The folks at Today I Found Out take a look at the Ig Nobel Prize-winning Pitch Drop Experiment: The 2005 Ig Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to John Mainstone and the late Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland, Australia, for patiently conducting an experiment that began in the year 1927 — in which a glob of congealed black tar […]
Tag: experiment
Adventures in Mailing
Alyssa Pelish writes about the difficult cases handled by the U.S. Postal Service (USPS). Pelish’s essay, called “The Bureau of Hards“, appears in the Fence blog. Close attention is paid there to a modest experiment: Indeed, an experiment run in 2000 by a group affiliated with the eccentrics behind the annual Ig Nobel Prize found that […]
A research project for the ages and ages
Andrew Stafford took a look at the current state of the Ig Nobel Prize-winning pitch drop experiment. His report, in The Guardian, bears the headline ” ‘It’s literally slower than watching Australia drift north’: the laboratory experiment that will outlive us all“. The 2005 Ig Nobel Prize for physics was awarded to John Mainstone and […]
Using a ‘robot audience’ to induce acute stress [new study]
Psychology researchers : are you looking for a novel way to illicit an acute stress response in your experimental participants? If so, a new paper in the journal Computers in Human Behavior (Volume 99, October 2019, Pages 76-85) may provide ideas. A research team from the University of Bath and Bournemouth University, UK, have devised […]
The drop dropped in the Ig Nobel-winning pitch drop experiment
Big little news from Queensland, as reported by Celeste Biever and Lisa Grossman for New Scientist magazine: Longest experiment sees pitch drop after 84-year wait The pitch has dropped – again. This time, the glimpse of a falling blob of tar, also called pitch, represents the first result for the world’s longest-running experiment…. Up-and-running since 1930, the experiment […]
A pitch for the pitch drop experiment
The University of Queensland invites you try to play a tiny but historic part in their Ig Nobel Prize-winning (physics, 2005) experiment: The Pitch Drop is the world’s longest running lab experiment. Many believe it’s also the most boring. But in its 86 years, no one has seen a Pitch Drop fall. Now the 9th […]
Economics experiment finds people volunteer for economics experiments largely to make money
What does one learn from reading about economics experiments? This: “Self-Selection into Economics Experiments Is Driven by Monetary Rewards,” Johannes Abeler [University of Oxford, IZA and CESifo] and Daniele Nosenzo [University of Nottingham], IZA [Forschungsinstitut zur Zukunft der Arbeit / Institute for the Study of Labor] DP No. 7374, April 2013. The researchers explain: “Laboratory […]
The slow pitch of excitement
Robin McKie, in The Observer, chronicles the slowly, slowly, slowly mounting excitement about the Ig Nobel Prize-winning [physics prize, 2005] Australian pitch-drop experiment: In terms of output, Queensland University’s pitch drop study – the world’s oldest laboratory experiment – has been stunningly low. Only eight drops have emerged from the lump of pitch installed in the university’s physics building […]
Nature looks, briefly, at the long-running pitch drop experiment
Nature takes a quick look at the now-86-year-long pitch drop experiment, and at several other long-running experiments. The people who started and tend the pitch drop experiment were awarded the 2005 Ig Nobel Prize in physics. Nature says, in part: The pitch-drop experiment started when Thomas Parnell, the university’s first professor of physics, set up […]
Hamburgers, and nothing but, in a man in the 1930s
The Minnesota Medical foundation described, a while ago, a hamburgers-and-human experiment that took place a good while before that. Their blog in 2008 called it “an unusual hamburger experiment” done in the 1930s by Jesse McClendon [pictured here] of the University of Minnesota’s Department of Physiological Chemistry. Some details: He planned to feed a single experimental […]