This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here are bits of each of them: Deep Oesophagus — Scientists, as a group, like to think they behave in ways a little distinct from the herd. The herd, as a herd, likes to think so, too. From time to time, Feedback receives furtive […]
Charl Fourie and Michelle Wong were awarded the 1999 Ig Nobel Peace Prize, for inventing an automobile burglar alarm consisting of a detection circuit and a flamethrower. (Patent WO/1999/032331, “A Security System for a Vehicle“) Now, in 2023, The South African news organization takes a look back at one of South Africa’s most spectacular but least financially rewarding inventions. […]
The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK. In the Ig Informal Lectures, some days after the ceremony, the new Ig Nobel Prize winners attempt to explain what they did, and why they did it. The 2022 Ig Nobel Prize for Economics was awarded to Peter de Smet and Nicholas Hellmuth, […]
Just stumbled across a big box of press clippings from the 90s. Here’s Bill Lipscomb with the plaster cast of his left foot on display. This article in the Harvard Gazette on October 2, 1997, says: IG NOBEL FEET: William N. Lipscomb, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry in 1976, holds his foot up against a display […]