Nature Physics has a nice essay today about the Ig Nobel Prizes. We take the liberty of reproducing it here: Editorial Published: 11 October 2023 Levity and gravity Nature Physics, volume 19, page 1375 (2023) The Ig Nobel Prize celebrates research that makes us first laugh and then think. We look at some of this year’s not so […]
Ancient advice to students to “get out of the classroom and breath some fresh air” has never been quantified to the satisfaction of people who want to quantify it better. A new study takes a brute-force approach: “Minimum Time Dose in Nature to Positively Impact the Mental Health of College-Aged Students, and How to Measure […]
“The observatory crotch peep platform is being installed, a lot of tourists to experience the crotch peeping.” — one highlight from NHK Zero’s TV report about the 2016 Ig Nobel Prize winners. The image you see here, from the TV program, shows how people have been influenced by the winner of the 2016 Ig Nobel Prize […]
Nature is now available in Prescription Strength, which is up for an award: [vimeo]124231471[/vimeo] (Thanks to Margaret Atwood for bringing this to our attention.)
Following along from the question ‘What’s the point of building a sandcastle?‘ we might perhaps go on to ask, ‘What exactly is a sandcastle?’ Authors Professor Michael Haldrup, and Professor Jonas Larsen of the Department of Environmental, Social and Spatial Change Space, Place, Mobility and Urban Studies, Roskilde University, Denmark, give explanations in their essay […]
Walter Westman wonders about worth: “How Much Are Nature’s Services Worth?” Walter E. Westman, Science, vol. 197, no. 4307 (Sep. 2, 1977), pp. 960-964. The author, at UCLA, begins with a snippet of poetry from Wordsworth, then gets on with it: ‘To me the meanest flower that blows can give Thoughts that do often lie […]
The QI [which stands for “Quite Interesting] quiz program (hosted by Stephen Fry, broadcast on the BBC), featured the Ig Nobel Prizes. This new QI episode [see below] also featured a visit from Chris McManus of University College London. Professor McManus was awarded the 2002 Ig Nobel Prize in biology for his study called “Scrotal Asymmetry in Man and in Ancient Sculpture“, published […]
When the Australian patent office granted a patent in the year 2001 to Mr. John Keogh for inventing the wheel (an action for which they shared an Ig Nobel Prize), little acknowledgment was given to the several animals who regularly reinvent themselves a wheels. One of those animals is celebrated in a new study: “Wind-Powered […]
A letter in the Sept 22, 2010 issue of Nature magazine begins: DNA dealt wrong hand on cover Michael Eisen Howard Hughes Medical Institute University of California, Berkeley It could not escape my notice that your cover of 9 September (Nature 467, issue 7312; 2010) is dominated by a DNA molecule with a pronounced left-handed […]