The Scottish Wasabi Fire Alarm

The National Museum of Scotland includes in its vast collection this item, number T.2012.28: Description Fire alarm for waking deaf people by nasal irritation with synthesized wasabi, awarded 2011 Ig Nobel prize in chemistry, designed by Makoto Imai, Naoki Urushihata, Hideki Tanemura, Yukinobu Tajima, Hideaki Goto, Koichiro Mizoguchi and Junichi Murakami, Japan, 2012 Inventor Makoto Imai himself […]

Overlooked McGonagall poems found!

There’s news about the bad poet William Topaz McGonagall. It’s of absolutely no importance, but of great and goofy enjoyment to many in the English-speaking world. Several poems that have never been published in any book will soon be recited in public [on March 19, at our show at the University of Dundee] for the […]

From satire to proposal in 120 years

Ptak Science Books found an apparently serious engineering proposal that echoes a satire done more than 100 years earlier: John B. Prather launched an idea in 1945 for building a high-speed pneumatic passenger/freight train connecting New York City to Philadelphia. [It’s described in his] New York-Philadelphia Vacuum Tunnel, Preliminary Design Features and Economic Analysis… One […]