The Journal of Food Science has a nice essay today (October 16, 2023) about the Ig Nobel Prizes. We take the liberty of reproducing it here: EDITORIAL Ig Nobel awards This month’s topic will be a little different, although I promise to bring the discussion back to peer review next month, as we look back […]
A September 11, 2021 editorial in The Guardian focuses on the Ig Nobel Prizes, Jonathan Swift, and science, though not necessarily in that order: The editorial begins: In Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift mocked the assumption that the scientific revolution had transformed European culture for the better. The satirical novel, published in 1726, has its eponymous […]
Stephen Buranyi explored how the business of publishing science (and other) research reports became such a big business. Buranyi’s article, appeared in The Guardian, in 2017: Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science? It is an industry like no other, with profit margins to rival Google – and it was created […]
Every Ig Nobel Prize ceremony since 1996 has included a new mini-opera, performed by professional opera singers (with Nobel Laureates acting in supporting roles). These mini-operas honor the tradition of the classic Bugs Bunny cartoons “What’s Opera, Doc?” and “Rabbit of Seville“—each mini-opera is a pasticcio that marries a brand new story & words to beloved […]
Bob and Ray‘s historic recording of an episode of their radio drama “Mr. Science”, performed in 1959. (Thanks to Scott Langill for bringing this to our attention.)
Somewhere round or about the late 1850s, John Tyndall FRS [* see note below] was developing and perfecting his experiments with “Sensitive Flames”. He describes one such experiment in his book ‘Sounds’ (p. 238). In which he reads a passage of poetry from Edmund Spenser’s ‘Belphœbe the Huntress’ to the flame (which he calls The Vowel-flame) […]
“The vast majority of scientists believe that humans have evolved over time (98%; Pew Research Center, 2015). However, recent public opinion polls indicate much more variability in the views of the general public; only 65% of Americans (Pew Research Center, 2015), 61% of Canadians (Angus Reid Public Opinion Polls, 2012), and similar amounts of British […]
“Using a sample of 440 scientists from a social networking site for researchers, multiple raters coded smile intensity (full smile, partial smile, or no smile) in publicly available photographs. We found that scientists who presented a full smile had the same quantity of publications yet of higher quality” See: Lukasz D. Kaczmarek, Maciej Behnke, Todd […]
The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS) proudly announced its 2017 Man Of The Year back in January. Now it proudly announces WHEN it will announce the 2017 Woman of the Year. 2017 MAN of The Year – an Experimental Physicist at Case Western Reserve University, researching cosmic rays – was announced on Friday, […]
Here at close of 2016 The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHCfS), and it’s sibling clubs, have collected the year’s new members into its 2016 Members Gallery. Individual members are first announced as they are inducted throughout the year, in the Improbable Blog’s Hair Club section (with one exception this year**), and then collected […]