The recent experiment by Joel Berger and colleagues, to test how muskoxen react to humans disguised as polar bears, was inspired by the Ig Nobel Prize-winning experiment done by two Norwegian scientists. This brief video shows the new experiment: The 2014 Ig Nobel Prize for arctic science was awarded to Eigil Reimers and Sindre Eftestøl, for […]
Tag: humans
Podcast #12: Ostrich courtship of humans
Ostriches, sea monsters, and sex figure heavily in this week’s Improbable Research podcast. LISTEN on Play.it or iTunes (or DOWNLOAD it, and listen later). SUBSCRIBE on Play.it or iTunes, to get a new episode every week, free. [NEWS: Soon, the podcast will also be available on Spotify.] This week, Marc Abrahams tells about: Ostrich courtship of humans, and also sea serpent mistakes. (Charles Paxton / Bubier, N. E., C. G. M. Paxton, P. Bowers, and […]
Biological guestimates: Microbes, humans, and ants
Two questions that are easy to answer, unless you care whether the answer is accurate: 1. Is your body mostly microbes? Actually, we have no idea. By Peter Andrey Smith, in the Boston Globe. 2. Are all the ants as heavy as all the humans? By Hannah Moore, for BBC News.
The stars in the heavens, the adults in the house
A new paper relates the apparent clumpings of stars to those of humans. Astronomer Alon Retter, who earlier posited a mathematical similarity between astronomical objects and human children, gives full details of his work: “An Intriguing Correlation between the Distribution of Star Multiples and Human Adults in Household,” Alon Retter, International Journal of Astronomy and Astrophysics, vol. […]