Tickets for the 2014 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony will go on sale TUESDAY, JULY 8, at noon (US eastern time). Tickets sell out rapidly, so we advise you to get them sooner, rather than not be able to get them later. Tickets will be available exclusively from the Harvard Box Office — online, by telephone (+1 […]
A possibly fascinating study of four possible causes of boredom propensity
Some academic studies are best appreciated by reading them aloud, in a stately voice, in a coffee shop. Perhaps this is one of those studies: “I can’t get no satisfaction: Potential causes of boredom,” Cory J. Gerritsen, Maggie E. Toplak [pictured here], Jessica Sciaraffa, John Eastwood, Consciousness and Cognition, vol. 27, July 2014, pp. 27–41. […]
Dr. Reed’s medical codpiece theory
If you were a well-to-do gentleman in 15th or 16th century Europe, your closet might well have sported an exuberant codpiece or two. But were they just a foppish whim, or could there have been an underlying necessity behind the codpiece phenomenon? This question caught the attention of Dr. Con Scott Reed, of Sydney, New […]
Breakthrough in guessing the risk of popping a balloon
A possible huge breakthrough of some sort, yielding important insights of some variety, may be reported in this study in which 64 students (actually it was 66, but “Data from two participants were removed due to a failure to follow instructions”) were asked to guess when a balloon would pop: “Knowing Where to Draw the Line: Perceptual […]