“[The] Germans themselves made extensive use of decoys to protect airfields and other targets. One example in the Netherlands was constructed with particular care, made almost entirely of wood and including hangars, gun positions, aircraft and vehicles. However, it took so long to build that Allied photo interpreters had plenty of time to observe it. […]
Tag: The Netherlands
A look back at Dutch Ig Nobel night 2013
De Nederlandse Ig Nobel Night (Dutch Ig Nobel Night) is an official satellite event of the annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony. Persons large and small, old and young, gather in a grand theater in Leiden to see live (1) performances by Ig Nobel Prize winners and outstandingly amusing Dutch scientists, and then to (2) view the actual […]
Smelov’s investigation of HPV on toilet seats in international airports
Lead author Smelov and colleagues write, in this letter to a medical journal, about a careful investigation that may (and may not) have small or nonexistent implications: “Are human papillomavirus DNA prevalences providing high-flying estimates of infection? An international survey of HPV detection on environmental surfaces,” Vitaly Smelov [pictured here], Carina Eklund, Laila Sara Arroyo […]
A dead dolphin, or dog
June 25th 2013, zoologists in The Netherlands were alerted by a report of a dead bottle-nosed dolphin (Tursiops truncatus) washed ashore in an inland estuary just south of Rotterdam. This dolphin is a very rare species in The Netherlands, even in the nearby open sea. Photographs, posted on http://www.waarneming.nl (now removed, but reproduced here), indeed […]
A homosexual copulation, on first arrival in The Netherlands from the Cape Verde Islands
May 19th, 2013 was an historical moment in the history of European ornithology. Four Iago Sparrows (Passer iagoensis) arrived in The Netherlands from the Cape Verde Islands aboard a ship, named Plancius. They are the first know individuals of that species (endemic to the islands off West Africa) to have reached Europe. As the ship […]
For the birds: “Hoe hoe hoe”
While in Japan Professor Yukio Hirose worries about pigeons pooping on statues, in The Netherlands a young man is making a musical stink about the high prices being paid for racing pigeons. He, the young man, expresses himself in this song: His plight is translated, both in language and context, for people outside the Netherlands, […]
Dutch bug-splatter-on-cars count
This graph shows seven days of bug-splat data. The bugs splatted onto the license plates of automobiles traveling in The Netherlands. The graph is color-coded to show approximate time-of-day when the splatting happened. It’s part of the Wageningen-University-based SplashTeller project. BONUS: Mark Hostetler was awarded the 1997 Ig Nobel Prize in entomology for his scholarly book, […]