The newspaper La Vanguardia reports about a new revival of the Ig Nobel Prize-winning virtual pet: Tamagotchi lives in Barcelona For an entire generation, Tamagotchi represented a toy that carried responsibility. Those first virtual pets that lived in oval-shaped devices caused a real sensation around the world. Its fame was so great that its authors, […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Fossil or beehive? — … And the snideness? That isn’t unusual, either. Nor is it new. In 1934, the Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences printed a report called “The supposed fossil ear of maize from Cuzco, Peru”. Quantum […]
Charl Fourie and Michelle Wong were awarded the 1999 Ig Nobel Peace Prize, for inventing an automobile burglar alarm consisting of a detection circuit and a flamethrower. (Patent WO/1999/032331, “A Security System for a Vehicle“) Now, in 2023, The South African news organization takes a look back at one of South Africa’s most spectacular but least financially rewarding inventions. […]
“Not for nothing in 1997, the creators of the Tamagotchi were winners of the Ig Nobel Prize in Economics: Akihiro Yokoi, of the Wiz Company, of Chiba (Japan), and Aki Maita, of the Bandai Company (Tokyo), father and mother of the Tamagochi, “for turning millions of work hours into lost time taking care of virtual […]