Today the Ig Nobel Prizes made another appearance on the Jeopardy! TV game show, this time as an answer. It refers to the 2006 Ig Nobel Biology Prize, which concerned malaria mosquitoes, human feet, and Limburger cheese. Note: The Jeopardy! wording refers to the cheese as being German, but Limburg, home of the fragrant cheese, […]
It’s known that if you wear overly pointy shoes for long periods, you’re likely to damage your feet How long has this been going on? Was it prevalent in, say, medieval Cambridge, UK? To find out, researchers examined the human remains of 177 adult individuals (11th > 15th century) from four cemeteries located in Cambridge, […]
Q. What is this man doing? A. He is strenuously tackling a ‘Scrummaging Machine’ developed at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Q. Why is he doing that? A. In order to assist with an experimental study into the effect of variations in the alignment of the feet on scrum kinetics during machine scrummaging. Q. […]
A strange (and true) news report from 1996, about an aftermath of that year’s Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, begins: Sorting Out This Case Could Take The Wisdom of a Learned Hand —- By Ross Kerber Staff Reporter of The Wall Street Journal The value of a Nobel Prize-worthy feat is clearly established: The Royal Swedish Academy […]
Ig Nobel Prize winner Bart Knols‘s sure-footed malaria-mosquito research is featured in a new Discovery Channel documentary called “Mosquito.” The New York Times celebrates “Mosquito,” contrasting it with the “frivolous” Shark Week films that the TV network is famed for: “Deadlier Than Sharks: A Documentary Spotlights the Mosquito.” Here’s a promotional chunk of the film: Knols and Ruurd […]
Does a cat always land on its feet? That’s the title of a concocted article published some years ago in the Annals of Improbable Research. The article was part of last week’s discussion on the Science Friday radio program. A new BBC program called Life In The Air features this video of a cat righting itself […]
The smelly feet / Limburger cheese / malaria mosquito research that earned an Ig Nobel Prize (in 2006) has provoked a deeper look at smelly foot smells. David Robson reports, for BBC Future: The disgusting secrets of smelly feet Renate Smallegange is something of a connoisseur of smelly feet – and she goes to surprising […]
“Time” as they say “is money.” Especially relevant perhaps, in a plastic surgery operating theatre, in which running costs can reach $66 a minute. And where, for example, “A 10% reduction in operative time per hour equals savings of $396 per hour.” What might help to speed-up surgeons’ performance (without of course compromising accuracy and […]
You might think, as many might have, that by virtue of the characteristic rows of heavy plates along their back and the spiny terminations of their tail, stegosaurs (and other armoured osteoderms) probably would have encountered considerable problems if they attempted to swim. Or did they? A new paper in PYGS : Proceedings of the […]
Some say that the circumspect application of Duct Tape works as a viable verruca-removal method. Others say it doesn’t. And yet others say that they can’t really be sure. We present below a (partial) listing of professional viewpoints from the medical literature. Does work (as good as cryotherapy) • • The Efficacy of Duct Tape […]