–225.
“Not the Cat’s Meow? The Impact of Posing with Cats on Female Perceptions of Male Dateability” [by Lori Kogan and Shelly Volsche, published in Animals, vol. 10, no. 6, June 9, 2020, E1007] is a featured study in “Cats Research: Girls, and Men and Datability“, which is a featured article in the special Women (and Men) issue of […]
If you do high precision over-cooking — extremely high precision, compared with most cooks — feel free to savor and salivate on the details of this new study about a very new cooking tool. Its use in cooking would apply mainly (or exclusively) to those times when you are cooking dish to the point where the […]
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 […]