The awarding of the 2023 Ig Nobel Medicine prize for research on nostril hairs revives happy memories of a publicity campaign mounted a decade earlier by the organization Clean Air Asia. That campaign introduced itself by saying: The campaign seeks to highlight, humorously, that urban populations should not adapt to worsening air quality but actually […]
“Waiter, there’s plastic in my lettuce” isn’t a phrase you’d expect to hear very often. Nevertheless, several studies have now shown that plants can, and do, take-up microplastics [MPs] from the soil and incorporate them into stems, roots and leaves. Should we be worried – or happy? The latter is a possibility that should be […]
BBC News reports: The former chief executive of the carmaker Volkswagen has been charged in Germany over his involvement in the company’s diesel emissions scandal. The public prosecutor in Braunschweig charged Martin Winterkorn and four other managers with fraud. VW said it would not comment on the indictments. The 2016 Ig Nobel Prize for chemistry […]
Professional baseball umpires are not supposed to make errors, yet they sometimes do. That happens more often on days when the air is badly polluted, suggests a new scientific study. If umpires make more bad decisions on bad-air days, then maybe so does anyone who has to make rapid judgment calls. As the saying goes: […]
The research that won an Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize for Volkswagen also involved monkeys watching cartoons while they inhaled automobile fumes — a fact that was not publicly known at the time the prize was awarded. Nor was it known to the Ig Nobel Board of Governors. The monkeys/cartoons news was reported today by Jack […]
Passenger trains train a rain of exhaust on the passengers, if the trains burn diesel fuel and the passenger cars traipse dutifully behind the exhausting locomotive. Details are in this possibly-not-entirely-surprising study: “Exposure to ultrafine particles and black carbon in diesel-powered commuter trains,” Cheol-Heon Jeong, Alison Traub, Greg J. Evans, Atmospheric Environment, epub February 8, 2017. (Thanks […]
Medical researchers, seeking insight, sometimes try to make simple sense of complex, difficult conglomerations of things that may or may not have effects on each other and on many other things. Sometimes coffee is involved, as is the case here: “Indoor Air Pollution, Nighttime Heart Rate Variability and Coffee Consumption among Convenient Store Workers,” Kai-Jen […]
“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 […]
Do the gods pollute? Scientists in India, worried about the public health consequences of immersing idols in lakes and rivers, have been looking anew at water pollution. They hope, and perhaps in some cases pray, to harmonise their medical concerns with some people’s religious priorities. Most of their research has focused on idols of the elephant-headed god Ganesh, created for […]
Investigator Scott Sandford alerts us to this pathblazing study: “Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and the unidentified infrared emission bands: Auto exhaust along the Milky Way,” L.J. Allamandola, A.G.G.M. Tielens and J.R. Barker, Astrophysical Journal, vol. 290, 1985, pp. L25-L28.