A Look at the Looooooooong-Almost-Dripping, Ig Nobel Prize-winning Pitch Drop Experiment

The folks at Today I Found Out take a look at the Ig Nobel Prize-winning Pitch Drop Experiment: The 2005 Ig Nobel Prize for Physics was awarded to John Mainstone and the late Thomas Parnell of the University of Queensland, Australia, for patiently conducting an experiment that began in the year 1927 — in which a glob of congealed black tar […]

A new, more rapid, yet unhasty look at pitch slowly dropping

Inspired, eventually, by the long, slow, continuing Australian pitch-drop experiment, a team in London has speeded things up considerably but — deliberately — not at all completely. They published a study about it: “Measurement of bitumen viscosity in a room-temperature drop experiment: student education, public outreach and modern science in one,” A.T. Widdicombe, P. Ravindrarajah, […]

Rocks/Tar Rock Star: Ivan Brady

Today’s Rocks/Tar rock star of the day is Ivan Brady, Distinguished Teaching Professor Emeritus and previous Chair of Anthropology at the State University of New York at Oswego, former president of the Society for Humanistic Anthropology and Chair of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania, and also former book review editor of the American Anthropologist. Professor […]