FEEDBACK

摘要

FEEDBACK'S favourite awards, the Ig Nobel prizes, mere handed out on 18 September at Harvard University by Marc Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research. The prizes honour research that makes you laugh, then think: this year, largely about sanity. PRATFALLS are a timeless laugh-inducer. Kiyoshi Mabuchi and his colleagues at Kitasato University in Tokyo noted, however, that the simple question of the frictional coefficient of banana skin has not been answered to date (doi.org/ vn6). So they gathered bananas, leather-soled shoes, samples of linoleum and wood flooring and a set of transducers to measure slippage at normal walking pace.