Ig Nobels honour dead salmon's 'brain activity' in improbable research awards | Science | The Guardian

Ig Nobels honour dead salmon's 'brain activity' in improbable research awards | Science | The Guardian

• Bennett and Abigail Baird, of Vassar College, used standard scanning techniques to build up a picture of the dead salmon's brain and were surprised to find a signal. Bennett said their study was a warning to neuroscientists to be careful with the way they do their work, so that they are not caught out by chance signals when they repeat a scan multiple times.
• Anita Eerland, of the Open University in the Netherlands, won this year's Ig Nobel for psychology when she and her team discovered they could make people guess the height of the Eiffel Tower incorrectly when they were leaning one way or another. Psychologists think people have a mental number line, where they tend to represent small numbers on the left and larger numbers on the right. This can be activated in a number of ways, such as looking to the right or left, and thinking about the line can prime people to think of higher or lower numbers.
• Rouslan Krechetnikov, of the University of California, Santa Barbara : his observational and theoretical analysis of the way coffee moved in cups led him to discover that it was just a coincidence that "the sizes of common coffee cups (dictated by the convenience of carrying them and the normal consumption of coffee by humans) are such that the frequency of natural liquid oscillations in the cup is on the order of the step frequency of normal walking". He noted: "This fact together with the natural irregularity of biomechanics of walking, which contributes to the amplification of coffee sloshing, are responsible for coffee spilling."