The awarding of the 2023 Ig Nobel Medicine prize for research on nostril hairs revives happy memories of a publicity campaign mounted a decade earlier by the organization Clean Air Asia. That campaign introduced itself by saying: The campaign seeks to highlight, humorously, that urban populations should not adapt to worsening air quality but actually […]
“Waiter, there’s plastic in my lettuce” isn’t a phrase you’d expect to hear very often. Nevertheless, several studies have now shown that plants can, and do, take-up microplastics [MPs] from the soil and incorporate them into stems, roots and leaves. Should we be worried – or happy? The latter is a possibility that should be […]
BBC News reports: The former chief executive of the carmaker Volkswagen has been charged in Germany over his involvement in the company’s diesel emissions scandal. The public prosecutor in Braunschweig charged Martin Winterkorn and four other managers with fraud. VW said it would not comment on the indictments. The 2016 Ig Nobel Prize for chemistry […]
Professional baseball umpires are not supposed to make errors, yet they sometimes do. That happens more often on days when the air is badly polluted, suggests a new scientific study. If umpires make more bad decisions on bad-air days, then maybe so does anyone who has to make rapid judgment calls. As the saying goes: […]
