‘ “God knows who figured this out,” he said. But it worked.’

Stanford Magazine (the university’s alumni magazine) profiles their latest Ig Nobel Prize winner. Dr. Ian Humphreys, together with three colleagues, was honored for treating “uncontrollable” nosebleeds, using the method of nasal-packing-with-strips-of-cured-pork: …Typically, doctors would next resort to sealing off the nearby artery. But in this case, doing so could have left the child blind. Running out […]

Cured pork up the nose for riches, rather than for medical purposes

One hesitates to inquire whether the new bacon-scented lottery tickets offered by the state of New Hampshire were inspired in any way by news photos of the Ig Nobel Prize-winning study “Nasal Packing With Strips of Cured Pork as Treatment for Uncontrollable Epistaxis in a Patient with Glanzmann Thrombasthenia.” New Hampshire’s lottery offers this deal (and, on […]

Superpowers for baristas

There’s reported progress in the struggle to give baristas (and their bosses, and their boss’s vendors, too) more reliable info about the identities of their coffee beans. Details are in the study “Voltammetric Electronic Tongue and Support Vector Machines for Identification of Selected Features in Mexican Coffee,” by Rocio Berenice Domínguez, Laura Moreno-Barón, Roberto Muñoz, […]

Improbable Research