“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 […]

Improbable Research