This man sleeps well. (Credit Shutterstock) Not all science needs to be so serious. Since 1991, the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony has proven that the best scientific research can sometimes be a mix of impactful and irreverent. Let’s check out this year’s winners, broken down by scientific category. Physics: “On the Rheology of Cats“ Cat owners are familiar with the peculiar quality of felines to fill whatever vessel they occupy, much like a liquid. So it’s only appropri ...read more

“The readability of scientific texts is decreasing over time”, according to a new paper just out. Swedish researchers Pontus Plaven-Sigray and colleagues say that scientists today use longer and more complex words than those of the past, making their writing harder to read. But what does it mean? Here’s the key result. This image shows text readability metrics from 709,577 abstracts, drawn from 123 biomedical journals, published in English between 1881 and 2015. There’s ...read more

Enceladus setting behind Saturn, as seen on September 13. This is one of the final images from Cassini. Data from the mission revealed that Enceladus has an ice-covered ocean that could potentially support life. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech) The death of the Cassini spacecraft marked the end of an era–not just the end of a mission, but the end of a whole style of exploration. Cassini was a multi-billion dollar probe, a versatile scout in the style of the Voyager and Galileo probes. It brist ...read more

Apollo launch escape system diagram. NASA. At the very top of the Saturn V stack, at the top of the Launch Escape Tower, was a small ball bored with eight holes. These holes led to the Q-ball, an unassuming instrument that played a huge role in making Saturn V launches safe for astronauts.  The Q-ball was similar to an airplane’s pitot tubes. As air flows into the pitot tubes on a plane, data on airspeed and pressure is sent to the computer’s onboard autopilot system and o ...read more

(Credit: Shutterstock) Body-worn cameras on police are increasingly called for in the hope they might help ease heightened tensions between officers and communities. However, scientists now find that falsified police reports and personal biases may change a person’s memory of such footage to see things that were not there or never happened. Cell phone videos of clashes between police and citizens, such as that involving the death of Eric Garner in 2014, have helped drive the call for bod ...read more

Same-or-different is the concept behind the most basic toddler games. We encourage kids to put the square block in the square hole, find two cards that match, place the cow in the cow-shaped puzzle slot. But in nature, the cow-shaped slots are harder to see. Deciding whether two animals are the same or different species frequently causes debates among scientists. In Central and South America, researchers tried to find the differences between many pairs of closely related birds by simp ...read more

Cassini’s final ringscape, taken Sept. 13. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute) The Cassini team members filled the chairs of mission control at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. As a long-time astronomy journalist, I was invited to witness the end of an era. At 4:55 a.m. PST, Cassini’s 13-year mission came to a bittersweet end when we lost signal from the spacecraft as it pierced through the cloud tops at Saturn. We’ve gathered in ...read more

Is this depression and others like it at a site in Crete actually hominin footprints? (Credit Andrzej Boczarowski) 12:02 p.m.: “In the context of the field, it’s the equivalent of blowing up the Sphinx in Egypt. It’s a big deal,” says Matthew Bennett, a co-author of the Trachilos footprints paper, published in August. But Bennett adds: “At the same time, no scientific data has been lost.” That’s because the detailed, sophisticated analysis carried ...read more

Holy leaping eel! A hall-effect ammeter measured the current through the arm of a human subject as the eel leaped at the arm.  (Credit: Catania, Power Transfer to a Human during an Electric Eel’s Shocking Leap, Current Biology, 2017) Electric eels are fascinating creatures. They emit high voltage electricity to track and control prey, but did you know they also jump out of water to attack threats? They’ve even been documented leaping at horses and humans. Kenneth C. Catania, a ...read more

Image: Flickr/AJC ajcann.wordpress.com If bed bugs are living in your home, they are probably hiding out and waiting to sense the carbon dioxide from your breath to home in on their next blood meal. But how did they get there in the first place? If you haven’t recently picked up a mattress off the street (always a good plan), it’s often assumed that they could have migrated from your neighbor’s place. But how frequent these wanderings are, or if they actually happen, has ...read more