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Posted: 30-09-2011 16:25 Post subject:

Excellent, but what an embarrassing way to go for the beetles, if they are dying out. Don't drop litter is the moral of that tale. And don't illegally park your luxury car either, although for different reasons. Not sure how that's science, mind you.

I thought discus throwers would be experienced enough not to get dizzy, so you live and learn. Maybe if they were more like ballerinas and ensured they were looking at a fixed position when they spun?

Posted: 22-09-2012 07:46 Post subject:

It's that time of year again! Very Happy

Ig Nobel honours ponytail physics
By Jonathan Amos, Science correspondent, BBC News

A UK/US team that came up with an equation to predict the shape of a ponytail has earned itself an Ig Nobel.
Patrick Warren, Raymond Goldstein, Robin Ball and Joe Keller picked up their prestigious award at a sellout gala ceremony at Harvard University.

Igs are intended as a bit of a spoof on the more sober Nobel science prizes.
Other 2012 winners included teams that studied how chimps could recognise each other from their behinds and why coffee will spill out of a moving mug.

But although some of this celebrated research might sound daft, much of it is intended to tackle real-world problems and gets published in peer-reviewed, scholarly journals.

Dr Warren, who is a researcher for Unilever in the UK, said he was thrilled to pick up his Ig.
"I'm amazed that a piece of work I've done has attracted so much attention," he told BBC News.
"My field, statistical physics, is not something that many will have heard of, so I'm really pleased we've done something that's caught the imagination."
His and his co-workers' research produced what has become known as the "Ponytail Shape Equation".

It takes into account the stiffness of the hair fibres on the head, the effects of gravity and the presence of the random curliness or waviness that is ubiquitous in human hair to model how a ponytail is likely to behave.
Together with a new quantity the team calls the Rapunzel Number, the equation can be used to predict the shape that hair will take when it is drawn behind the head and tied together.

"I've been working on this for a long time," said Dr Warren. "At Unilever, as you can imagine, there is a lot of interest because we sell a lot of haircare products. But there are wider applications where you have a lot of fibres coming together, such as in fabrics.
"I've also wondered if we can contribute something to the whole area of computer animation. Hair, for example, is something that is very hard to make look natural in animated movies."

Thursday's Ig Nobel ceremony at Harvard's Sanders Theatre was the 22nd since the American science humour magazine, Annals of Improbable Research, started the event.

The gala is always attended by real Nobel Laureates, who are tasked with handing out the prizes. Recipients get 60 seconds to make an acceptance speech. If they run over, a young girl will start to shout "boring". Another tradition is for everyone in the theatre to throw paper planes. Cool

The full list of 2012 Ig Nobel winners:

Psychology Prize: Anita Eerland and Rolf Zwaan (Netherlands) and Tulio Guadalupe (Peru/Russia/Netherlands) for their study Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller.

Peace Prize: The SKN Company (Russia) for converting old Russian ammunition into new diamonds.

Acoustics Prize: Kazutaka Kurihara and Koji Tsukada (Japan) for creating the SpeechJammer - a machine that disrupts a person's speech by making them hear their own spoken words at a very slight delay.

Neuroscience Prize: Craig Bennett, Abigail Baird, Michael Miller, and George Wolford (US) for demonstrating that brain researchers, by using complicated instruments and simple statistics, can see meaningful brain activity anywhere - even in a dead salmon. Shocked

Chemistry Prize: Johan Pettersson (Sweden/Rwanada) for solving the puzzle of why, in certain houses in the town of Anderslöv, Sweden, people's hair turned green.

Literature Prize: The US Government General Accountability Office for issuing a report about reports about reports that recommends the preparation of a report about the report about reports about reports. Psychout

Physics Prize: Joseph Keller (US), Raymond Goldstein (US/UK), Patrick Warren and Robin Ball (UK) for calculating the balance of forces that shape and move the hair in a human ponytail. Prof Keller was additionally given an Ig for work he contributed to on non-drip teapots in 1999 but for which he had been wrongly overlooked at the time.

Fluid Dynamics Prize: Rouslan Krechetnikov (US/Russia/Canada) and Hans Mayer (US) for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks while carrying a cup of coffee.

