Huh? Ig Nobel Prize winner wins Heineken Young Scientist Award

Mark Dingemanse was awarded the Heineken Young Scientists Award in Humanities 2020. The official announcement says: Mark Dingemanse studied African languages and cultures at Leiden University. He carried out research for his PhD in Ghana, receiving his doctorate cum laude in 2011 at Radboud University Nijmegen. That work contributed to a fundamental shift in research […]

Banana skins and rabbit cartilage mucus – with an Ig Nobel connection

Kiyoshi Mabuchi, Kensei Tanaka, Daichi Uchijima and Rina Sakai, were jointly awarded the 2014 Ig Nobel Physics Prize for measuring the amount of friction between a shoe and a banana skin, and between a banana skin and the floor, when a person steps on a banana skin that’s on the floor. REFERENCE: “Frictional Coefficient under […]

Predicting a Scientist’s Future Achievement Is Unpredictable?

The drive to measure—in advance!—success gets a whack in the computational knee, in this study about an Ig Nobel Prize (and also Nobel Prize) winner’s career: “Web of Science: Showing a Bug Today That Can Mislead Scientific Research Output’s Prediction,” Pablo Diniz Batista, Igor Marques-Carneiro, Leduc Hermeto de Almeida Fauth, and Marcia de Oliveira Reis […]

Ig Nobel Prize-winning swearing research wins best science book prize

Black Sheep: The Hidden Benefits of Being Bad, a new book by Richard Stephens, is the British Psychological Society’s Book Award winner — in the category Popular Science. The BPS’s Book Awards have just been announced. In the year 2010, Richard Stephens and two colleagues were awarded the Ig Nobel Peace Prize, for confirming the widely held belief that swearing […]

A knighthood for Geim—he of frogs, magnets & pencils

The man [pictured here] who was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for using magnets to levitate a frog (a feat he accomplished together with a man who already had a knighthood) and then ten years later was awarded a Nobel Prize for having used scotch tape to tease graphene layers from a pencil, has now been […]