“Feed Cooking Oil to Your Paper Shredders” is a topic opined upon in the wikiHow web site. The advice is presumably just as valuable to anyone who has but one paper shredder: Oiling an office shredder is an important part of your routine. While the frequency of oiling depends on the type of shredder and […]
ProPublica gives a detailed report about a little-noticed consequence of the oil spill that led to an Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize. The ProPublica report begins: A Massive Oil Spill Helped One Billionaire Avoid Paying Income Tax for 14 Years After the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling rig exploded in 2010, environmentalists surveying the damage in the […]
If you’re thinking of supplementing or replacing your plant-based cooking oils with oils made from insects, maybe steer away from Blaptica dubia – the Dubia Cockroach. Stick to mealworms or house crickets instead. That’s the take-home message from a new paper in-press at the Journal of Insects as Food and Feed which details recent progress […]
Of all the criticisms aimed at fracking, charges that it might increase the incidence of STDs – specifically gonorrhea – are seldom heard. Yet there might be a link – according to a new research paper published in the Journal of Public Health Policy. “We analyzed one potential cost to communities, the effect of fracking […]
The work of Kiyoshi Mabuchi, Kensei Tanaka, Daichi Uchijima and Rina Sakai, who were awarded the 2014 Ig Nobel Physics Prize for measuring the amount of friction between a shoe and a banana skin, and between a banana skin and the floor, when a person steps on a banana skin that’s on the floor, continues […]
“The immense forehead of sperm whales is possibly the largest, and one of the strangest, anatomical structures in the animal kingdom.“ Leading to the question: ‘What’s it for?’ Herman Melville’s famous novel Moby-Dick suggested that one purpose might be for large-scale head-butting, the practicalities of which are reviewed in a new paper for PeerJ PrePrints, […]
David Biello writes, in Scientific American, about “The Enduring Mystery of the Missing Oil Spilt in the Gulf of Mexico” — a detective story whose beginnings were told in an Ig Nobel Prize-winning study: Workers uncovered a tar mat weighing some 18,000 kilograms just offshore of a natural barrier island in Louisiana in the summer of 2013. […]
“It is estimated …” say Ken Foster and Ralph Brendle in their 2007 US patent “… that a single hunting club or hunting resort may lose over $100,000 a year because of missed hunts due to rainy and damp weather.” The problem which the patent is addressing is primarily that of wet birds. “On wet […]