Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 11

Diet of Worms, and so on, in mini-AIR

Worms and two limericks about weasel words grace the December 2024 issue of mini-AIR, our free monthly little e-newsletter of stuff that’s too tiny to fit into the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. If you’d like each new issue of mini-AIR to be emailed to you, add yourself to the distribution list. Here is the winning-limericks passage from this month’s mini-AIR: […]

Dung Beetles and Navigation with Marie Dacke

Lund University professor Marie Dacke discusses her famous research with dung beetles, and also how she became a biologist, her joy at working with colleagues, and what happened when she and her team won an Ig Nobel Prize — and what happened as a consequence of winning that prize. Dacke was interviewed in the The […]

Ig Nobel Face-to-Face (video part 3 of 3)

The Ig Nobel Prizes honor things so surprising that they make people LAUGH, then THINK. At the 2024 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, ten new prizes were awarded. Two days later, most of the winners gathered, at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to ask each other questions. This was the 2024 Ig Nobel Face-to-Face event. The day had three sessions, each with three winners. […]

CNRS Talks With Some French Ig Nobel Prize Winners

CNRS, France’s venerable research organization, takes a cheery look at some of the many French scientists who have won Ig Nobel Prizes. Here are portions of the CNRS report [machine-translated into English]: Ig-Nobel: science seriously “ This is the prize I always wanted! ” says Daniel Bonn, a CNRS research director currently on secondment at the […]

The new Ig Nobel Prizes book for children

The new children’s book Laugh and think! The Ig Nobel Prize Encyclopedia, by Kiyoshi Furusawa, will be published on December 26, 2024. It will be available on Amazon and elsewhere. The book is loaded with super-magnifico-excellento pictures and stories. Here is a sneak peek at one page (page 38): The book’s publisher, Holp Shuppan, describes […]

Symmetric Overpackaging Attitudes of Gift Givers and Recipients

Overwrapping and overpackaging can be overstimulating. This study probes the phenomenon of overpackaging, and probes the psyches of some of the people involved and affected by overpackaging: “Thoughtful or Thoughtless? Asymmetric Attitudes of Gift-Givers and Gift-Recipients Toward Overpackaged Gifts,” Haijiao Shi, Rong Chen, and Bingqing (Miranda) Yin, Journal of Retailing, epub 2024. The authors explain: […]

An Anthemic Experiment with Consciousness (and Wokeness)

A health-insurance company has announced a large-scale experiment involving consciousness. This is the experiment: if any particular surgical procedure lasted too many minutes, the insurance company will refuse to pay for anesthesia. The company is Anthem Blue Cross Blue Shield. On November 1, 2024, the company announced: “Beginning with claims processed on or after February […]

Celebrating Japan’s bright Ig Nobel winning streak

“One bright spot amid the gloom surrounding the state of scientific research in Japan is the fact that the nation keeps winning the Ig Nobel Prize, a parody of the Nobel Prize, whose aim is to “honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think.” Japanese scientists have been among the Ig […]

Children in the Gas-like Phase

Another attempt to use physics to try to begin to understand the behavior of children: “Emergence of Social Phases in Human Movement,” Yi Zhang, Debasish Sarker, Samantha Mitsven, Lynn Perry, Daniel Messinger, Udo Rudolph, Michael Siller, and Chaoming Song, Physical Review E, vol. 110, no. 4, 2024, article 044303. The authors explain: “We observed two […]

Ig Nobel Face-to-Face (video part 2 of 3)

The Ig Nobel Prizes honor things so surprising that they make people LAUGH, then THINK. At the 2024 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, ten new prizes were awarded. Two days later, most of the winners gathered, at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to ask each other questions. This was the 2024 Ig Nobel Face-to-Face event. The day had three sessions, each with three winners. […]