Tonight’s the 21st First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony. 1200 people will have the privilege of watching it live, in-person at Sanders Theatre, Harvard University. Many more will have the opportunity to watch it live on the internet. The webcast will be available here on Improbable.com, at the Improbable Research YouTube channel and at finer […]
Tag: nobel
Nobel Medals, Dissolved and Bottled
Stephan Schwartz writes, in the magazine Gamma: In an autobiographical essay, George de Hevesy (1943 Nobel Laureate) writes: ”My work was interrupted only one day during the enemy occupation of Denmark. When, in the morning of Denmark’s occupation [9 April 1940], I arrived in the laboratory, I found Bohr worrying about Max von Laue’s Nobel […]
Brandishing a handgun — for science!
Eric Weddle reports, in jconline: When Herbert C. Brown, Purdue University’s first Nobel Prize winner, walked into a hall at Harvard University circa 1960 and laid a handgun on the table, his audience got the point.”There was a joke going around that he should come armed because there was a lot of controversy at the […]
Someone stole Roy’s Nobel Prize
Bizarre news, reported in the Boston Globe: Harvard professor’s Nobel Prize stolen Police have caught a man they suspect of breaking into a Harvard professor’s suburban Boston home, but they are still looking for some missing items — including a Nobel Prize. Police tell the Boston Herald that Stephen Beaulieu of Skowhegan, Maine broke into […]
Improbable Research Collection #128: The 2009 Ig Nobel Prize for Public Health
At the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, Public Health Prize winner Dr. Elena Bodnar demonstrates her invention – a brassiere that, in an emergency, can be quickly converted into a pair of protective face masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander. She is assisted by Nobel laureates […]
Improbable Research Collection #123
William Lipscomb, the 1976 Nobel laureate in chemistry, is a Kentucky colonel. He is famous for wearing string ties. Here he demonstrates how to tie a string tie. We made this video as part of the celebration for Professor Lipscomb’s upcoming 90th birthday.