i thought some of you all might appreciate this article: How do wombats poop cubes? Scientists get to the bottom of the mystery | Science | AAAS (sciencemag.org).
fittingly, the science was published in the journal Soft Matter: Intestines of non-uniform stiffness mold the corners of wombat feces - Soft Matter (RSC Publishing)
oh dear, I’m a very unhealthy wombat!
that same team actually won the 2019 Ig Nobel prize in Physics (https://www.improbable.com/2019/09/12/announcing-the-2019-ig-nobel-prize-winners/) for earlier work in wombat poop fluid dynamics. in this new work, they built upon their previous research and created a mathematical model for it.
… and some of the members of the team won earlier 2015 Ig Nobel prizes for “The Other Golden Rule”, which established that Duration of urination does not change with body size | PNAS.
If that’s what keeps winning Nobel prizes, I think parents oughtta stop telling their kids to stop talking about poop and pee lol.
Ig Nobel prize ;) i.e. a somewhat satirical award (although I would say increasingly desirable) for unusual/amusing research
My favorite Ig Nobel Laureate is Andre Geim. He’s (so far) the only person to win both an Ig Nobel and a real Nobel prize. He won the Nobel for his work with graphene (two-dimensional carbon with unique physical properies) and won the Ig Nobel for levitating a frog inside an MRI magnet.
Oops, didn’t pick up on that ;)
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