Suspicious eyes, Dad’s superpower, Poo proofs, Apple-a-day

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Suspicious eyes — In the year 2001, US president George W. Bush foreshadowed a hope that decades later would pervade the robotics industry. Bush stood next to Russian president Vladimir Putin at a press conference in Slovenia […]

Secrets in the Scat

Yes, the wombat-cubical-poo acceptance speech at the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony does get a moment in the sun in the NOVA television documentary “Secrets in the Scat.” NOVA describes the episode this way: “Scott Burnett is ‘Scatman’—an Australian ecologist on the trail of the secrets of poop. By identifying and analyzing animal scat for DNA […]

“Wombat research that’s not to be sniffed at”

“Wombat research that’s not to be sniffed at” is the headline on this Royal Society of Chemistry article about a new research study: The findings – published today in our aptly named journal Soft Matter – could help develop new colon cancer diagnostics. An international team of scientists have been able to replicate how a wombat produces square poo […]

Penguin Pooing Pressure, Calculated Anew

The penguin pooing pressure calculation that won the 2005 Ig Nobel Prize for fluid dynamics has been calculated anew by a different group of scientists. The new study is: “Projectile Trajectory of Penguin’s Faeces and Rectal Pressure Revisited,” Hiroyuki Tajima [@HiroyukiTajima3] and Fumiya Fujisawa, arXiv 2007.00926v1, 2020. The authors, at Kochi University and at the […]

Offered for scale: Child and Wombat Gear

Winners of 2019 Ig Nobel Physics Prize showed up to accept the prize, dressed as a wombat, or as pieces of wombat feces (they received the prize for researching and publishing, “How Do Wombats Make Cubed Poo?“). You might have seen them onstage dressed this way in the ceremony video. If you were wondering how […]

A better-rounded understanding of why wombat poo is cubic

Ian Sample reports, in The Guardian, a new discovery by Ig Nobel Prize winners, about wombat poo shape: Scientists unravel secret of cube-shaped wombat faeces Researchers investigate why excrement emerges in awkward-shaped blocks … “My curiosity got triggered when I realised that cubical feces exist,” said Patricia Yang pictured below], a postdoctoral fellow in mechanical engineering […]

Proper credit for penguins: credit cards and poo

Here are two drawing of penguins. One drawing is part of an ad for a credit card offered by CIBC, with the slogan “Unleash your sense of adventure. Aventura. The Traveller’s Travel Card.™” The other drawing is from the Ig Nobel Prize-winning biology research study “Pressures Produced When Penguins Pooh — Calculations on Avian Defaecation,” published in the journal Polar Biology, […]