Improbable Research

Our premium beer is brewed with ancient yeast preserved in amber and revived after 45 million years to provide a distinguished and satisfying taste

So says the web site of the Fossil Fuels Brewing Company.

Beer writer William Brand sampled some in a bar, and wrote about the experience. The description is similar to written descriptions by other beer writers of sampling other beers in other bars.

(Thanks to investigator Julia Lunetta for bringing this to our attention.)

Tonight the Ig Nobel Tour of Denmark arrives in Copenhagen (actually we arrived yesterday, and Dan Meyer and Magnus Wahlberg were invited onto a live national TV broadcast, where the host was a bit disconcerted at suddenly realizing that she was removing a sword from the throat of a polite man who speaks interesting but obviously new Danish, though he was not speaking during the moments when the sword was being withdrawn).

Håkan Westerberg joins the tour today. Tonight’s show will be the only one where both he and colleague  Magnus Wahlberg tell (and maybe show) how their discovery about farting herring affected the course of diplomatic, military, and espionage history.

Where: Lundbeckauditoriet, Københavns Universitet Gratis billetter kan afhentes i indgangen til Zoologisk og Geologisk Museum efter påsken

When: Fredag 24/4 19:00-21:00

“DNA Double-Strand Break Repair: All’s Well that Ends Well,” Claire Wyman and Roland Kanaar, Annual Revue of Genetics, vol. 40, 2006, pp. 363–83 (http://dx.doi.org
/10.1146/
annurev.genet.
40.110405.090451). (Thanks to S.K. Moses for bringing this to our attention.) The authors explain that:

Breaks in both DNA strands are a particularly dangerous threat to genome stability. At a DNA double-strand break (DSB), potentially lost sequence information cannot be recovered from the same DNA molecule. However, simple repair by joining two broken ends, though inherently error prone, is preferable to leaving ends broken and capable of causing genome rearrangements.

(That’s an excerpt from the article “Icky Cutesy Research Review —Research reports that are icky and/or cutesy”, in AIR 13:4.)

Details about the late Norbert Elias’s international untied-shoelace experiments were difficult to track down. But Ingo Mörth found them.

Mörth, a professor at the Johannes Kepler Universität in Linz, Austria, broke the news in an article called “The shoelace breaching experiment”, published in the June 2007 issue of Figurations: Newsletter of the Norbert Elias Foundation.

“Norbert Elias started a series of breaching experiments, beginning ad hoc, and ending in various situations in Spain, France, England, Germany and Switzerland. He strolled around in all these contexts with intentionally untied and trailing shoelaces.”

Elias had an eminent career as a sociologist, beginning in Germany in the 1930s. After retiring as a reader at the University of Leicester in 1964, he went a-wandering, doing sociological research as a byproduct of his tourism.

In the Spanish fishing village of Torremolinos in 1965, giggling girls spurred him to realise that his left shoelace “was untied and trailing”. Mörth describes the magic that resulted…

So begins this week’s Improbable Research column in The Guardian.

This is a photo Kees (the duck guy) Moeliker took from onstage during the Aarhus show tonight — first show on the Ig Nobel Tour of Denmark. This room was packed full with 450 spectators; more watched via video in another room. (And this is a newspaper preview of the Aarhus show.) The video monitors were for the benefit of the speakers who were sitting facing the audience, so we could see what was being projected on the two giant screens above our heads. Next show: Odense on Thursday.