Nature Physics has a nice essay today about the Ig Nobel Prizes. We take the liberty of reproducing it here: Editorial Published: 11 October 2023 Levity and gravity Nature Physics, volume 19, page 1375 (2023) The Ig Nobel Prize celebrates research that makes us first laugh and then think. We look at some of this year’s not so […]
Willfully or not, some leaks can under certain circumstances stop themselves. This study explores that notion: “How a Leak Can Stop Itself,” Caroline D. Tally, Heather E. Kurtz, Rose B. Tchuenkam, and Katharine E. Jensen, arXiv:2202.02644, 2023. The authors explain: We often consider how to stop a leak, but here we ask a different question: […]
Much can be learned from a calculating study of cartoon animals behaving in ways that are natural to them. Here is a new example: “Tauberian identities and the connection to Wile E. Coyote physics,” Roberto Camassa and Richard M. McLaughlin, arXiv:2304.06127, 2023. (Thank to Mason Porter for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at […]
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, […]