Improbable Research

WHEN: Tonight, Saturday, October 24, at 9:00 pm.

WHAT: The Genoa Science Festival‘s Annual Ig Nobel special event featuring Marc Abrahams and Ig Nobel Prize winners Prof. Dr. Johanna E.M.H. van Bronswijk (surveyor of the tiny creatures with whom we all share our beds each night) and Dan Meyer (co-author of the medical study “Sword Swallowing and Its Side Effects”).

WHERE: Sala del Maggior Consiglio, Palazzo Ducale, Genoa.

(That’s “HMO-NO News,” Published in AIR 15:4.)

Ig Nobel Prize-winningwork of Andre Geim and Michael Berry, Yuanming Liu, Da-Ming Zhu, Donald M. Strayer and Ulf E. Israelsson have used magnets to levitate mice. Their study in the journal Advances in Space Research tells all, or at least much, or what they did. Called “Magnetic levitation of large water droplets and mice“, it says:

In a years-later follow on the We report successful levitation of large water droplets and mice using a newly built variable gravity simulator. The simulator consists mainly of a superconducting magnet with a room temperature accessible experimental levitating space. The superconducting magnet generates a field and field gradient product that is large enough to levitate water and many other common liquids. The warm bore of the magnet has a diameter of 66 mm, large enough to levitate small mammals. We demonstrate that water drops up to 50 mm in diameter and young mice can be levitated in the system.

Livescience has a report about the report, and reproduces one of its photos.

(Thanks to investigator Hugh Henry for bringing this to our attention.)

In 1992 a professor named T Steuart Watson discovered a completely effective way to prevent people writing on public toilet walls.

Watson published a report in the Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, describing both his method and the relentless manner in which he tested it.

Watson, then at Mississippi State University, is now a professor at Miami University of Ohio. He carried out the experiment in three men’s toilets. Each chamber had a history writ large, and small, in many different hands. The study says that “during the preceding months, each of the walls had been repainted numerous times due to the proliferation of graffiti”.

Each day, Watson and his minions meticulously counted how many marks were on each wall. They tallied each letter, number, or piece of punctuation. Other shapes called for special assessment. The study describes one typically difficult example: “A drawing of a happy face was counted as five marks (one for each eye, one for the nose, one for the mouth, and one for the circle depicting the head).”

The investigators employed professional stealth….

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

BONUS: The Guardian assembled a gallery of toilet graffiti (of which one image is displayed here,at right).

This video shows Dr. Elena Bodnar, winner of the 2009 Ig Nobel Prize in public health, demonstrating her invention (a brassiere that, in an emergency, can be quickly converted into a pair of protective face masks, one for the brassiere wearer and one to be given to some needy bystander.) on the Nick Digilio Show on WGN in Chicago.