SciAm Science & Technology Web Awards 2004

Every year the editors at Scientific American give their best-of-the-web awards. Here they are for this year; 50 different sites in the areas/fields of anthopology & paleontology, astronomy, biology, chemistry, earth & environment, engineering & technology, great minds, health & medicine, physics and science for kids. I particularly liked the Rube Goldberg and the IEEE Virtual Museum sites in the eng & tech area. By the way, I hate it when math & computing get short shrift in these things. Math and computer science are distinct from both the physical & life sciences and from engineering and technology. With this kind of subject classification scheme, they just get left out.

2004 Ig Nobel Prize winners

There're here! My fave this year is medicine to Steven Stack and James Gundlach for "The Effect of Country Music on Suicide." in Social Forces, vol. 71, no. 1, September 1992, pp. 211-8. There's a bizarely strong Canadian connection this year, with two prizes going to canuckleheads (via Bob Michaelson on SLAPAM-L):

• "PHYSICS: Ramesh Balasubramaniam of the University of Ottawa, and Michael Turvey of the University of Connecticut and Haskins Laboratory, for exploring and explaining the dynamics of hula-hooping.
  
• "BIOLOGY: Ben Wilson of the University of British Columbia, Lawrence Dill of Simon Fraser University [Canada], Robert Batty of the Scottish Association for Marine Science, Magnus Whalberg of the University of Aarhus [Denmark], and Hakan Westerberg of Sweden's National Board of Fisheries, for showing that herrings apparently communicate by farting."