The Bioengineer web site (and many other news orgs) brings news about the project that won the 2024 Ig Nobel Physiology Prize. That prize was awarded to Ryo Okabe, Toyofumi F. Chen-Yoshikawa, Yosuke Yoneyama, Yuhei Yokoyama, Satona Tanaka, Akihiko Yoshizawa, Wendy L. Thompson, Gokul Kannan, Eiji Kobayashi, Hiroshi Date, and Takanori Takebe, for discovering that […]
This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has five segments. Here are bits of each of them: Politicians and ChatGPT — A few politicians seek success by being ultra-glib. In so doing, they achieve momentary plausibility. Feedback notices a similarity between those politicians’ shiny, hollow speech and the shiny, hollow text generated by […]
A new, distinct form of backend processing— a very distant relative of potty training, for computers—is presented in this new study: “A mountable toilet system for personalized health monitoring via the analysis of excreta,” Seung-min Park, Daeyoun D. Won, Brian J. Lee, Diego Escobedo, Andre Esteva, Amin Aalipour, T. Jessie Ge, Jung Ha Kim, Susie […]
What depths has the anus song? This study takes a look: ” ‘Everybody, Let’s Tighten the Anus’: Exploring the Social and Cultural Meaning of a Korean Folksong,” Joonseong Lee [pictured here], Journal of Media and Religion, vol. 11, no. 4, 2012, pp. 216-230. The author, at California State University San Marcos, explains: “The immanent approach to the […]
