Another good crop of Ig Nobel this year! I'm not sure which one is my favorite.

You won't look at your kitchen the same way after this.

This is a very good declaration and call to actions from the mathematics field. I wish we'd have something well thought out like this for computer science and software engineering as well.

A long piece, but digs in details on why "mind uploading" really can't be a thing.

Or why most of the studies we see out there can't be trusted. They're full of holes and flaws. We'd really know people who know what they do in humanities to conduct such studies to get a chance at a proper picture.

And this is why... we now have chickens. More seriously it's a true testament to genetic and behavioral diversity. This is clearly what allowed some species to escape the disaster.

Excellent piece, it show quite well the problem of skipping the "grunt work". Without it you can't really learn your trade (be it astrophysics or anything else). It also shows how the incentives on scientific careers are wrong. It's not new, but when LLM agents become available, things are definitely changing for the worst.

Interesting call, our field like anything undertaken by mankind is worthless without community. Also community can't sustain if you got an anti human agenda.

In praise of code reviews. This article does a good job showing all the advantages if properly managed. Teams have to pay attention to latency but otherwise you get lots of benefits for not so much time spent.

Fascinating story about the little known Cantor big mistake. This also shows once more, that even though we like to put people on pedestals and look for a "lone genius" or a "hero", discoveries are always a process of several minds playing of each other.

Yes we do need to talk more about them. They are ugly... but they are awesome! (in a scary way)

I was so waiting for someone motivated enough to publish a review of that paper. I indeed threw it away as weak after reading it. Thanks for taking the time to write this up! This is good scientific inquiry... and it shows there were interesting findings in the paper that the authors decided to just ignore.

The biology of trees is just fascinating. And there's so much we still don't know about it.

Lots of insight and advice in here. Are you sure you're having enough sleep? Of high enough quality?

A nice way to try to grasp the scale of the solar system. We hardly realize the amount of empty space.

Indeed, innovation is far from being a linear process. It's actually messy, the breakthroughs already happened already and we describe it after the facts.

This is indeed one of the big issues of the computer science research community. It's also something of importance in fields relying on simulations... which is almost all scientific fields nowadays. Peer reviewing the paper is well practiced, but the software is another story entirely. It'd require some investment in research... but that's not where we're headed at all.

A paper showing that social media algorithms foster political polarization and societal division. Who knew?? Sarcasm aside, the real value of the paper is showing that by modifying those algorithms we could quickly have positive effects. Most of the participants didn't even notice they changed how they perceive others.

Excellent news! It is long overdue that such organisations switch to open access.

I had a few moment like this in my life. I definitely recommend it. I've never been more productive than isolated in a mountain with only books, notebooks and pens.