Improbable Research

Scroll down for a post-press-conference update.

Dr. Elena Bodnar will hold a press conference today, Tuesday, Sept 28, at 11:00 am — at the MIT Museum to announce that her Ig Nobel Prize-winning Emergency Bra is now available to the public, and to present a new invention (a counterpart device to be worn by men).

You are invited to attend.

(For a bit more background info, including videos, see the blog post from a few days ago.)

BONUS: A report in today’s Sydney Morning Herald, with good educational video from the Associated Press

UPDATE (after the press conference): Here are Reuters photos from the press conference.

Click on the photo to go to another site. There, click around (use the left arrow and the right arrow) and you will find several more photos.

Brain damage can sometimes give gamblers a winning edge, an American study suggests. The researchers take a flier at explaining how and why certain brain lesions might, in some circumstances, help a person to triumph over others or over adversity.

The study – Investment Behavior and the Negative Side of Emotion – published in the journal Psychological Science, renders its tantalising, juicy question into lofty academese. The five co-authors, led by Baba Shiv, a marketing professor at Stanford University, ask: “Can dysfunction in neural systems subserving emotion lead, under certain circumstances, to more advantageous decisions?”

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

POSSIBLY-RELATED BONUS: A book called The Hypomanic Edge

The journal ACS Chemical Biology wrote in 2006 in its Editor’s Letter:

Congratulations, you’re a winner, too!

As the Nobel Prize winners head to Stockholm, we have to face the reality that most of us will never receive a call from the Nobel Foundation in the wee hours of the morning. Don’t despair: there’s always hope that each of our small contributions to science, whether literary or experimental, will be recognized by another, equally visible but less lucrative award, the Ig Nobel Prize.

The Ig Nobel Prize is organized by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. “The winners have all done things that first make people LAUGH, then make them THINK.” These Ig Nobel Prizes will not make anyone rich, but the winners are proud of their imaginative and sometimes unusual ways of increasing people’s interest in science and technology.

In slightly mis-aimed celebration of Pot Week (which comes into existence with this mention of it), here’s a potto study:

“L’Allure du Potto (Perodicticus potto Mûller, 1766)(Lorisinae, Primates) au Cours de son Déplacement sur un Support Horizontal,” S. Renous and J.-P. Gasc, Annales Des Sciences Naturelles, vol. 13, 1980, pp. 117–130.

Ig Nobel Prize winner Baba Shiv gives a 5/4ths-hours-long lecture called “The Frinky Science of the Human Mind”. (Professor Shiv shared the 2008 Ig Nobel Medicine Prize for demonstrating that high-priced fake medicine is more effective than low-priced fake medicine.)