Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 13

Angelica Ørregaard Lindholm joins the The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists™ (LFHCfS)

Angelica Ørregaard Lindholm has joined the The Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists™ (LFHCfS). She says: I am a PhD candidate in forensic toxicology at the University of Copenhagen, where I am studying the effects of nitrous oxide on the ability to drive and how to detect intake of nitrous oxide in blood samples. My […]

Celebrating the vampire bat human blood investigation

This is the latest in a series of drawings by artist Becky Moon, about her favorite Ig Nobel Prize winners. (This one also harmonizes with the Halloween season.) This one celebrates the Ig Nobel Nutrition Prize that was awarded in the year 2017 to Fernanda Ito, Enrico Bernard, and Rodrigo Torres, for the first scientific report of human […]

Python limericks, and so on, in mini-AIR

Two limericks about this research study — “Python Farming as a Flexible and Efficient Form of Agricultural Food Security” — grace the October 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 […]

“How the Ig Nobel Prize Became a Status Award”

Russian science journalist Dmitry Borisov wrote a comprehensive, good history of the Ig Nobel Prizes, in the publication N+1. It’s written in the Russian language. Here, below, is a machine-translation into English. (Note: the original, Russian version includes additional graphics). Shameful prestige How the Ig Nobel Prize Became a Status Award by Dmitri Borisov On […]

Sad news: Ig Nobel Prize winner Phil Zimbardo has died

Phil Zimbardo died on October 14. His obituary is online. One of his lesser professional accomplishments came in 2003 when that year’s Ig Nobel Prize in psychology was awarded to Gian Vittorio Caprara, Claudio Barbaranelli, and Philip Zimbardo, for their report “Politicians’ Uniquely Simple Personalities.” That study was published in Nature, vol. 385, February 1997, […]

Celebrating the swallow-and-excrete-a-shrew experiment

This is the latest in a series of drawings by artist Becky Moon, about her favorite Ig Nobel Prize winners. This one celebrates the Ig Nobel Archaeology Prize that was awarded in the year 2013 to Brian Crandall and Peter Stahl, for parboiling a dead shrew, and then swallowing the shrew without chewing, and then carefully examining everything […]

PoLambRimetry

A technically roundabout look at the bits and bobs that altogether are a lamb brain — that was the goal of a team of researchers in Spain, the UK, and China. You can see what they say they saw by reading their study: “PoLambRimetry: a multispectral polarimetric atlas of lamb brain,” Verónica Mieites Alonso, Giulio […]

Cat/Dog ownership, Measuring sexual satisfaction, Coffee and kidneys, Coffee vs. covid

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Comparatively: People who own dogs or cats — Leah Michelle Baines and Jessica Lee Oliva at James Cook University in Australia say they have discovered that people who own dogs tend to be more resilient than those […]

On Balance, A Cup of Coffee Does Nothing

This study attempted to see how giving a cup of coffee, or not giving a cup of coffee, to 22 old people would affect the balance of those old people. The study is: “The acute effects of coffee ingestion on postural control and physical function in older adults: A randomised crossover trial,” Darren L. Richardson, […]

“A lot of questions and absolutely no answers: … a resounding success!”

“Well, in true scientific form, the Ig Nobels have left me with a lot of questions and absolutely no answers whatsoever, so we can chalk up this edition of the awards as a resounding success!” — Eshaan Joshi, in his article “The winners of the 2024 Ig Nobel awards” in The Tartan, Carnegie Mellon University