Next Monday, Sept 6, at 7:00 pm, at the Coolidge Corner Cinema, in Brookline, MA, Marc Abrahams (the man in the blue suit — an Ig Nobel Prize-winning self-perfuming business suit) will introduce a special showing of the classic Alec Guinness film “The Man in the White Suit“. Daniel Rosenberg (the man in the white lab coat) will add insights about the chemistry of the white suit. Special appearances by Human Spotlight Jim Bredt (the man in the silver suit) and Boston Globe Miss Conduct columnist (and Improbable Research psychology editor) Robin Abrahams (the woman in the little black dress).

Note: Because of the re-configurable touch-screen the bot can also play Checkers, Go, GoBang, and Machang.

we may take it as quite certain that war as an institution will be as obsolete as gladiators in the year 2000. Even if the increasing amenity of the human race did not abolish war, two other things would be certain to do so. One is the enormous development, already clearly in sight, of the means of destruction : the other the revolt of the peoples against the stupendous cost, not merely or chiefly in time of war, but also in time of peace, of modern armaments. The rising tide of educated democracy must inevitably banish war.

“A complete theory of icicle shape, including tip growth, self-similarity and the ripple instability, is currently lacking.”

Prompting professor Stephen W. Morris and Antony Szu-Han Chen from the Department of Physics, at the University of Toronto, Canada to construct ‘An apparatus for the controlled growth of icicles’. The team used their specially designed table-top apparatus in an attempt to grow what they call ‘ideal icicles’:

“The most ideal icicles were found for distilled water and gently stirred air. Icicles grown in still air had a higher probability of forming multiple tips. The latter condition contradicts the assumptions of the self-similarity theory, but nevertheless improves the agreement with it.”

A number of the icicles, however, were found to be non-ideal. Some had branched or even split tips. And some showed signs of rippling – which the team also investigated. For, as sometimes happens, unforeseen experimental side-effects provided opportunities for further study.

“A particularly good sample of ripples was found on a long finger of ice that fortuitously formed when the drain of the refrigerated box froze.”

The paper ‘Experiments on the morphology of icicles’ has just been published in arXiv:1008.1922v1 (note: appropriately suspensive download)

Ingrid Sharp

After the Berlin Wall came tumbling down in 1989, salacious minds wondered how many, how quickly, how often, and just how Easterners would fall into bed with Westerners. Ingrid Sharp, a senior lecturer in German at the University of Leeds, pored through newspapers and academic papers in search of something related to the answer. She published her findings in a 2004 issue of the Journal of the History of Sexuality.

Sharp focused on a single question…

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

See part of her Ig lecture in the video here. And you might enjoy reading her monograph “Huis, Bed en Beestjes” [House, Bed and Bugs], J.E.M.H. van Bronswijk, Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Geneeskunde, vol. 116, no. 20, May 13, 1972, pp. 825-31, and her many other related publications.

advertising will in the future world become gradually more and more intelligent in tone. It will seek to influence demand by argument instead of clamour, a tendency already more apparent every year. Cheap attention-calling tricks and clap-trap will be wholly replaced, as they are already being greatly replaced, by serious exposition; and advertisements, instead of being mere repetitions of stale catch-words, will be made interesting and informative, so that they will be welcomed instead of being shunned; and it will be just as suicidal for a manufacturer to publish silly or fallacious claims to notoriety as for a shopkeeper of the present day to seek custom by telling lies to his customers.

BONUS: Edward Greenly also wrote The metalliferous mines of Parys Mountain.

Mel [pictured here] says, “It’s swell.”

(mini-AIR is the simplest way to keep informed about Improbable and Ig Nobel news and events. Just fill in the wee form, and mini-AIR will be emailed to you every month)

“Lucifensin, the Long-Sought Antimicrobial Factor of Medicinal Maggots of the Blowfly Lucilia sericata,” Lenka Monincova, Zdenek Voburka, Robert Bem, Cellular and Molecular Life Sciences, vol. 67, 2010, pp. 455–66. (Thanks to Mitch Dushay for bringing this to our attention.) The image here shows “Left toe neuroischaemic foot ulcer of female diabetic patient at the time of larvae removal”. The authors, in Prague, report:

“A novel homologue of insect defensin designated lucifensin (Lucilia defensin) was purified from the extracts of various tissues [and secretions] of green bottle fly (Lucilia sericata) larvae…. We assume that lucifensin is the key antimicrobial component that protects the maggots when they are exposed to the highly infectious environment of a wound during the medicinal process known as maggot therapy… [and that it is] effective against pathogenic elements of the wound microbial flora.”

Part 1 features the founding of the Igs and of the magazine Annals of Improbable Research, and a few highlights from ceremonies. We see one of the inventors of Bow-Lingual, the computer-based dog-language-to-human-language translation device, and his son, who accompanied him dressed in a dog suit. We also see the incident in which Sir Robert May, chief scientific adviser to the British government, tried to ban the awarding of Ig Nobel Prizes to British scientists. We see other things…

The dog (but in an experiment conducted in our own lab, not in Marc Hauser's lab)

Robin Abrahams, our psychology editor, writes in Salon:

“What kind of a pet owner voluntarily submits her dog for laboratory experiments? The kind who very much hoped that the scientists would give out bumper stickers that read, “My Dog Is an Honor Student at the Harvard Canine Cognition Lab,” that’s who. Now that the academic superstar behind the lab, Marc Hauser, has been brought up on eight counts of scientific misconduct (an imbroglio that’s been followed by the Boston Globe and the New York Times, among others), the bumper sticker sounds like a bad idea….”

about half of all astronauts get the final frontier’s version of motion sickness in zero gravity. So it’s virtually guaranteed that some barf bags will be going into the trash. NASA researchers want to test their prototype garbage bags in the laboratory, but they don’t necessarily want to deal with the real gnarly stuff. Hence the artificial vomit.

“Most agree that the Great Pyramid at Giza, the last remaining Wonder of the Ancient World, was an amazing job of construction. It’s a great pity, though, that the Egyptians left little or no records of how they did it.”

It is certain, however, that huge granite blocks were somehow moved into their final positions. Some scholars have suggested the use of giant stone-bearing sledges which were hauled up ramps -  perhaps not a very efficient method, but as Sundt points out -

“One might argue that cost and efficiency were of no concern to the pharaoh, and regardless of the waste in material and labor, a simple brute force ramp all the way to the top was the way to go.”

Thus, to the pharaoh, cost might not have been an important consideration, but -

“…time was very much a concern, for it was imperative to finish the pyramid while the pharaoh was still alive.”

The author presents a new hypothesis which might have helped to speed things along -  perhaps an ‘elevator’ could have been used in conjunction with the ramp. In this scenario, a ‘plateau’ formed at the top of the part-built pyramid (see dwg.) provided a platform where four teams of workers -

“… pulled in unison and hoisted the sledge up the vertical shaft. It is estimated that a total of 40 men, divided into four hauling teams, would be able to lift a 2 ton load to the plateau at a velocity of 30m per minute.”

In time, perhaps physical evidence for the elevator’s existence might be found.