Enemas, ducklings and the language of lawyers: the winners of the Ig Nobel Prize are named

The Ig Nobel Prize is a satirical award given annually since 1991 to the authors of the most unusual or ingenious discoveries in scientific research. The original name of the Ig Nobel Prize is a play on words with the parodied Nobel Prize and the word ignoble (“ignoble”).

The scientific comic magazine Annals of Improbable Research (AIR) became the organizer of the funny award. At the same time, the “Ig Nobel Prize” is awarded by real Nobel laureates at a ceremony at the Sanders Theater at Harvard University, after which the winners give public lectures at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

So, what achievements were rated as worthy of the Ig Nobel Prize this time?

Interesting – no matter how you turn

A group of Japanese industrial designers began to study the question: is there an optimal way to turn the doorknob and other handles. After a series of laboratory tests, the researchers concluded that the larger the handle, the more fingers it takes to turn it. In general, the “Ignobel” award in the engineering field has found a hero!

It turned out to be Professor Matsuzaki of the Chiba Institute of Technology, whose research on “rotational control of columnar knobs” was noted for “focusing on a problem that no one cares about.”

After analyzing video footage of 32 volunteers turning 47 knobs of various sizes, the researchers concluded that turning a knob wider than 1 cm typically requires three fingers, and switching to four and five fingers during this simple operation occurs when the knob is larger than 2.5 cm and 5 cm in diameter. “We can’t turn a small diameter handle with all five fingers,” the team concluded in Bulletin of the Japan Design Science Society.

Love at first sight: myth or reality

The award in cardiology went to a researcher from the University of Leiden in the Netherlands: Eliska Prochazkova’s personal experience inspired her research in the field of … dating.

The researcher herself had no problem finding her perfect match on dating apps, but she often found that “there was no spark” when meeting in person. So Prokhazkova set people up on blind dates in real social settings, measured their physiological responses, and found that the heart rate of people attracted to each other synchronized. Here the question arose: is this evidence of “love at first sight”?

“It really depends on how you define love,” says Prokhazkova. “During our research, we found that people decide very quickly whether they want to date their partner. During the first two seconds of the date, the members formed a very complex idea of ​​the person sitting in front of them.”

Ducklings and energy saving

In the field of physics, the winner was a study on why ducklings swim in formation. The laureate was Professor Frank Fish, along with colleagues from West Chester University in Pennsylvania. “This is what I dreamed of, because I will never receive the Nobel Prize,” Fish admitted.

The scientist began to think about an important scientific question after he saw a mother duck and her offspring swimming in a river on the campus of the University of Michigan, where Fish was finishing his doctoral dissertation on the hydrodynamics of muskrats. So, Fish had a group of ducklings follow a mechanical mother duck in a large tank of water and found that the line formation saves energy—the last duck in the line gets the most benefit: it is easier for him to swim. It’s about energy conservation: ducklings follow their mother in the same way as cyclists and race runners, the scientist explains: “.

“Science is fun. My motto is: if you are not having fun, then you are not doing science,” Professor Fish comments on his work.

Gossip must be honest

The Ig Nobel Peace Prize was awarded for developing an algorithm that helps gossipers decide when to tell the truth and when to lie. Numerous authors of an article published in 2021 define gossip not only as “the exchange of information about absent people with one or more recipients”, but also as a viable strategy for encouraging and maintaining cooperation, especially in situations where there are conflicting interests with others or strangers. . “This information can be positive, negative or neutral, but it must be honest. Low-level dishonest gossip can be relatively harmless. But when gossip is dishonest—i.e., the gossiper is lying—at a high enough level, the system collapses and vital social cooperation cannot develop,” the study participants conclude.

The award in economics went to the mathematical explanation of why success most often goes not to the most talented people, but to the most successful.

Translate from legal to human

The literary “schnobel” went to the team that analyzed what makes legal documents so complex and impenetrable to human understanding.

“We all have an intuition that legal language is difficult, but we really need to know empirically: how bad is it?” says Francis Mollica, who worked on the study at the University of Edinburgh. In the end, it was concluded that bad writing, not complex concepts, was to blame. “One of the worst tendencies is center embedding, where you take two sentences and instead of separating them from each other, you put one inside the other,” Mollica explained. “It is inevitable that someone may enter into obscure contracts for bad faith reasons, but we have not tested such motives,” the scientist added.

“Ultimately, there is hope that lawyers will think more about readers,” the authors of the study say. “Clarity benefits not only non-specialists, but also lawyers.”

Constipation and enemas

Among other outstanding works deserving the Ignobel Prize is the study of how constipation affects the mating prospects of scorpions. The Biology Prize went to Solimari Garcia-Hernandez and Glauco Machado from the University of São Paulo in Brazil.

Scorpions can detach a body part to escape a predator, a process called autotomy. But when these creatures lose their tail, they also lose the last part of their digestive tract, leading to constipation – and eventually death, scientists wrote in the journal Integrated Zoology.

“A long-term decrease in the motor activity of autotomized males may worsen the search for a partner,” the Brazilian researchers came to this choice.

Was awarded (in the field of art history) review of classic Maya pottery. Its authors Pieter de Smet and Nicholas Hellmuth have shown that “contrary to the traditional belief that the ancient Maya were a contemplative people”, they may have given themselves intoxicating enemas containing alcohol or hallucinogenic herbs. The funny thing is that one of the authors, even in the interests of science, gave himself enemas with a mixture containing about 5% alcohol – and also took alcohol in the usual way, after which he compared the effect. “The results certainly support the theoretical assumption that alcohol is well absorbed through the enema,” the authors concluded.

And the Ig Nobel Prize in Safety Engineering goes to Magnus Gers for creating a crash test dummy elk made for his master’s thesis at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

According to Gers, the frequent collisions of moose with vehicles on the motorways of Sweden often lead to injury and death of both people and animals. However, car manufacturers rarely include animal crashes in their safety tests. “I think this is a fascinating and still very unexplored area that deserves all the attention it needs,” says the inquisitive Swede. “This topic is mystical, life-threatening and more relevant than ever.”

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Ignobel laureates are presented with an award – banknotes of 10 trillion Zimbabwean dollars (however, already out of circulation and worthless).

Mark Abrahams, editor of the Annals of Improbable Research and founder of the award, congratulated the laureates and urged the scientists not to despair: “If you didn’t receive the Ig Nobel tonight – and especially if you did – good luck next year.”

By the way, Ignobel laureates can also become owners of the real Nobel Prize – as was the case with Andrey Geim, who received a joke award in 2000 for using magnets to demonstrate the possibility of frogs levitating. And in 2010, Game was awarded the Nobel (together with Konstantin Novoselov).