This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here’s how each of them ends: Sing it loud—… One implication from that intensive Hong Kong experiment: most karaoke singers manage to keep the quality of their singing fairly constant, no matter what. Kinetic excitement— … Then the word “kinetics” takes centre stage, […]
A lot can happen to a drop. That becomes evident as one reads this study, and even more evident if and as one tried to replicate the study: “Controlled Uniform Coating from the Interplay of Marangoni Flows and Surface-Adsorbed Macromolecules,” Hyoungsoo Kim, François Boulogne, Eujin Um, Ian Jacobi, Ernie Button, and Howard A. Stone, Physical […]
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. We are releasing these lectures one at a time. The 2022 Ig Nobel Prize for Biology was […]
The 2022 Heinz Oberhummer award, for “outstanding science communication”, was awarded to the Ig Nobel Prize on November 24, at the Stadtsaal in Vienna, Austria. The ceremony was webcast. Here’s recorded video of it:
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here’s how they begin: What’s in a name?—This month, Sam Bankman-Fried returned to the head of the nominative determinism parade of tech entrepreneurs, following his portentous appearance earlier in the year.…. Non-Newtonian milk—Research is “the mother’s milk of feeding [and] fueling the economy”, […]
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. We are releasing these lectures one at a time. The 2022 Ig Nobel Prize for Applied Cardiology […]
Encyclopedia Sciplayer has made two more videos, each about a different Ig Nobel Prize winner: “Why Don’t Woodpeckers Get a Headache”: “How to take a blink-free photo”:
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has three segments. Here’s how they begin: Curiously Meta—Coltan Scrivner’s curiosity about morbid curiosity is ushering him to higher and higher realms. He wrote his PhD thesis on the subject and joined the Recreational Fear Lab at Aarhus University, Denmark. Scrivner defines morbid curiosity as “a motivation […]
Economically speaking, should one look up to the businesspeople who build skyscrapers, or look down at them? Calculation is involved in reaching the answer obtained in this study: “A Game-Theoretic Analysis of Skyscrapers,” Robert W. Helsley and William C. Strange, Journal of Urban Economics, vol. 64, no. 1, July 2008, pp. 49-64. The authors explain: […]
Two Ig-related events this month. The Heinz Oberhummer award, for “outstanding science communication”, will be given to the Ig Nobel Prizes on Nov 24, in Vienna, Austria (and webcast) at 7:30 pm (Central European Time). On Nov 25, Science Friday will broadcast specially edited highlights (and a discussion with Ira Flatow and Marc Abrahams) of […]