What I see in different shades of gray, from behind my reading glasses
“Research that makes people laugh, then think” is what the IgNobel Prizes celebrate, since 1991
In 2020, the IgNobel Prize for Economics was awarded to Christopher Watkins & 8 others, for trying to quantify the relationship between different countries’ national income inequality and the average amount of mouth-to-mouth kissing.
They explain what they did, & why they did it in this short podcast.
Marc Abrahams explains in this brief video. And read this insightful article by a laureate, Dr Elena Bodnar, who invented the Emergency Bra (not what you have in mind!)
Because most women wear one all the time – and it can provide two face masks – I considered using a standard bra as the basis for such a personal protective device and designed my first prototype.
Scientific research that makes people laugh, then think finds its way into the annals of the Improbable Research, eventually competing for the Ig Nobel awards each year. Carmen Nobel visited this year and writes about it:
The requisite small-talk name-dropping bests that of most cocktail parties. Overheard conversation snippets at this year’s party include, “I don’t know if you remember him, but he studied penguin poo under pressure,” and “Oh, right, she played Star Wars movies to locusts.”
If you enjoy the site Improbable Research, and think the Ig Nobel Prizes are fun, mark your calendars for the live webcast on Sep 12 for the 2013 Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony & Lectures. Supported by Nobel Laureates:
in addition to the awarding of the 2013 Ig Nobel Prizes, the ceremony will include a variety of momentously inconsequential events. Among them: World premiere of “THE BLONSKY DEVICE“
Frans de Waal and Jennifer Pokorny were awarded the 2012 Ig Nobel Prize for their discovery that chimpanzees can identify other chimpanzees individually from seeing photographs of their rear ends. (If you’re interested in their research paper, click here for a pdf document). A recent essay by de Waal in the WSJ, called the “Brains of the Animal Kingdom” begins thus:
Who is smarter: a person or an ape? Well, it depends on the task. Consider Ayumu, a young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University who, in a 2007 study, put human memory to shame. Trained on a touch screen, Ayumu could recall a random series of nine numbers, from 1 to 9, and tap them in the right order, even though the numbers had been displayed for just a fraction of a second and then replaced with white squares
I tried the task myself and could not keep track of more than five numbers—and I was given much more time than the brainy ape. In the study, Ayumu outperformed a group of university students by a wide margin. The next year, he took on the British memory champion Ben Pridmore and emerged the “chimpion.
How do you give a chimp—or an elephant or an octopus or a horse—an IQ test? It may sound like the setup to a joke, but it is actually one of the thorniest questions facing science today. Over the past decade, researchers on animal cognition have come up with some ingenious solutions to the testing problem. Their findings have started to upend a view of humankind’s unique place in the universe that dates back at least to ancient Greece….
If nothing, watch the video of Ayumu for a demonstration of his photographic memory!