This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has two segments. Here’s how they begin: Physics vs Mona Lisa — The wood and smile of the Mona Lisa fascinate scientists. Not wooden smile. Wood and smile. A new study in the Journal of Cultural Heritage reveals how researchers have spent 18 years exploring the wooden panel on which Leonardo da […]
This video, made by iFaces in Pakistan, asks the plain question “What will happen if you fall into a pool of honey?” The answer it presents involves some Ig Nobel Prize-winning research about swimming:
“Rotation of Whirling Dervishes” is a review column about some of the scientific research that focuses on whirling dervishes. Specifically: (1) Physics of the Skirts of Whirling Dervishes, and (2) Whirling Dervish in an MRI Tube. The column appears in the special Rotation and Spinning issue (volume 28, number 5) of the magazine. You can […]
The physics of musical saws, explored by Ig Nobel Prize winner Lakshminarayanan Mahadevan, was profiled in the New York Times: “Now L. Mahadevan, a professor of physics and applied mathematics at Harvard, along with two colleagues, Suraj Shankar and Petur Bryde, has studied the way the saw produces music and drawn some conclusions that help […]
The running of the people who are running from the bulls at the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, Spain, begs for some insights. Insights — insights about the running of those people from those bulls — course through the paragraphs of this newly published study: “Pedestrian Dynamics at the Running of the Bulls Evidence […]
Oxford maths PhD student Sophie Abrahams explicates the Ig Nobel Prize-winning research on what happens when one walks backwards while (or whilst) holding a cup of coffee. The 2017 Ig Nobel Prize for fluid dynamics was awarded to Jiwon (Jessie) Han, for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks […]
Here is the Ig Informal Lecture by the winners of the 2020 Ig Nobel Physics Prize. The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that make people LAUGH, then THINK. In the Ig Informal Lectures, some days after the ceremony, the new Ig Nobel Prize winners attempt to explain what they did, and why they did it. [In non-pandemic years, […]
When a person walks while carrying a full cup (with no lid) of coffee, it is almost inevitable that some coffee will spill. Two Ig Nobel Prizes have honored research that analyzed why. Small Expedition Room produced this video news report [in Korean] about the phenomenon: Those Two Coffee-Spill Ig Nobel Prizes The 2012 Ig […]
Richard Feynman:
“How to Spill a Cup of Coffee” is a featured article in the special Coffee, and Tea issue (volume 26, number 4) of the Annals of Improbable Research. It looks at two studies—each of which led to an Ig Nobel Prize—about the physics of how and why anyone who walks with a full cup of […]