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Whale Snot, Promoting at Random, and the Other Ig Nobel Winners
The Ig Nobel awards were announced last week. For those of you who don't know, the Ig Nobel awards are given out by the Institute of Improbable Research for "for achievements that first make p
ENGINEERING:
To find out if whales are sick, you need to get some of their mucus. Getting close to a whale can be hard. Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse, Agnes Rocha-Gosselin, and Diane Gendron—pioneering biologists and engineer
MEDICINE:
Do you have bad asthma? Well, according to a paper by Simon Rietveld and Ilja van Beest, if you ride a roller coaster, your
TRANSPORTATION PLANNING:
Slime molds are a fungus-like organism that uses spores to reproduce. They can also slowly move. A large group of Japanese scientists showed that slime molds
PHYSICS:
Does wearing socks over your boots help you grip on icy surfaces? It does: As proven by two physicists from New Zealand's University of Otago, who asked
PEACE:
People tend to swear when they're in pain. Turns out, this isn't just anger; swearing actually makes your
PUBLIC HEALTH:
If you are a scientist who works regularly with microbes, you would be wise to shave your beard. So says an experiment that tested w
ECONOMICS:
We'll quote the Ig Nobel committee for this one:
"The executives and directors of Goldman Sachs, AIG,
CHEMISTRY:
This prize was given jointly to three scientists who study oil spills and to BP, for helping to confirm their results. The discovery: Oil and water do, in fa
MANAGEMENT:
The Peter Principle states that workers will continue to be promoted until they reach a job for which they don't have the competence. They will then s
BIOLOGY:
It's a pretty simple discovery: When bats perform oral sex on each other, they have sex for longer periods of time. There mus
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