Improbable Research

Tickets for the Twentieth 1st Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony will go on pre-sale SUNDAY, AUGUST 1, 2010, at NOON, from the Harvard Box Office online (and later that week, from the ticket office at Holyoke Center in Harvard Square).

We expect that this year’s tickets will get snapped up very quickly (for reasons that will become evident a bit later in August, when we announce more info about who will be part of this year’s ceremony).

The ceremony will happen at the usual place, Sanders Theatre, Harvard University, on THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 30, 7:30 pm.
This year’s theme is BACTERIA.

The July issue of mini-AIR just went out. Topics include:  Lab Assistants Named Igor; Wombats From Space; Active Nonsense-Mediated Usage Poet; Drug Snorting Fire-Eater Competition; Manga (with an Iggy Protagonist); Inspired by Mothball Report; Tales of the Wombat; etc.

Mel [pictured here] says, “It’s swell.”

(mini-AIR is the simplest way to keep informed about Improbable and Ig Nobel news and events. Just fill in the wee form, and mini-AIR will be emailed to you every month)

A simple experiment: put a person in a tube. Add a snake. Details are reported in the study [and click on the image here to see the video that accompanies the study]:

“Fear Thou Not: Activity of Frontal and Temporal Circuits in Moments of Real-Life Courage,” Uri Nili, Hagar Goldberg, Abraham Weizman and Yadin Dudai, Neuron, Volume 66, Issue 6, pp. 949-962, 24 June 2010. The authors, at the Weizmann Institute, explain (and also present video of):
In this study, volunteers who fear snakes had to bring a live snake into close proximity with their heads while their brains were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Bringing the snake closer was associated with a dissociation between subjective fear and somatic arousal.

Principles of accounting — the song from act 2 of the mini-opera “The Count of Infinity”, which premiered at the 2005 Ig Nobel Prize ceremony.

Principles of accounting — the song-and-dance from the US Department of Defense, which “is unable to account for the use of $8.7 billion of the $9.1 billion it spent on reconstruction in Iraq”. The quote, and this graphic, are from GoodBlog.

Does running downhill affect maximum speed? A team from the Structure and Motion Laboratory at the Royal Veterinary College in the UK have been investigating the relationship between running-speed and slope. The rapidity of thoroughbred racehorses (Equus caballus), greyhounds (Canis familiaris) and human subjects (Homo sapiens) was logged under a number of different uphill and downhill running scenarios.

“We hypothesise that, if speed is limited by power, subjects’ maximum speed will increase on a decline and decrease on an incline.”

Readers can find out if the hypothesis was supported or not by paying US $31.50 and accessing the report  Does running downhill affect maximum speed?, which is published in Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology – Part A: Molecular & Integrative Physiology Volume 153, Issue 2, Supplement 1, Page S132

The Virginia opossum (Didelphis virginiana) is North America’s only marsupial. Should you ever come across one that is homeless, orphaned or otherwise in need of help and could not be taken care of by a professional wildlife rehabilitation center, ME Pearl presents ‘The Practical Opossum Series’. Here is part 1, titled ‘Proper opossum massage’.

Tomorrow: Proper opossum pedicure. Stay tuned.