THE IGNOBEL PRIZE WINNERS ARE HERE! | The Scicurious Brain. What rewards: Failed Doomsday Predictions, Beer-Loving Beetles, Effects of a Full Bladder on Decision-Making, The “Theory of Structured Procrastination”, and the Wasabi Fire Alarm? Why, the IgNobel prizes do! The prizes that make you laugh, and then make you think. And then, maybe, become really useful. From the press release: (September 29, 2011, CAMBRIDGE, MA, USA) The 2011 Ig Nobel Prizes, honoring achievements that first make people LAUGH, and then make them THINK, were awarded at Harvard University’s historic Sanders Theatre tonight before 1200 spectators in a ceremony filled with coffee, chemistry, opera singers, and paper airplanes.
And below we have the WINNERS THEMSELVES. Fromm the press release: Tracking nanotech. Bone is one of nature’s surprising “building materials.” Pound-for-pound it’s stronger than steel, tough yet resilient. Scientists and the important role citrate plays, work that may help science better understand and treat or prevent bone diseases such as osteoporosis. Using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames Laboratory scientist and Iowa State University chemistry professor Klaus Schmidt-Rohr and his colleagues studied . By understanding the nanostructure of naturally occurring materials, researchers may be able to develop new light-weight, high-strength materials that will require less energy to manufacture and that could make the products in which they are used more energy efficient.
“The organic, collagen matrix is what makes bones tough,” Schmidt-Rohr said, “while the inorganic apatite nanocrystals provide the stiffness. “We feel that citrate probably also has a role in the biomineralization of the apatite,” Schmidt-Rohr said. Jaquelynn invites you to ShoeDazzle | Style. Personalized. 1000 Awesome Things | A time-ticking countdown of 1000 awesome things. Sokoblovsky Farms - Russia's Finest Purveyors of Miniature Lap Giraffes.
About the ADHD in me. Improbable Research. For a laugh. Baby owls are adorable. That is all. Excellent Procrastination. Quotes for Everything. - Get daily quotes on Twitter. Follow us on Twitter and get more daily quotes! Don't forget to stop by the Motivational Quotes of the Day.Starling Fitness: Fitness weblog from the authors of The Quotations PageHear Motivational Quotes set to music at Affirmation StationStarling Travel: Travel weblog from the authors of The Quotations PageFind out what happened Today in History (Scope Systems)You can include these quotations on your own Web page.Read classic books, essays, plays, and poetry online at The Literature Page. If an author's name is highlighted, you can click it for more quotations by that author. Click on a quotation for more information about it, or click on the icons next to each quotation: View further information about the quote or link to it on its own page Email the quotation to yourself, or to a friend View notes about the quotation Note: These quotes are randomly selected from my collection by an automatic routine once a day.
Google Demo Slam. The Likability Of Angry Birds [Infographic] The following chart helps you clearly understand your own feelings about the different classes of Angry Birds. Clearly, bomb birds are like the top secret fighter jet while the green bird is more like duct taping a rifle to the Wright Brothers plane. Check out the full graphic after the break. (via The Oatmeal) Tagged as: angry birds, infographic, webcomics. Skepchick. Right-handers can be made to think like lefties - life - 26 March 2011. WHETHER right or left-handed, people associate "good" with their dominant side. But if that displeases you, it can be changed.
A team led by Daniel Casasanto at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, showed 13 people who had had strokes a cartoon character in between two squares, and told them that it "loves zebras and thinks they are good, but hates pandas and thinks they are bad". They then asked them which square the character would put each animal in. All 13 people had once been right-handed, but eight had lost control of their right sides. Of these, seven said the zebra should go on the left side. The remaining five chose the right-hand square (Psychological Science,DOI: 10.1177/0956797611401755). The team then asked 55 right-handed students to wear a heavy glove on one hand while trying to stand up dominoes. More From New Scientist Robot guard-dragon unveiled in Japan (New Scientist) 'Tenth planet' is bigger than Pluto (New Scientist) (YouTube) Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.