Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 14

Chicken blushing / Smectic / Entropy for travel / Sword swallowing / Kids’ saliva

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Chicken blushing — People — humans — blush. Chickens aren’t entirely inhuman in that they, too, show emotions on their facial skin. Delphine Soulet at the University of Tours, France, and colleagues have explored how skin redness […]

Who are the Ig Nobel Prize Winners?

“Who are the Ig Nobel Prize Winners? The Ig Nobel Prize looks like a mockery, but it makes you think” begins Zoran Radovanović’s lovely essay (in Serbian) published in Velike Priçe.

Ig Nobel Face-to-Face in Tokyo on November 17

The 2024 Ig Nobel Prizes celebration will take further flight in a flurry of paper airplanes at the Miraikan science Museum in Tokyo, Japan, on Sunday, November 17, 2024. This will be an Ig Nobel Face-to-Face event, a counterpart to the Face-to-Face event that happened at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA two days […]

Phrases of philosophers: Logical Copulation

Philosophers see meaning in places and things that some people who are not philosophers may not have noticed. Philosopher George Englebretson sees a concept that many people had not noticed: the concept of “logical copulation. Englebretson describes it on page 5 of his book Something to Reckon with: the Logic of Terms, published by University […]

The importance of the hat on a cat in a hat

This photo of a cat in a hat is an important part of why some people expect a good deal of media attention for this study: “Non-invasive electroencephalography in awake cats: Feasibility and application to sensory processing in chronic pain,” Aliénor Delsart, Aude Castel, Guillaume Dumas,Colombe Otis, Mathieu Lachance, Maude Barbeau-Grégoire, Bertrand Lussier, Franck Péron, […]

The new Ig Nobel Prize winners — A view from Stockholm

Every year, the new Ig Nobel Prize winners get a discerning and artistic look by the science and graphics teams at Dagens Nyheter, Sweden’s largest newspaper. Here is this year’s Ig Nobel report. (See some press clippings from elsewhere, too, on our press clippings page.)

Hair pulling / Honestly? / Self-crumbling satellite / Coconuts and self-colonoscopy

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Hair pulling — Yes, when someone pulls your hair – if you have enough hair that someone can pull it – it hurts. But the truth of why that is, and some of the how much and […]

Coffee and the Brains of Rats

If you feed coffee to rats you will, maybe, want to drink in some or all of the info in this study, which involved feeding coffee to rats, and which poses intellectual challenges of many sorts: “The Relationship between Coffee-Related Factors and Cortical and Hippocampal Structure: A Triangulation of Evidence Approach and Mendelian Randomization Research,” […]

A rundown of the new Ig Nobel Prize winners

Here’s my annual writeup in New Scientist magazine of the year’s new Ig Nobel Prize winners. Further details about the 2024 winners, and about the 2024 ceremony, are here on the Improbable Research web site.

Lipstick in the brain, Cicadas to treat tinnitus, etc.

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Lipstick in the brain — Lipstick interacts with the human brain mostly in indirect ways. Kazue Hirabayashi and colleagues have been modernising the search for some of those interactions. Their stated goal is to find “a […]