The Ig Nobel Prize-winning “invisible gorilla” guys have a new book coming out. The book is about con men — about how (1) everyone can get conned, and (2) anyone can learn to not get conned so often. Dan Simons and Chris Chabris‘s new book is called Nobody’s Fool: Why We Get Taken In and […]
Of the approximately 330 million people in the United States of America, only one is known to have personally applied Gorilla Glue as a hair-styling substance. After that person shared her innovation in a TikTok video which became very, very popular, one university showed public-spirited quick thinking. Rutgers University issued a press release that immediately […]
Output takes center stage in this new study of what some gorillas left behind: “Daily Defecation Outputs of Mountain Gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei) in the Volcanoes National Park, Rwanda,” Elie Sinayitutse, David Modry, Jan Slapeta, Aisha Nyiramana, Antoine Mudakikwa, Richard Muvunyi, and Winnie Eckardt, Primates, epub 2020. (Thanks to Damien Caillaud for bringing this to […]
This report from Virunga National Park appears to broaden and confirm the Ig Nobel Prize-winning discovery about different kinds of animals (humans and some of our close relatives) imitating each other: The photo, posted on Instagram, bears this caption: You might have recently seen caretakers Mathieu and Patrick’s amazing selfie with female orphaned gorillas Ndakazi […]
Charles Spence (Ig Nobel Prize winner for the electronically-modified-sound-of-a-potato-chip experiment) and a colleague have a new study that explores an unexplored aspect—smell—of what’s known as “inattentional blindness.’ Inattentional blindness became widely noticed because of the “invisible gorilla experiment” that won an Ig Nobel Prize for Chris Chabris and Dan Simons. The new study asks, in essence, […]
If you spend enough time in a flight simulator or using Virtual Reality goggles, you’re likely to suffer “simulator sickness”. The simulator shows your eyes objects, motions, and distances which don’t match what your other senses are perceiving, which can cause nausea, vertigo, headaches, and other documented symptoms. Some designers try to lessen the effect […]
Gorilla dung matters. This came to mind today, when I saw the news about a particular gorilla: “Famous Dian Fossey Gorilla Presumed Dead at 38“. In ninth grade biology class, I wrote a report about a book about gorillas and about Dian Fossey and other scientists who studied those gorillas. Being a ninth grader, I was impressed at how dung had played […]
Humans who study animals sometimes quarrel about exactly what they are seeing. The ape Mafuka was the subject of one such quarrel: “Watching Exotic Animals Next Door: ‘Scientific’ Observations at the Zoo (ca. 1870–1910),” Oliver Hochadel, Science in Context, vol. 24, no. 2, 2011, pp. 183–214. The author, at Institucio Mila i Fontanals, CSIC, Barcelona, […]
Unintentionally harking back to the Ig Nobel Prize-winning “Did You See the Gorilla” experiment, a Seattle PI news report says: Costumed Zoo Employee Taken Down by Veterinarian with a Tranquilizer Dart – the Vet Mistook Him for a Real Gorilla Loro Parque, an amusement park located on a Spanish island off the coast of Africa where […]
Dan Simons, psychology professor and Ig Nobel Prize winner (together with Chris Chabris, for the invisible-gorilla study) casts a cool, appraising eye on a cold-shower-and-loneliness study, and looks at the way other investigators have looked at that study. Simons writes, on his blog: Replication, Retraction, and Responsibility Congrats/thanks to Brent Donnellan, Joe Cesario, and Rich […]