What shape does an earthworm take if someone vibrates the worm? Arnaud Hemmerle alerts us to an experimental attempt to find out. Hemmerle says: A few words about this wonderful paper, which tackles a deep and puzzling question: what is the shape of a vibrated earthworm? Back in 2015, we published a paper entitled “Worm-like […]
Category: Boys Will Be Boys
Research — that makes people LAUGH, then THINK — by and for teenage boys of all ages and genders.
The insect sex research adventures of Yoshitaka Kamimura
This insect-sex-reversal-centric profile of 2017 Ig Nobel Biology Prize co-winner Yoshitaka Kamimura appeared a year ago in the Keio Times: Sex-Role Reversal Research in Insects Wins Ig Nobel Prize for Keio Professor Yoshitaka Kamimura …In 2012, Prof. Kamimura was first invited to join a research team led by Kazunori Yoshizawa, an associate professor at Hokkaido […]
Wearing High Heels as Female Mating Strategy [research study]
Comes a major advance, possibly, in the understanding of why some women wear high heeled shoes. A new study presents details: “Wearing High Heels as Female Mating Strategy,” Pavol Prokop and Jana Švancárová, Personality and Individual Differences, vol. 152, January 2020, 109558. The authors, at Comenius University and at the Slovak Academy of Science, Slovakia, […]
Program details from last year’s cannibalism conference
Here’s the program (downloadable!) from last year’s cannibalism conference at the University of Leeds. The lunch break was from 12:45-13:45.
Sperm Bags Research (and other Disgusting Research)
“Sperm Bags Research—thinking and looking outside the bag” is one of the articles in the special Disgusting Research issue (volume 25, number 4) of the Annals of Improbable Research. Subscribe, if you dare, to the magazine!
Associations: Terrorist attacks and CEOs’ wages [new study]
“This is an important topic” – say Yunhao Dai, Raghavendra Rau, Aris Stouraitis and Weiqiang Tan [jointly of the Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China; Cambridge Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, UK; and the Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong]. The important topic to which they are referring is the question of whether […]
Prize-winning underwear that traps bad smells
A quick video visit with the winner of the 2001 Ig Nobel Prize for biology:
Improbable Research—special ANIMALS issue
The special ANIMALS issue (volume 25, number 3) of the Annals of Improbable Research is now out and about. It’s packed with improbable research about animals, and parts of animals, and things that animals, some of them, do. The special section on animals research brings to you: Flies in the Face of Death Animal Odors […]
Odorous preoccupations of James Joyce – the low down [study]
James Joyce may not have had particularly good eyesight, but (some say) he at least partially made up for it with a heightened awareness of smells. Especially bodily ones. Which he often wrote about. In great detail. But do academic works about Joyce’s evident preoccupations with flatulence – which have led some scholars to suggest that […]
He loves beaver
BBC News reports, abut Poland’s Minister of Agriculture: “I will decide to recognise [the endangered species] beaver and bison as edible animals,” he said, adding that beaver tail was an aphrodisiac. (Thanks to Dariusz Jemielniak for bringing this to our attention.)