IgNobel Prizes for April Fools Day, a holiday special

Happy April Fools Day! I considered today's topic in PBS Eons and SciShow on Piltdown Man for April Fools Day, a Science Saturday holiday special.

I might write about the IgNobel Prizes next year, which I haven't done for nearly a decade. Time to return to them.

My readers reinforced this idea, as Science awards from the ridiculous to the sublime, 2013 edition has seen a surge in interest so far this year, earning 305 page views from December 1st to now. Without any further ado, listen to Ig Nobel prize 2023: Science that makes you laugh (and think) | New Scientist Weekly podcast 215.

A smart toilet with a camera inside that analyses your poop, plus a study of people who are fluent in speaking backwards – these are just two recipients of this year’s Ig Nobel prize. As the satirical sister to the Nobel prize, the Ig Nobels honour scientific achievements that make people laugh…then think. Prize founder Marc Abrahams on this year’s hilarious winners - and why even robots made from reanimating dead spiders can have a more serious side.

Two of the prizes connect to stories I tell my students, geologists, particularly paleontologists, licking rocks and spiders moving their limbs by hydraulic action. Science Friday went into more detail on both in Saluting Science’s Silly Side, Virtually (click to listen).

This year’s awards included prizes for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks, for re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools, and for using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person’s two nostrils.

I'm a paleontologist, so I know what geologists do in the field, including tasting rocks for composition and chewing on them for texture. I tell my students about the chew test for siltstone versus shale, but I also tell them not to do it to their specimens; the rocks are already identified. Besides, they can tell by rubbing them.

Using reanimated spiders as robots is creepy, but it makes perfect sense given the anatomy of spiders. I'll try to remember this research when I lecture about spiders this summer and fall in Organismal Biology.

The Education Prize touches on my teaching philosophy: "If I'm bored, my students are bored, and nobody is learning." I try to keep my lectures interesting for that reason, including telling jokes and, hopefully, interesting stories. That's a third story I tell my students that I now know has scientific support, thanks to the IgNobel Prizes.

Ars Technica has detailed descriptions of all the winners, including ones New Scientist and Science Friday missed, such as the Nutrition Prize recognizing "Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura, for experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food" and the Physics prize acknowledging "Bieito Fernández Castro, Marian Peña, Enrique Nogueira, Miguel Gilcoto, Esperanza Broullón, Antonio Comesaña, Damien Bouffard, Alberto C. Naveira Garabato, and Beatriz Mouriño-Carballido, for measuring the extent to which ocean-water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies."

I hope my readers enjoyed today's excursion into "achievements that first make people LAUGH, then make them THINK." All of them are real research. No hoaxes today!

Follow over the jump for a retrospective of the most read posts about holidays during the 13th year of Crazy Eddie's Motie News.

'Last Week Tonight' on the now-dead Sinclair-Tribune merger and long-dead Warren G. Harding, a double Emmy nominee

Last year, 'Last Week Tonight With John Oliver' led variety talk shows at the Primetime Emmy Awards with eight nominations in seven categories.  This year, it exceeded last year's haul with nine nominations in eight categories.  Two of them, Outstanding Production Design For A Variety, Reality Or Reality-Competition Series and Outstanding Picture Editing For Variety Programming, went to the episode centered around the segment Sinclair Broadcast Group, a topic in the news.

Sinclair Broadcast Group is the largest owner of local TV stations in the country. That's alarming considering that they often inject political views into local news.

Oliver was pretty certain that the merger would go through.  It didn't.  As Ars Technica reported Thursday, FCC votes against Sinclair/Tribune merger, likely dooming deal.

The Federal Communications Commission has voted unanimously against approving Sinclair Broadcast Group's acquisition of Tribune Media Company, likely dooming the merger.

Technically, the commission adopted a Hearing Designation Order that refers the merger to an administrative law judge. Mergers usually don't survive that legal process. Besides referring the merger to a judge, the FCC's other options included denying the merger outright, approving the merger, or approving it with conditions. The unanimous vote to refer the merger to a judge was finalized on Wednesday evening.

Sinclair's problems stem from its plan to divest some stations in order to stay under station ownership limits. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai proposed the designation order on Monday, saying that Sinclair's proposal to divest certain stations "would allow Sinclair to control those stations in practice, even if not in name, in violation of the law."

"When the FCC confronts disputed issues like these, the Communications Act does not allow it to approve a transaction. Instead, the law requires the FCC to designate the transaction for a hearing in order to get to the bottom of those disputed issues," Pai said Monday.

Fox Business sounded even more pessimistic in its analysis, declaring Sinclair-Tribune deal is dead for now: Charlie Gasparino.

FBN’s Charlie Gasparino discusses the latest on the FCC’s concerns regarding the Sinclair-Tribune deal.

Good news for people concerned about corporate consolidation and a balanced media environment!  It's enough to get me to post Professor Farnsworth.


To be fair, as important and informative as that segment was, it probably wasn't what earned this episode its Emmy nominations.  In fact, at least one of them definitely went to Harding, which served as the episode's conclusion.

John Oliver unveils Last Week Tonight's collection of presidential wax statues and brings Warren G. Harding's incredible life story to the big screen.

That was even more hilarious than the first time I watched it!  I can't wait to see what he does with the other four presidents.

"Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" has seven more nominations for me to cover, to say nothing about all the other nominees in politics, science, and speculative fiction.  Stay tuned.