Jan Philipp Roer, LFHCfS

Jan Philipp Röer joins the The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists™ (LFHCfS)

Jan Philipp Röer has joined the The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists™ (LFHCfS). He says: Hair plays a very important role in my research, specifically the hair cells of the inner ear. I’m interested in what makes a sound attract our attention and the mechanisms we have in place to prevent irrelevant sound from […]

Damage by Screw Working Bodies

Slightly-intriguing study title of the month: “Damage to Seeds by Screw Working Bodies,” Mayya Sukhanova, Eduard Khasanov, Alexander Butenko, Shamil Fayzrakhmanov, and Rinat Fayzullin, Heliyon, 2023, article e18973. The authors explain: “The occurrence of mechanical damage to seeds caused by the operative components of agricultural machinery…” The image you see above is from the study.

Northern vs. southern hair whorls, Sun & Shine, Quantum depression

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Southern hair whorls — Three northern hemisphere scientists – Marjolaine Willems, Quentin Hennocq and Roman Hossein Khonsari in Paris, France – teamed up with a southern hemisphere scientist – Juan José Cortés Santander in Santiago, Chile – for […]

Ig Nobel Prize Winner Boris Johnson’s Life & Death Influence: New Info

Historians are coming to further appreciate the life-and-death influence of former UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson — influence that earned Johnson a share of the 2020 Ig Nobel Medical Education Prize. BBC News reports (on October 31, 2023) some new, pertinent information: Boris Johnson agreed with some Tory MPs who thought Covid was “nature’s way […]

Demonstration: How to make bland food taste salty

Electrified chopsticks, soup bowls, and other eating implements can make bland food taste much saltier — much tastier.  The technology was honored with the 2023 Ig Nobel Nutrition Prize. The prize, awarded to Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura, for their experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food. […]

Interview with the Ig Nobel Prize-winning inventor of the Stanford Toilet

Dr. Seung-min Park was awarded the 2023 Ig Nobel Public Health Prize for inventing the Stanford Toilet, a device that uses a variety of technologies — including a urinalysis dipstick test strip, a computer vision system for defecation analysis, an anal-print sensor paired with an identification camera, and a telecommunications link — to monitor and […]