Bart Knols explains—and also demonstrates—three related things: How to use cheese and dogs and a new kind of pill to kill malaria mosquitoes. Knols and Ruurd de Jong were awarded the 2006 Ig Nobel Prize in biology for showing that the female malaria mosquito Anopheles gambiae is attracted equally to the smell of limburger cheese and to […]
Tag: cheese
The Cheese and Salami Experiments
Through the clever use of cheese in 2004, researchers at the University of Reading claimed to have solved one of life’s great little mysteries. “Why is it relatively difficult, even with a sharp knife, to cut when simply ‘pressing down’, but much easier to cut as soon as some sideways sawing or slicing action is […]
Ig Nobel winner’s big new pepper
Ig Nobel Prize winner Paul Bosland has bred yet another surprising jalapeno pepper. Professor Bosland, director of The Chile Pepper Institute, New Mexico State University, was awarded the 1999 Ig Nobel Biology Prize for breeding a spiceless jalapeno chile pepper. The newly announced pepper (which is not spiceless) is meant to have an impressively large […]
Cheese over time
Can the basic attributes of a cheese remain stable over half a millennium or so? Fortunately, written details of the visual, olfactory, taste and texture characteristics of Parmigiano-Reggiano™ cheese can be traced back as far as the Middle Ages. Allowing the collection, consolidation and examination of historical data to form the basis of a new study […]