Marc Abrahams's Blog, page 18

Coral-ation, Thinking about thinking, Embalming and explosions, Tell-all-titles

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them: Cosplay coral-ation — Getting anyone, anyone at all, to notice what you have discovered is a problem for almost every scientist. (It’s a problem also for almost anyone anywhere who discovers almost anything.) Mark […]

Ig Nobel ceremony tickets will go on sale AUGUST 2

TICKETS to attend the 34th First annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony in person WILL GO ON SALE FRIDAY, AUGUST 2, 2024, at noon US eastern time, here at improbable.com  

Throw paper airplanes in the 2024 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony

We invite you (together with as large a group as you can muster) to throw paper planes at the 34th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize ceremony, to honor the new Ig Nobel Prize winners. This year we will be blending our two paper-airplane-throwing traditions: If you are coming to the 2024 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony […]

High Drinking in the Dark

High drinking in the dark and other intellectual adventures await you, yours for the reading, in the study: “Development and implementation of a Dependable, Simple, and Cost-effective (DSC), open-source running wheel in High Drinking in the Dark and Heterogeneous Stock/Northport mice,” Kolter Grigsby, Zaynah Usmani, Justin Anderson, and Angela Ozburn, Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, vol. […]

Splitting hairs, Grave water, Drinking grandma, Axe hazard, Etc.

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them: Splitting hairs — “Academics are often accused of ‘splitting hairs’,” David Taylor tells Feedback. “Well this year my team and I have done just that. We built a machine which can literally split a single hair from […]

Some books about the Ig Nobel Prizes

This photo shows some of the books people have written about, or mostly about, the Ig Nobel Prizes. (Marc Abrahams, too, has written some books; those are not included in this photo.) Ig Nobel Prize Fan Book is an ongoing, long-running series, written by fans in Japan. If you know of others, please tell us […]

New depths of con-man-ism in the science world

In this golden age of con men (call them “con artists, if you are persnickety about your lingo), more of them are worming their way into the science world. Those science con men are devising new ways to manipulate things at ever-deeper professional levels. A team of detectives writes, in The Conversation, about some muck […]

US Mail questions (what remains?)

When you consult the US Postal Service (via their web site) prior to mailing a letter, these are the first questions they ask you: What are you Sending?  Cremated Remains – Learn about mailing Cremated Remains  Live Animal(s) other than Day-Old Poultry – Learn about mailing Live Animals  Day-Old Poultry – Learn about mailing Day Old Poultry  

Nuts, Irish hats, and Ghod dam water deficiencies. Also Superpower northness/southness

This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Nut deficiency — What would happen if you removed most of the nuts from the bolts on three of the four sides of a tall electrical power pylon? New data speaks to that question. Newshub reported on […]

The doctor who performed the first self-colonoscopy

A TV crew from Thai PBS visited Akira Horiuchi, the doctor who won the 2018 Ig Nobel Prize for medical education, for performing the first self-colonoscopy: https://www.thaipbs.or.th/program/Doh...