IG Nobel Prize Winners 2025(improbable.com) |
IG Nobel Prize Winners 2025(improbable.com) |
For example,
> for their experiments to learn whether cows painted with zebra-like striping can avoid being bitten by flies.
This isn't absurd. It is currently thought that the stripes are NOT for camouflage, since simulated predator vision (such as lions) cannot resolve them. It is believed that one reason for the stripes could be to act as a deterrent against flies (how exactly, not sure).
In this sense, testing whether it works on cows isn't absurd!
The study debunking blue zones won, but it was some of the best science I’ve ever seen. (Removing false knowledge is more important than adding new knowledge)
Turns out the Mediterranean diet doesn’t help you live to a hundred, there was just a lot of pension fraud in Italy.
Turns out best predictor of Japanese centenarians is if the local records hall was destroyed in World War Two (because the records were replaced by non native speaking records clerks)
Sometimes that means the achievement (or "achievement") is something genuinely absurd. Other times it's not.
No, if you're looking for a cure go read something about, say, quantum physics instead.
> > me not speaking a word of french
> > consumes alcohol
> > ca va bien merci et tu?
I thought it was common knowledge?
(And of course there's a Ballmer peak in any case.)
Participants who consumed alcohol had significantly better observer-ratings for their Dutch language, specifically better pronunciation, compared with those who did not consume alcohol. However, alcohol had no effect on self-ratings of Dutch language skills.
This is a case where conventional wisdom on HN is wildly out of sync with actual science.
The answer is that it's a study in rats, seemingly (from the abstract) a very successful one. Probably a bad idea to introduce that amount of "forever chemicals" into the environment, but the central idea seems pretty sound.
Maybe the Galactic Council just opened a new discount shuttle route over Class 4 Civilizations areas like us: (Non-Fusion, Non-Warp and apparently Non-Skeptical...)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45296112
(for /u/DanG to merge)