Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 16

Bifurcation, Predators, Prey, and Taxis

Much is explained, and some is not, in a study about Hopf bifurcation that arises in circular-distributed predator-prey interaction with taxis. The study goes into more detail than the title does: “Equivariant Hopf bifurcation arising in circular-distributed predator-prey interaction with taxis,” Yaqi Chen, Xianyi Zeng, Ben Niu, arXiv:2402.12163, 2024. (Thanks to Mason Porter for bringing […]

The special MORBID issue of the magazine

The special MORBID (volume 30, number 5, September/October 2024) issue of the magazine Annals of Improbable Research will soon go out to subscribers. Even if you are not a subscriber you can read several of its articles online free, for looks at many kinds of morbid research: dead reckoning, morbid curiosity, Brazilian butt-lift death, curiosity and cats, drinking […]

The 2024 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony WEBCAST

The 34th First annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony will happen on Thursday, September 12th, 2024, starting at 6:00pm US Eastern time. If you are unable to get a ticket to attend in person, you can watch the live webcast (for free!), here at Improbable.com and on YouTube.

Backwards Speech and Listening Rats [tribute drawing about a past Ig Nobel Prize winner]

This is another drawing by artist Becky Moon, about her favorite Ig Nobel Prize winners. Moon has been a scholar of the Ig Nobel Prizes since she was a young teenager. This one celebrates the Ig Nobel Linguistics Prize awarded in 2007 to Juan Manuel Toro, Josep B. Trobalon and Núria Sebastián-Gallés, for showing that rats sometimes cannot tell the […]

Raw broccoli, Go Venn, Titration, Execution, The Teflon Diet

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them: The raw-broccoli experiment — What would be the effect on young adults and young children of seeing positive expressions on the faces of strangers who are eating raw broccoli? Katie Edwards at Aston University, UK, together with […]

Microbes and bearded men [tribute drawing about a past Ig Nobel Prize winner]

This is another drawing by artist Becky Moon, about her favorite Ig Nobel Prize winners. Moon has been a scholar of the Ig Nobel Prizes since she was a young teenager. This one celebrates Ig Nobel Public Health Prize that was awarded in the year 2010 to Manuel Barbeito, Charles Mathews, and Larry Taylor of the Industrial Health and Safety […]

Does Which Yarn Matter?

What’s new in knitting, you might wonder after having wondered what’s new in sewing. Some physics is new, says this study: “Programming mechanics in knitted materials, stitch by stitch,” Krishma Singal, Michael S. Dimitriyev, Sarah E. Gonzalez, A. Patrick Cachine, Sam Quinn, and Elisabetta A. Matsumoto,  Nature Communications, vol. 15, 2024, article 2622. (Thanks to […]

Becky Moon’s tribute drawings about Ig Nobel Prize winners: Bang

This is the first in a series of drawings by artist Becky Moon, about her favorite Ig Nobel Prize winners. Moon has been a scholar of the Ig Nobel Prizes since she was a teenager. This one celebrates Ig Nobel Peace Prize that was awarded in the year 2000. Coming: the 2024 Ig Nobel Prize […]

Politicians and ChatGPT, Morbid dating, Curiosity limits, Superpower, Teacup/pot storm

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them: Politicians and ChatGPT — A few politicians seek success by being ultra-glib. In so doing, they achieve momentary plausibility. Feedback notices a similarity between those politicians’ shiny, hollow speech and the shiny, hollow text generated by […]

Biting, Kissing and the Treatment of Feet

Do you bite? Do you kiss? Do you treat feet? Has it occurred to you more than once that the twelfth century was, by some reckoning, long? If you answer yes to any of those questions, you are not alone. Read this study, if you will: “Biting, Kissing and the Treatment of Feet: The Transitional […]