Weird & Interesting science, take 2

[Bob Schroeck]

I missed this entirely -- it was neither visible nor audible from where I live:

Daylight fireball comes down over NYC and explodes above New Jersey

EDIT: This article has footage of the meteor from a door cam.

[robkelk]

Curiosity rover discovers something completely unexpected by driving over it.

"Finding a field of stones made of pure sulfur is like finding an oasis in the desert," gushed Curiosity's project scientist, Ashwin Vasavada of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "It shouldn't be there, so now we have to explain it. Discovering strange and unexpected things is what makes planetary exploration so exciting."

[robkelk]

At first glance, this looks like it's Ig Nobel fodder... but it settles a longstanding question.

Why scientists had people watch videos of themselves doing karaoke until they blushed

Pop-sci article, no real meat to it... sorry.

[robkelk]

There are many possible explanations why a Martian rock could look like this one does... but one of those explanations is that "Martian life did it".



Seen on Astronomy Picture of the Day - that page has pop-sci links.

[classicdrogn]

So the universe has freckles, apparently. Always suspected it was a ginger.


link

[Bob Schroeck]

Teenager creates fusion reactor for school project, successfully creates plasma.

[robkelk]

Turning wool into pellets could keep fibre from going to waste — and help farmers weather a changing climate

tl;dr: Not all wool is suitable for fabric; these wool pellets use the leftover wool and serve as a source of agricultural nitrogen while helping to average out deluge/drought cycles during the growing season.

[Bob Schroeck]

1000 AI agents autonomously build a civilization in Minecraft.

[Norgarth]

Anton Petrov - Strange orbits in the Solar System explained with a star flyby...

[robkelk]

"SpaceX Polaris Dawn astronauts perform historic 1st private spacewalk in orbit"

Well, no, simply standing in the doorway and waving your arms around isn't a spacewalk.

It is, however, a decent first test of a substantially-less-bulky spacesuit.

[classicdrogn]

I think if you're in orbit with nothing between you and the vacuum sucker merit badge but a space suit, it probably counts. Under the circumstances, loitering where they could give the safety tether a good yank, slam the hatch, and start pumping air back in if something went wahoonie-shaped is just good sense for a space program aiming to minimize any changes to Have A Bad Day.

[robkelk]

...
If this one isn't nominated for an Ig Nobel, I'll be very surprised.

I'm very surprised.

Meet the winners of the 2024 Ig Nobel Prizes

Peace: B.F. Skinner, for experiments to see the feasibility of housing live pigeons inside missiles to guide the flight paths of the missiles.

Botany: Jacob White and Felipe Yamashita, for finding evidence that some real plants imitate the shapes of neighboring artificial plastic plants.

Anatomy: Marjolaine Willems, Quentin Hennocq, Sara Tunon de Lara, Nicolas Kogane, Vincent Fleury, Romy Rayssiguier, Juan José Cortés Santander, Roberto Requena, Julien Stirnemann, and Roman Hossein Khonsari, for studying whether the hair on the heads of most people in the Northern Hemisphere swirls in the same direction (clockwise or counter-clockwise?) as hair on the heads of most people in the Southern Hemisphere.
(Spoiler: The hemisphere doesn't make a difference.)

Medicine: Lieven A. Schenk, Tahmine Fadai, and Christian Büchel, for demonstrating that fake medicine that causes painful side effects can be more effective than fake medicine that does not cause painful side effects.

Physics: James C. Liao, for demonstrating and explaining the swimming abilities of a dead trout.
(Spoiler: Dead trout can swim upstream. They just can't stop.)

Physiology: 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 many mammals are capable of breathing through their anus.
(Insert your favourite politician joke here.)

Probability: František Bartoš, Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, Alexandra Sarafoglou, Henrik Godmann, and many colleagues, for showing, both in theory and by 350,757 experiments, that when you flip a coin, it tends to land on the same side that it started.

Chemistry: Tess Heeremans, Antoine Deblais, Daniel Bonn, and Sander Woutersen, for using chromatography to separate drunk and sober worms.

Demography: Saul Justin Newman, for detective work in discovering that many of the people famous for having the longest lives lived in places that had lousy birth-and-death recordkeeping.

"If equivalent rates of fake data were discovered in any other field... a major scandal would ensue," Newman wrote. "In demography, however, such revelations seem to barely mention citation."

Biology: Fordyce Ely and William E. Petersen, for exploding a paper bag next to a cat standing on the back of a cow to explore how and when cows spew their milk.

[Norgarth]

Anton Petrov - Study suggests that giant impact did not form the moon... so what then?