Harvard University announces 2023 Ig Nobel Prize winners

At Harvard University for the 33rd time announced winners of the Ig Nobel Prize, which is awarded for unusual and sometimes quite strange discoveries in various fields of knowledge. This year, among the winners were studies on the reasons for licking stones by scientists, on the sensations arising from numerous repetitions of the same word, on how to properly use dead spiders, on the importance of counting the hairs in the nostrils of deceased people, and the authors of at least six more exciting discoveries.

Prize winner in chemistry and geology became a paleontologist at the British University of Leicester, Jan Zalasiewicz, who very clearly explained the “mysterious habit” of many scientists of licking stones. It turns out that wetting the surface of the stone in this way allows the texture of the mineral or fossil to be revealed brighter and more clearly, while on a dry surface all these “intersecting micro-reflections and micro-refractions are lost” and look dull. Personal experience helped Zalasiewicz come to this profound conclusion. He once licked a pebble picked up on the side of the road and, judging by its brightly revealed texture, he was surprised to discover that it was not a fragment of some kind of cobblestone, but the well-preserved fossil remains of an organism of the genus Nummulita of the foraminifera order.

Ig Nobel Prize on literature awarded to a group of scientists from France, Great Britain, Malaysia and Finland who studied the sensation that people get when they say the same word many, many, many, many times.

According to the authors of the study, in such a situation, a person experiences the opposite “déjà vu” feeling of “jame vu,” when a well-known word, place or person seems unfamiliar and as if seen for the first time.

The study involved student volunteers who had to copy the same word over and over again until they felt some “semantic satiation.” Typically, this feeling arose in volunteers after about a minute, when they managed to copy the word 30 times. According to the experiment participants, at some point they felt that the words were losing their meaning and seemed like a set of letters rather than a whole word. Moreover, the authors of the study were able to prove that the feeling of jamais vu is more likely to occur in those who are familiar with the feeling of déjà vu, and this apparently proves the connection between these two strange sensations.

Prize for engineering mechanics a group of scientists from India, China, Malaysia and the USA were helped to obtain dead spiders. It is common knowledge that dead spiders have all eight of their legs tucked into their body. Scientists decided that such a valuable property should not be wasted and figured out how it could be used. For example, as a mechanical gripper for small objects. The extension of the legs of spiders is responsible for something like an internal hydraulic chamber, which, with the help of valves, is capable of moving each leg individually, as well as in any combination or all at once. With the death of the spider, this system stops working and the legs fold.

But as soon as you insert a syringe into a dead spider and introduce air into its hydraulic chamber, the legs straighten. And in this way, having straightened the legs of the spider, you can bring it to some small object, position the spider so that the legs cover the edges of this object, and then draw out the air with a syringe – the legs of the spider will compress and grab the object. The scientists tested this mechanical grip on a variety of objects, including another dead spider and a piece of dried foam.

As it turned out, a dead spider is able to lift objects weighing 1.3 times more than its own. Moreover, one dead spider is enough for 1 thousand such rises.

But another group of scientists to receive the Ig Nobel Prize for medicine, I had to deal not with dead spiders, but with dead people. These scientists counted the hairs in the nostrils of corpses (10 males and 10 females). The research was conducted as part of the study of alopecia areata, in which a person loses hair in places on the head and face, including the nasal mucosa. Scientists have found that such people are more susceptible than others to diseases of the upper respiratory tract, suffer from allergies, as well as dry nasal mucosa. During the study, it was found that a person has 120–122 hairs in one nostril and the length of one hair ranges from 0.81 to 1.035 cm.

Prize in the field communications awarded to a group of scientists who studied “the mental activity of people who can pronounce words backwards.” Two volunteers were invited to participate in the experiments from the Spanish city of San Cristobal de la Laguna, whose residents are known for their ability to communicate by turning words around. For comparison, 18 more ordinary people were invited. They all performed different tasks related to speaking, changing words, memorizing, repeating, etc. All participants underwent brain scans.

It turned out that the two Spaniards had more gray matter in their brains than the average person, and more white matter in the parts of the brain that control language. That is, the study authors concluded, “language-related neuroplastic changes may also occur in atypical forms of language use that are not widely used in everyday life or are not honed through professional training.”

Ig Nobel Prize in the field health received the South Korean inventor of the smart toilet, Son Min Park. The device he created is capable of analyzing urine and feces directly during the process of urination and defecation, analyzing the quality and pressure of the urine stream by sound, and in addition, taking a photo of the anus in case of hemorrhoids or other problems. Test results and photos are transferred by the toilet to a smartphone for further study. But that’s not all. A “smart” toilet is able to distinguish one user from another thanks to a fingerprint scanner, and then the analyzes of different people (and photos) will not be mixed up and sent to the wrong person.

Japanese researchers Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura became laureates of the prize in the field nutrition for his analysis of how the electrification of chopsticks and drinking straws changes the taste of food and drink. Scientists have complained that humans have taste buds only on the tongue, and even those are able to perceive only a small fraction of the taste qualities of food. It’s the same with some fish from the order Catfish, which have such receptors located throughout their body, which allows them to taste everything they touch and sense all the chemicals dissolved in the water.

To help people fully experience the taste of food and drinks, scientists connected electrodes to chopsticks and drinking straws and ran a current through them. This gives the product an “electric taste” that enhances the taste for humans.

Prize in the field education awarded for studying the boredom of students and teachers during the educational process. An international team of scientists studied boredom in 437 students and 17 teachers from two secondary schools in Hong Kong. Research has proven that boredom has a negative impact on learning. Bored students lose motivation to study, get bad grades, and generally lack knowledge. It has been established that students sometimes get bored not on their own, but because teachers make them bored. Among the findings of the study is also the fact that it is not necessary to sit through a boring lesson in order to begin to get bored; it is enough just to think that the upcoming lesson may be boring in order to already feel bored and not want to go to it.

Prize for psychology was awarded for experiments on a city street in which the number of passers-by who stopped and looked up when they saw other people standing and looking up was analyzed. The award-winning research was conducted by social psychologist Stanley Milgram back in 1963, but it is only now being fully appreciated. The experiment was carried out on one of the crowded streets of New York. The scientist used a target group of people who stood still and raised their heads up on command, and estimated how many passers-by stopped next to this group and also looked up. Repeating the experiment many times with different target group sizes showed that the size of the group is the key factor influencing the number of passers-by who repeat its actions.

If one person stands with his head up, only 4% of passers-by will stop, but if 15 people stand, then 40% of passers-by will stop and hold up their heads.

But how long passers-by will stand with their heads raised depends on how interesting the object they are looking at is.

And finally, a bonus for physics awarded for research into how the sexual activity of anchovies affects the mixing and stability of seawater layers. By the way, mixing layers of sea water is a very important phenomenon that affects the temperature of the water, its salinity, saturation of nutrients, etc., and even the climate. Previously it was believed that the mixing of sea water is facilitated by currents, winds, tides and similar factors. But an international group of scientists has also identified another, previously unnoticed factor – the reproduction of anchovies. These tiny fish, according to scientists, with their reproductive activity create such “strong biophysical turbulence” that the layers of sea water mix well.

Alena Miklashevskaya