Friday, November 26, 2021 is the day for this year’s day-after-Thanksgiving Ig Nobel special on the Science Friday radio program, on public radio stations in the USA. This is the 30th year for the special. (This is the 31st year for the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony itself.)
WHEN, IN MOST OF THE USA: On most public radio stations, the Ig Nobel broadcast will be at 3:00 pm (which is HOUR TWO of Science Friday’s two-hour broadcast).
BOSTON IS AN EXCEPTION: Boston, where the ceremony is based, always views itself as an exceptional place, always a step ahead of the crowd. Accordingly, in Boston the Ig Nobel special will be broadcast on WBUR-FM, at 2:00 pm, rather than 3:00 pm.
INTERNET: Most public radio stations stream over the internet, as well as broadcasting good ol’ radio signals — so no matter where you are, you can probable catch the show. And if you don’t catch it on the fly, you can catch it later on the sofa. The broadcast will also be archived, and available later on the Science Friday web site.
posted by Marc Abrahams in Ig Nobel | Comments Off on Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony on “Science Friday” on the day after Thanksgiving
Oxford maths PhD student Sophie Abrahams explicates the Ig Nobel Prize-winning research on what happens when one walks backwards while (or whilst) holding a cup of coffee.
The 2017 Ig Nobel Prize for fluid dynamics was awarded to Jiwon (Jessie) Han, for studying the dynamics of liquid-sloshing, to learn what happens when a person walks backwards while carrying a cup of coffee.
He documented that research, in the study “A Study on the Coffee Spilling Phenomena in the Low Impulse Regime,” Jiwon Han, Achievements in the Life Sciences, vol. 10, no. 1, 2016, pp. 87-101. Here you see him demonstrate that the basic physics of walking with a cup of coffee, back in 2015 while he was a high school student:
All of this was inspired by an earlier Ig Nobel Prize.
I am a PhD candidate in electrical engineering at Case Western Reserve University, where I specialize in professional amateur radio and its application to ionospheric physics. I organize citizen science campaigns, usually during solar eclipses, in which people throw signals at the ionosphere and some of the signals bounce off of it, become all scrunched up, and land in other people’s radios. My masters work, also at CWRU, was on space laser robots for NASA and featured an entire chapter about LEGO. In my copious free time, I can be found looking for hair ties or messing about in boats.
Kristina Collins, MA, LFHCfS Graduate Student, Electrical Engineering Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA
posted by Marc Abrahams in LFHCfS (Hair Clubs) | Comments Off on Kristina Collins joins Luxuriant Flowing Hair Club for Scientists (LFHfC)
The airflow from a trained opera singer has been studied intensively. It led to this video, a year ago, and now to a published study (and a new video, too).
The study is “Tracking the Air Exhaled by an Opera Singer,” Philippe Bourrianne, Paul R. Kaneelil, Manouk Abkarian, and Howard A. Stone, Physical Review Fluids, vol. 6, no. 110503, 2021.
The researchers, at Princeton University and the University of Montpellier, report:
“We observed the air exhaled by a mezzosoprano singer during her performance of an Armenian lullaby “Oror.” We use a high-speed infrared camera (FLIR X6900SC) operating in the midwave range of the infrared spectrum (1.5–5 μm). The use of a filter in the absorption range of CO2 (4.2 μm) enables tracking the warm exhaled CO2. The opera singer sat beside a dark nonreflective curtain that provided a uniform background at the ambient temperature. As seen in the image sequence of Fig. 1, the infrared imaging captures the warm face of the singer and the warm exhaled CO2. The spatial extent of the exhaled CO2 can, thus, be estimated.”
