“Danes identify Aalborg bishop’s 300-year-old poo” is the BBC News headline. The report begins: A lump of faeces stored in the back of a Danish museum has been traced back to a bishop who lived in the city of Aalborg at the end of the 17th Century. Researchers discovered the lump in a broken bottle. […]
Tag: Denmark
Luxuriant Hair Club for Scientists™ names 2016 Woman & Man of the Year
The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS) proudly announces its Woman and Man Of The Year for 2016. The two scientists are, respectively, a Danish researcher who studies polymer micro and nano engineering, and a Scottish researcher for NASA who studies airborne particles in earth’s atmosphere. Here is thrilling detail about each of them. […]
A rectal foreign body in a 65 million year-old Danish sea urchin
Since David B. Busch and James R. Starling, won the 1995 Ig Nobel Literature prize for their deeply penetrating 1986 research report, “Rectal foreign bodies: Case Reports and a Comprehensive Review of the World’s Literature” the body of literature on the subject and the number of cases has increased considerably. By 2012, no less than […]
The 2014 Ig Nobel tour of Europe
A bevy of Ig Nobel Prize winners — scientists who have done things that make people LAUGH, then THINK — will strut their stuff in the 2014 Ig Nobel tour of Europe. It happens March 14—April 2. Here’s a quick list of events: Fri, March 14 …. LONDON, Imperial College. Mon, March 17 …. COVENTRY, […]
Smelov’s investigation of HPV on toilet seats in international airports
Lead author Smelov and colleagues write, in this letter to a medical journal, about a careful investigation that may (and may not) have small or nonexistent implications: “Are human papillomavirus DNA prevalences providing high-flying estimates of infection? An international survey of HPV detection on environmental surfaces,” Vitaly Smelov [pictured here], Carina Eklund, Laila Sara Arroyo […]
The Three Dimensions of Fresh Air
The Journal of Material Culture is “concerned with the relationship between artefacts and social relations irrespective of time and place”. And, as part of this remit, the June 2013 issue of features one of the few academic studies of ‘Fresh Air’. ‘The air from outside: Getting to know the world through air practices’. “The article […]
Stress Test for Vicars
What’s special about vicars? This study, from Bispebjerg University Hospital, Copenhagen, looked into the question: “Psychosocial stress among Danish vicars,” F. Gyntelberg, H. O. Hein and P. Suadicani, Occupational Medicine (2012) 62 (1): 12-16. The authors explain: “No studies have analysed whether differences in psychosocial workloads between vicars and others explain their higher prevalence of stress-related […]
When Ig winners came to Odense
Last week’s show at Syddansk Universitet in Odense—part of the first Ig Nobel Tour of Denmark—prompted this brief report by TV2. The video features two of the four Ig winners (one of whom, Magnus Wahlberg, of herring-fart fame, is based partly at the university) who were on the tour:
Herring intrigue in Copenhagen tonight
Tonight the Ig Nobel Tour of Denmark arrives in Copenhagen (actually we arrived yesterday, and Dan Meyer and Magnus Wahlberg were invited onto a live national TV broadcast, where the host was a bit disconcerted at suddenly realizing that she was removing a sword from the throat of a polite man who speaks interesting but […]
Aarhus, then Odense
This is a photo Kees (the duck guy) Moeliker took from onstage during the Aarhus show tonight — first show on the Ig Nobel Tour of Denmark. This room was packed full with 450 spectators; more watched via video in another room. (And this is a newspaper preview of the Aarhus show.) The video monitors […]