Anatomy Prize: Frans de Waal (Netherlands/US) and Jennifer Pokorny (US) for discovering that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends.

Medicine Prize: Emmanuel Ben-Soussan and Michel Antonietti (France) for advising doctors who perform colonoscopies how to minimise the chance that their patients will explode. Shocked

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-19667664

Posted: 22-09-2012 20:26 Post subject:

What use would the SpeechJammer be other than to wind people up? It's not going to calm someone down if that's the proposal.

The liquid sloshing research could come in handy, especially if you regularly take a mug of coffee upstairs.

Posted: 25-09-2012 18:45 Post subject:

Keep forgetting to say, SpeechJammer was coincidentally on QI last week, and apparently used to cure stammerers.

Posted: 27-11-2012 22:43 Post subject:

Oh joy! Infinite Monkey Cage on the Ig Nobels! Very Happy

The Infinite Monkey Cage - Series 7
- 2. Improbable Science

Brian Cox and Robin Ince discuss some of the more unlikely and odd avenues of research travelled down in the name of science. For example, the British physicist who calculated the optimal way to dunk a biscuit into a cup of tea without it disintegrating too quickly. Or the brain researchers who demonstrated that they could detect meaningful brain activity... in a dead salmon. All these academics share something in common, not just a slightly quirky application of the scientific method. They have also been a recipient of the now infamous Ig Nobel prizes, awarded each year as a parody of the Nobel Prize, to research that seems at first glance, entirely improbable, and possibly pointless. Robin and Brian are joined on stage by the organiser of the Ig Nobels, Marc Abrahams, comedian Katy Brand and biologist Professor Matthew Cobb, from the University of Manchester, to ask whether all scientific exploration is valid, no matter how ridiculous it may seem at first glance, or whether there is genuinely something to be learned from observations that to many, may seem pointless.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b01p0bmz/The_Infinite_Monkey_Cage_Series_7_Improbable_Science/

Available until
12:00AM Thu, 1 Jan 2099 Confused

Posted: 09-01-2013 22:46 Post subject:

And now, an Ignobel prizewinner in the audience of QI! Very Happy

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b015qsj5/QI_XL_Series_I_Indecision/

Available until
9:44PM Sat, 12 Jan 2013

Posted: 13-09-2013 08:41 Post subject:

'Beer goggle' study wins Ig Nobel award
By Melissa Hogenboom, Science reporter, BBC News

A team of researchers who found that people think they are more attractive when drinking alcohol, have scooped an Ig Nobel prize for their work
The researchers from France and the US confirmed the "beer goggle effect" also works on oneself.

Ig Nobel awards are a humorous spoof-like version of their more sober cousins, the Nobel prizes.
Winners have 60 seconds to make a speech to avoid being booed off stage by an eight-year-old girl.

Titled "Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder", the team were awarded one of the 10 awards (listed below) at a packed gala ceremony at Harvard University, US.
Other winners included a patent for trapping and ejecting airplane highjackers and a UK team scooped an Ig for observing that a cow is more likely to stand up the longer it has been lying down. Very Happy

The Peace Prize went to the president and state police of Belarus for making public applause illegal and having arrested a one-armed man for the offence. They did not attend the ceremony.

Penile amputations were the focus of the Public Health Prize. A team from Thailand recommended how to manage an epidemic of such amputations, but said their technique was not advised in cases where the penis had been partially eaten by a duck (after amputation).

Representing archaeology was a study that observed which bones dissolved when swallowing whole a dead shrew.

Brad Bushman of Ohio State University, US, and one of the five co-authors of the alcohol attractiveness study, said he was honoured that his team's work had won an Ig.
In the study, people in a bar were asked how funny, original and attractive they found themselves. The higher their blood alcohol level the more attractive they thought they were.

The same effect was also found for those who only thought they had been drinking alcohol when in fact it was a non-alcoholic placebo drink.

"People have long observed that drunk people think others are more attractive but ours is the first study to find that drinking makes people think they are more attractive themselves," Prof Bushman told the BBC.
"If you become drunk and think you are really attractive it might influence your thoughts and behaviour towards others. It illustrates that in human memory, the link between alcohol and attractiveness is pretty strong."

