Improbable products (with mistakes) increase product preferences (research study)

“[…] we find that consumers actually prefer products that were made by mistake to otherwise identical products that were made intentionally.” – explain the researchers behind a new study to be published in the Journal of Consumer Research. The research team performed a series of experiments which described to participants various mistake-prone scenarios, e.g. one […]

Group laughter at the social insect conference

“At a social insect conference, the whole room broke into laughter,” writes Myrmecos about the moment someone displayed this chart: Myrmecos explains: “Pachycondyla, among the most common ants in tropical regions worldwide, turns out to be a motley assortment of unrelated species. While the taxonomy of the world’s 12,000 or so ant species is obviously still […]

The unexpected end of 2011 (an Ig Nobel tribute)

This year, 2011, is ending—unexpectedly—in December. To celebrate, we pay tribute to the winners of this year’s Ig Nobel Prize in mathematics. The prize was awarded to: Dorothy Martin of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1954), Pat Robertson of the USA (who predicted the world would end in 1982 [and whose book is pictured […]

Life, art, scrambled dinosaurs — again

Dinosaurs upside down, backwards, or scrambled are the subject of art yet again imitating life. In this case it’s art imitating life about the art of trying to describe life. The Onion has just published a splendid parody article called “Paleontologists: ‘We’ve Been Looking At Dinosaurs Upside Down“. But this joke has been lived out, […]