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 […]
Tag: oil
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 […]