- What did Louis Pasteur believe was required for fermentation to occur, and why?
- How did Buchner's cell-free yeast extract accidentally disprove the vitalist theory of fermentation?
Food Science and Culinary Curiosities
The chemistry and physics of food, including offbeat findings.
- Which everyday scents come from the terpenes Wallach studied?
- Why is Sabatier's hydrogenation process still used today to turn vegetable oils into solid margarine fats?
- How did Robert Bárány use warm and cold water to test the vestibular system?
- Why did public health authorities begin fortifying milk with vitamin D in the 1930s?
- How did Arthur Harden discover that phosphate was essential to fermentation?
- How did Harden and von Euler-Chelpin's separate work converge into a single theory of fermentation?
- Why were Hungarian red peppers so useful for isolating vitamin C in large quantities?
- How did public health agencies use the discovery of folic acid to prevent birth defects?
- What manufacturing technique let American pharmaceutical companies scale penicillin from teaspoons to tons?
- Why couldn't penicillin be mass-produced for years after Fleming's original 1928 discovery?
- What role did a mouldy cantaloupe found in Peoria, Illinois play in scaling up penicillin production?
- How did Virtanen's AIV method use acid to keep silage from rotting without ruining its nutritional value?
- What was Boyd Orr's central argument about the true cause of world hunger?
- Why is understanding the Calvin cycle considered essential to thinking about atmospheric carbon and food supply today?
- How does the discovery of cyclic AMP connect to how caffeine affects the body?
- How long had SPAM been sold by Hormel before the 1992 Ig Nobel Nutrition prize?
- How did SPAM spread through military and Pacific cuisines during and after World War II?
- What made the Campbells' scented advertisement patent different from a normal print ad?
- What was actually inside Bijan Pakzad's DNA Cologne and DNA Perfume?
- How is kopi luwak coffee actually produced, from bean to cup?
- What is the luak, and what role does its digestive tract play in the coffee's flavor?
- What structural mechanics determine the moment a puffed cereal grain loses its crunch in milk?
- Why does treating cereal sogginess as a materials-science problem make it useful to the food industry?
- What inspired Don Featherstone's design of the plastic pink flamingo, given that the real bird was scarce in Massachusetts?
- Why was Featherstone significant to the Ig Nobel tradition beyond winning the prize itself?
- Which substance appeared to discourage leeches from feeding, and why might that matter clinically?
- How does microencapsulated fragrance stay bonded to fabric and release slowly over a working day?
- What was the actual source of Dasani bottled water when Coca-Cola launched it in Britain?
- Why did Coca-Cola have to recall Dasani from British shelves within weeks of launch?
- What process was used to purify the tap water before it was sold as Dasani?
- What problem was Daisuke Inoue trying to solve when he built the first karaoke machine?
- Why did Inoue never become wealthy from his invention?
- What reasoning did the Ig Nobel committee give for crediting karaoke with promoting world peace?
- Why does the speed of ultrasound through cheddar cheese reveal information about its ripeness?
- What shared bacteria connects the smell of Limburger cheese to the smell of feet?
- What is vanillin and how is it normally produced at industrial scale?
- How did Irish police officers come to issue more than fifty traffic citations to a driver who did not exist?
- What does 'prawo jazdy' actually mean in Polish, and how did the mistake get repeated by multiple officers?
- How was the confusion eventually discovered and corrected within the police service?
- How much could panda gut bacteria reduce the mass of kitchen waste, and over what timeframe?
- Why did researchers look to infant faeces as a source of bacteria for fermenting sausage?
- What properties make infant gut bacteria well suited to meat fermentation and possible probiotic benefit?
- What is the likely mechanism by which cured, salted pork stopped uncontrolled nasal bleeding?
- Where did the Detroit physicians find the historical precedent for using salted pork as a nasal pack?
- How does cheese aversion differ from an ordinary, contextual food dislike?
- Could fly pheromone detection be developed into a food-quality biosensor?
- How did James Cole calculate the caloric value of a human body tissue by tissue?
- What pathogenic bacteria did researchers find on banknotes collected from seventeen countries?
- Why did the bacterial load on banknotes vary by denomination and by country?
- What did the study suggest about the hygienic advantages of contactless payment over cash?
- What cancers did Silvano Gallus's epidemiological studies associate with regular pizza consumption?
- Why did the protective effect appear specific to pizza rather than to tomato products in general?
- What are the competing explanations for why pizza consumption correlated with lower cancer risk?
- Why has conflict overtaken failed harvests as the primary driver of severe food insecurity?
- What role does starch from pasta-cooking water play in stabilising the cheese-and-water emulsion?