The story of how the sound of herring expelling gas through their rear ends became mistakenly taken, by Swedish government officials, as evidence of invading Soviet submarines, gets a new, beautifully stylish telling in a new episode of the RadioLab podcast: Red Herring It was the early 80s, the height of the Cold War, when […]
Tag: herring
The incident of the Suspected-Soviet-Sub, the Swedish Navy, and the Farting Herring
“Fishes caused Sweden to be afraid of being attacked by Soviet submarines in 1982” is a report by VN Express (in Vietnamese) about the secret incident that years later produced the 2004 Ig Nobel Biology Prize. The central figures in the story: farting herring. It is an open question, biologically speaking, whether the herring do […]
The place of fish farting in fish flirting and in international relations
The two independent research studies about herring farts gave different insights: one that fish probably use farting to communicate, the other that farting herrings in Stockholm harbor were mistakenly identified as Soviet submarines. Brian Owens appreciates these studies — their two sets of scientists shared the 2004 Ig Nobel Biology Prize — in an article […]
Dropped red herring attacks
The ‘Dropped Red Herring Attack’ was first (Improbable believes) described by Professor Brad Karp (pictured right) and colleagues Dr. James Newsome and Professor Dawn Song in their paper for Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium On Recent Advances In Intrusion Detection (RAID 2006), entitled: ‘Paragraph: Thwarting signature learning by training maliciously’. “In the Dropped Red […]
The curious true tale of the the Swedish prime minister, a Soviet submarine, and farting herring
Professor Magnus Whalberg took part, many years ago, in an odd historic passage that involved the Swedish prime minister (Carl Bildt), a Soviet submarine, and farting herring. Years after the event, in 2004, Whalberg and his colleague Håkan Westerberg were awarded an Ig Nobel Prize — though the Ig Nobel Board of Governors was at the time completely unaware […]
How herring farts almost led to a diplomatic crisis
A video from TEDx Goteborg, with this description; How can herring farts in the Stockholm archipelago almost lead to a diplomatic crisis? Or a bra be converted into a gas mask in case of emergency? To Magnus Wahlberg this is everyday stuff, and proof that science doesn’t have to be dull to be important. He […]
Herring farts, Russian submarines & the PM on Swedish TV
Tonight the “Vetenskapens Värld” program on Sweden’s Swedish SVT2 network broadcast a pair of reports, back-to-back, about the Ig Nobel Prizes. Report # 1 is about the recent Ig Nobel Tour‘s visit to Stockholm. Report #2 focuses the history behind one part of that visit — the now-it-can-be-told story of how, some years ago, herring farts prevented the […]
Fish farts, Russian submarines, the Swedish Foreign Minister
Maggie Koerth-Baker of Boing-Boing interviewed several journalists at the AAAS Annual Meeting last week in Vancouver, about what they had learned at the meeting. Here’s me, blabbing on about a new little chapter in the story of how fish farts almost caused a diplomatic crisis between Russia and Sweden, and might cause a new little kerfuffle […]
Thursday: Whales & herring farts in Copenhagen
A special event in Copenhagen on Thursday, October 13, 7:00-9:00 pm, HCØ (Auditorium 4), Universitetsparken 5, 2100 København Ø: Magnus Wahlberg, Ig Nobel Prize winner, Improbable Research’s Scandinavian Desk Chief, and Head of Research and Outreach, Adjunct Professor at Fjord & Bælt and University of Southern Denmark, will talk about whales and dolphins, which he is currently […]
Herring + whales + bacteria =
When different species meet, interesting things can happen. Here’s a case in point: “Digestion of herring by indigenous bacteria in the minke whale forestomach,” Monica A. Olsen, Tove H. Aagnes and Svein D. Mathiesen, Applied and Environmental Microbiology, December 1994, p. 4445-4455. The authors, at the University of Tromso, Norway, report: “Northeastern Atlantic minke whales […]