An hour of Improbable Research, in the crucible of Standards & Technology

Historic video:  An hour of improbable research, presented at the National Institute of Standards and Technology [NIST] in 2014—with Marc Abrahams [founder of the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony] and Theo Gray [2002 Ig Nobel Chemistry Prize winner for inventing the 4-legged periodic table table.]

Here’s the official NIST description of this event:

Dung beetles finding their way home via the Milky Way. Calculating the forces acting on a ponytail. Preventing patients from exploding during colonoscopies. What do these real-life scientific studies have in common? They were all recipients of the Ig Nobel Prize, the brainchild of the April 25, 2014, NIST Colloquium speaker, Marc Abrahams, editor and co-founder of the Annals of Improbable Research. In his talk, Abrahams entertained NIST staff with a set of haphazardly selected examples of Ig Nobel Prize-winning and other research “that makes people LAUGH, then THINK.”