The special Viruses and Pandemics issue of the magazine—Annals of Improbable Research—has been released into the populace. Among its delights you will find: Pandemic Dining: Gelato, Candy, Lettuce, Frozen Meat Virus Toiletometry Pandemic-Fingering: Manning and His Digits Anti-Pandemic Drinking and Drugging Pandemic-Handling: Toilet Paper, Horror, and the Wealthy Beauty and Masks in Pandemic Time Eyeglasses […]
The effort to train ferrets to recognize virus odor in mallard duck droppings may be paying off, suggests a new study. The study is: “Biodetection of a specific odor signature in mallard feces associated with infection by low pathogenic avian influenza A virus,” Glen J. Golden, Meredith J. Grady, Hailey E. McLean, Susan A. Shriner, […]
A colleague in El Paso, Texas, writes: “I received a COVID vaccination today. By the time I was released to go home after receiving the shot, I had an unusual and insatiable desire for fried chicken. I had to make a detour to a chicken place on the way home. This [the video, of Doug […]
Donald Trump, one of the nine co-winners of the 2020 Ig Nobel Prize for Medical Education is in news headlines worldwide yet again, for his educational endeavors with the Covid-19 virus. The Washington Post reports today (December 11, 2020): White House orders FDA chief to authorize Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine Friday or submit his resignation In the […]
Pressure from the pandemic is bringing an urgent flow of partial information about the safety-or-danger of everyday activities. That flow brings us this new study: “Can a Toilet Promote Virus Transmission? From a Fluid Dynamics Perspective Featured,” Yun-yun Li, Ji-Xiang Wang, and Xi Chen, Physics of Fluids, vol. 32, 2020, 065107. The authors, at Southeast […]
US-based inventor Peter Delgrosso points out that consuming finger foods can sometimes be a hygienically suboptimal process – with a (timely) reminder that, in the act of eating finger foods ; “Germs, bacteria, and other harmful elements (e.g., microorganisms, viruses, chemicals, etc.) on our hands and fingers can then make their way into the body.” […]
The biomedical race to understand and tame the COVID-19 virus proceeds rapidly, drop by drop. This new spittle study is the very latest addition to the literature: “Visualizing Speech-Generated Oral Fluid Droplets with Laser Light Scattering,” Philip Anfinrud, Valentyn Stadnytskyi, Christina E. Bax, and Adriaan Bax, New England Journal of Medicine, April 15, 2020. (Thanks […]
How to get people to pay more attention to NOT touching their eyes, nostrils, or mouth? We invited people, in a gathering, to say “FACE” whenever they saw a speaker touching a hand to their face. And most of those people said “FACE”, cheerily—appreciating that they were talking to themselves as much as to the […]
As a newly discovered corona virus spreads through an increasingly anxious world, advice is being offered—and sometimes mocked—about the mundane-seeming question of facial hair. The basic safety question was investigated more than fifty years ago—and that investigation was honored ten years ago with an Ig Nobel Prize. Also: Today the Trump administration took a new […]
“We investigate the anecdotal belief that end users will pick up and plug in USB flash drives they find by completing a controlled experiment in which we drop 297 flash drives on a large university campus. We find that the attack is effective with an estimated success rate of 45–98% and expeditious with the first […]