Paper-Airplane-Throwing is a gleeful tradition in the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. You or your institution can submit a video to be included in the 2022 ceremony — The deadline for that is July 31, 2022. We especially welcome schools and libraries (feel free to display your school or library name blatantly, if you wish!). Have […]
The ceremony web page tells how to make your paper-plane-throwing video, and submit it.
Would you like to throw a paper airplane, as a visible part of the 31st First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony? You can! Make a little video, and send it to us. (Because of the pandemic, this year, like last year, the ceremony is happening entirely online—rather than in its traditional home, Harvard University’s Sanders […]
Do people with high levels of guilt-proneness tend to have a heightened sensitivity to injustices – what happens if they get an unexpected airline upgrade for example? This question has been examined by professor Anna S. Mattila and professor Lu Zhang of the School of Hospitality Management, The Pennsylvania State University, US along with professor […]
One of the side effects of venturing to high altitudes (or any environment where the air pressure is lower than normal, say, for example inside a passenger airplane at cruising height) is an increase in the expellation of intestinal gases. As a number of our readers will no doubt be aware, the syndrome was first […]
Paper airplanes are a tradition at the annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, dating back to the ceremony’s earliest years. Technology has now advanced to the point where it necessary, for safety, to place a technological limitation on ceremonial flight. An inventive little tiny leap in electromechanical engineering has brought powered flight — that is powered […]
The taste of tomato juice has been tested at high levels —or, rather, at simulated high levels. This study contains details about that: “Odor and taste perception at normal and low atmospheric pressure in a simulated aircraft cabin,” Andrea Burdack-Freitag, Dino Bullinger, Florian Mayer, Klaus Breuer, Journal für Verbraucherschutz und Lebensmittelsicherheit, March 2011, Volume 6, […]
Artist David Neevel, labeling himself as a “physicist”, though he seems to mean “engineer”, presents this video of himself with a machine that separates the components of an Oreo cookie: Neevel is also noted for his use, on another project, of paper airplanes: (Thanks to investigator Sally Ramos for bringing this to our attention.)
Perhaps the first formal study of transplanting beavers by airplane and parachute appeared slightly more than six decades ago: “Transplanting Beavers by Airplane and Parachute,” Elmo W. Heter, Journal of Wildlife Management, vol. 14, no. 2, April 1950, pp. 143-7. The Atlantic did a nice piece about it, as did The Daily Planet. The author, at the Idaho […]
Bats can present a medical hazard even while they are in flight — even flying at altitudes far higher than bats normally attain. The Centers for Disease Control explains how and why: “Rabies Risk Assessment of Exposures to a Bat on a Commercial Airliner — United States, August 2011,” Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report (MMWR), […]