It has been said that (in some cases) court judges are more lenient on those accused of crimes if the date of the court hearing falls on the defendant’s birthday. But can things also work in the reverse direction? What if, for example, the judge’s favorite football team have just lost a match? Would they dish […]
Julien Blondeau, who researches thermodynamics and fluid dynamics at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, writes us about his most unusual research project: I can now perfectly explain why, for instance, field hockey players score more than football players, although the fields have approximately the same size, the number of players is exactly the same, the goals […]
The search continues, to find timely meaning in soccer (football) and childbirth: “More Goals, Fewer Babies? On National Teams’ Performance and Birth Rates,” Luca Fumarco and Francesco Principe, IZA DP No. 14448, June 2021 The authors, at Tulane University, IZA, the Tinbergen Institute, and ECASE, explain: “Does national team performance boost birth rates? We compiled […]
Do referees who are short punish players more than referees who are not so short do? A new study by Ig Nobel Prize winner Minna Lyons and colleagues probes that question. The study is: “Referee Height Influences Decision Making in British Football Leagues,” Dane McCarrick, Gayle Brewer, Minna Lyons, Thomas V. Pollet, and Nick Neave, […]
If you thought that ‘Score Celebration Injuries’ (SCIs) were restricted to soccer players – think again. A 2017 report in The Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness, 57(3 ): 267-71, reviews the medical literature on the subject, reporting that of the 62 SCIs that they found, only 22 involved professional soccer players. “A total […]
The World Cup brings more than passing excitement to the world. This newly published study suggests that the World Cup also brings, eventually, a change in the world population: “The sex ratio at birth in South Africa increased 9 months after the 2010 FIFAWorld Cup,” Gwinyai Masukume and Victor Grech, Early Human Development, epub 2015. […]
The clip above shows (amongst others) the now-famous 2014 FIFA World Cup biting-incident featuring Luis Suárez. One might ask, and indeed some have, what are the ethical and philosophical implications of such an act? Bearing in mind that : “A prohibition against biting an opponent is not included in the rules of most contact sports, […]
An American former pro football player, now turned radio talk show host, has been consulted about the Ig Nobel Prize-winning research on the so-called “gay bomb”. In 2007, the Ig Nobel peace prize was awarded to the Air Force Wright Laboratory, Dayton, Ohio, USA, for instigating research & development on a chemical weapon — the so-called “gay […]
John Urschel is not your ordinary National Football League offensive lineman. He may be a professional football player by day, but by night he is a spectral graph theorist (and numerical linear algebraist). His latest paper has now been accepted for publication in Journal of Computational Mathematics. Urschel announced via Twitter that his paper had […]
Dr. Ivan Schwab explains why woodpeckers don’t get headaches, in this Discovery Channel video: He explains it in more detail, in this TEDx Talk: Dr. Schwab, of the University of California Davis, and the late Philip R.A. May of the University of California Los Angeles, were awarded the 2006 Ig Nobel Prize for ornithology, for exploring […]