“With patience and spit” is the headline in the German magazine Monopol, about the application of Ig Nobel Prize-winning knowledge to the cleaning of a historic painting. Marcus Boxler reports, in Monopol: A highlight of the Mannheim art gallery collection is currently being cleaned up: The oil painting “The execution of the Emperor Maximilian of […]
Tag: cleaning
The Value of Spit, in the Art World
A proper appreciation of spit might have prevented an art tragedy. The tragedy is reported by VN Express International: HCMC museum takes a national treasure to the cleaners A precious lacquer painting suffered 30 percent damage during cleaning process due to cleaner’s lack of knowledge in art. The painting, Vuon Xuan Trung Nam Bac (Spring Garden […]
Cleaning with spit, and now with pillars and pancakes
Last month human saliva got its due, with the awarding of the 2018 Ig Nobel Prize for chemistry, as an effective agent to clean surfaces. This month, pillars and pancakes are served up as an effective way to pattern surfaces so that those surfaces will be self-cleaning. Pillar/pancake details are in the new study “Pillars […]
Urination-duration Ig winner: physics of animals keeping clean
David Hu, 2015 Ig Nobel physics prize winner (together with several colleagues, for testing the biological principle that nearly all mammals empty their bladders in about 21 seconds, plus or minus 13 seconds ) has a new paper out, written with colleague Guillermo Amador. Their institution, Georgia Tech, describes it: A CAT’S SURFACE AREA IS EQUAL […]
Cool way to begin a science story (jeans)
The Surprising Science blog gave a mighty cool beginning to this report: The Myth of the Frozen Jeans Levi Strauss advises freezing your jeans to kill the germs that make them smelly, thereby saving the water you’d use in washing them. Don’t bother, says Stephen Craig Cary, a University of Delaware expert on frozen microbes, who wrote to us from Antarctica….
Postcoital Penis Cleaning in Budongo Chimps
The authors of a study called High Frequency of Postcoital Penis Cleaning in Budongo Chimpanzees do not beat about the bush. “We report on postcoital penis cleaning in chimpanzees,” they write. “In penis cleaning, leaves are employed as ‘napkins’ to wipe clean the penis after sex. Alternatively, the same cleaning motion can be done without leaves, simply […]