Judges were also asked to rate how attractive they thought the participants were. The individuals who thought they were more attractive were not necessarily rated thus by judges.
"It was just an illusion in their mind. Although people may think they become more attractive when they become intoxicated, other [sober] people don't think that," added Prof Bushman.

Prize winners tend to see the Ig Nobels as a considerable honour and indeed seven of the 10 winners (one winner died in 2006) attended the ceremony in Cambridge, US, to accept the prizes at their own expense.

Although a light-hearted event, the awards are handed out for work that is for the most part serious research. Prof Bushman said that his study significantly contributed to the existing literature.

And the study about cows standing up or lying down was important to be able to detect health problems early on, say its authors.
"We were surprised by the prize. We thought we did a decent piece of work and did not realise it made other people laugh," lead author Bert Tolkamp from Scotland's Rural College, UK, told BBC News. But he added that anything that promoted interest in science was very welcome.

The full list of 2013 Ig Nobel winners:

Medicine Prize: Masateru Uchiyama, Gi Zhang, Toshihito Hirai, Atsushi Amano, Hisashi Hashuda (Japan), Xiangyuan Jin (China/Japan) and Masanori Niimi (Japan/UK) for assessing the effect of listening to opera on mice heart transplant patients.

Psychology Prize: Laurent Bègue, Oulmann Zerhouni, Baptiste Subra, and Medhi Ourabah, (France), Brad Bushman (USA/UK/, the Netherlands/Poland) for confirming that people who think they are drunk also think they are more attractive.

Joint Prize in Biology and Astronomy: Marie Dacke (Sweden/Australia), Emily Baird, Eric Warrant (Sweden/Australia/Germany], Marcus Byrne (South Africa/UK) and Clarke Scholtz (South Africa), for discovering that when dung beetles get lost, they can navigate their way home by looking at the milky way.

Safety Engineering Prize: The late Gustano Pizzo (US), for inventing an electro-mechanical system to trap airplane hijackers. The system drops a hijacker through trap doors, seals him into a package, then drops the hijacker through the airplane's specially-installed bomb bay doors through which he is parachuted to the ground where police, having been alerted by radio, await his arrival.

Physics Prize: Alberto Minetti (Italy/UK/Denmark/Switzerland), Yuri Ivanenko (Italy/Russia/France), Germana Cappellini, Francesco lacquaniti (Italy) and Nadia Dominici (Italy/Switzerland), for discovering that some people would be physically capable of running across the surface of a pond - if those people and that pond were on the Moon. Rolling Eyes

Chemistry Prize: Shinsuke Imai, Nobuaki Tsuge, Muneaki Tomotake, Yoshiaki Nagatome, Hidehiko Kumgai (Japan) and Toshiyuki Nagata (Japan/Germany), for discovering that the biochemical process by which onions make people cry is even more complicated than scientists previously realised.

Archaeology Prize: Brian Crandall (US) and Peter Stahl (Canada/US), for observing how the bones of a swallowed dead shrew dissolves inside the human digestive system

Peace Prize: Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus, for making it illegal to applaud in public, and to the Belarus State Police, for arresting a one-armed man for applauding.

Probability Prize: Bert Tolkamp (UK/the Netherlands), Marie Haskell, Fritha Langford. David Roberts, and Colin Morgan (UK), for making two related discoveries: First, that the longer a cow has been lying down, the more likely that cow will soon stand up; and second, that once a cow stands up, you cannot easily predict how soon that cow will lie down again.

Public Health Prize: Kasian Bhanganada, Tu Chayavatana, Chumporn Pongnumkul, Anunt Tonmukayakul, Piyasakol Sakolsatayadorn, Krit Komaratal, and Henry Wilde (Thailand), for the medical techniques of penile re-attachment after amputations (often by jealous wives). Techniques which they recommend, except in cases where the amputated penis had been partially eaten by a duck.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24061992

Posted: 13-09-2013 18:18 Post subject:

Excellent, always a great report to read, that one. The hijacker trap seems to rely a lot on them standing in the right spot, is there a big X on the aircraft floor?

I would think it would be easy to run across a pond on the Moon seeing as how it would be frozen. Be interesting to find out what the point of that research was.