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 […]
The effort to train ferrets to recognize virus odor in mallard duck droppings may be paying off, suggests a new study. The study is: “Biodetection of a specific odor signature in mallard feces associated with infection by low pathogenic avian influenza A virus,” Glen J. Golden, Meredith J. Grady, Hailey E. McLean, Susan A. Shriner, […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Victor Benno Meyer-Rochow tells why he and his colleagues calculated the internal pressure of a penguin. He then confides that there remain questions worth answering: …The pressing question had been that of the pressure of course, but what still puzzles me is why the streaks were found all around the nest and not just in […]
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 […]
Annmarie Throckmorton sent us this note today, expressing her level of delight at the Ig Nobel Prizes: And Science wonders why more little girls don’t go into STEM education. The answer for Improbable is that no one wants to be publicly called “poo” which is a synonym for SHIT. How mean and stupid are you? […]
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, […]
“Danes identify Aalborg bishop’s 300-year-old poo” is the BBC News headline. The report begins: A lump of faeces stored in the back of a Danish museum has been traced back to a bishop who lived in the city of Aalborg at the end of the 17th Century. Researchers discovered the lump in a broken bottle. […]