Dan Ariely, co-winner of the 2008 Ig Nobel Medicine Prize (for discovering that expensive fake medicine is more effective than inexpensive fake medicine) brought a video camera to the ceremony. Later that evening, he interviewed 2006 Ig Nobel Medicine Prize winner Francis Fesmire (who devised a reliable cure for intractable hiccups: digital rectal massage). Here […]
Hairy programming, on the face of it
Investigator Dennis McClain-Furmanski alerts us to two research projects: In “Computer languages and facial hair — take two,” the author examines the correlation between kind and amount of facial hair, and the survival rate of persons who develop computer programming languages. This is a follow up to a previous article from this author, called “Why […]
Improbable Research Collection #108
Here’s episode 108 (“Cake, wrap, calculate”) of the Improbable Research TV series. To see it, click on the image at right, and you will be whisked to YouTube (where you can subscribe, if you like, to the Improbable Research channel). These are three-minute videos about research that makes people laugh, then makes them think. For […]
When Deborah Met Salma
It’s not often that movie stars and pop singers are given the same celebrity as top scientists. The October 3, 2008 issue of the International Herald Tribune features a stunning conjunction of celebrities: Dr. Deborah J. Anderson of Boston University Medical School and Harvard Medical School, co-winner of the 2008 Ig Nobel Prize in Chemistry […]