Research — on any and all subjects — that makes people LAUGH, then THINK.
“ ‘This is dangerous’: slime moulds and the bitter debate over the nature of intelligence — Scientists are battling over whether supposedly simple organisms should be considered ‘intelligent’. The outcome could reshape our understanding of the natural world – and our own place within it”. So says the headline of a report by Samanth Subramanian, […]
Jesse Han is becoming good at winning unusual awards. In 2017 he traveled to Harvard University, to receive the 2017 Ig Nobel Fluid Dynamics Prize, for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks backwards while carrying a cup of coffee. [His research on that was published in study called […]
Almost all scientific discoveries come — directly or indirectly — from things that people at first thought to be strange, weird, crazy, stupid, and/or just plain wrong. This essay looks at a few of the zillions of examples: “Oddball Science: Why Studies of Unusual Evolutionary Phenomena Are Crucial,” Patricia L.R. Brennan, Duncan J. Irschick, Norman […]
Sometimes a citation can sound like a metaphor: “Asymptotic study of the blowhard problem for the supersonic flow of a gas past sharp slender bodies,” A.M. Antonov, and Yu A. Belov, USSR Computational Mathematics and Mathematical Physics, vol. 16, no. 6, 1976, pp. 227-232.