“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 […]
Tag: oil
Prize-Winning Oil Spill Helps Individual Save Money
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 […]
Cockroach oil gets thumbs down for cookery [new study]
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 […]
Fracking and Sexually Transmitted Disease [public health study]
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 […]
Banana Skins – their promise as an industrial lubricant additive
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 […]
Head butting in whales – explanations for junk
“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, […]
Ig Nobel update: How well do oil and water mix, five years later?
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. […]
Birds: oiling and de-oiling (patented methods)
“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 […]