Ig Nobel Prize awarded for sex with anchovies

At an online ceremony organized by the journal Annals of Improbable Research, the winners of the buffoonish Ig Nobel Prize were announced a few weeks before the start of the traditional Nobel week. As usual, the satirical award is given to authors of studies that first make people “laugh and then think.”

This time, the recognition of the Ig Nobelists was given to the authors of works on the use of dead spiders and the inventors of electric chopsticks, as well as scientists who spent their time on other equally funny discoveries.

Unlike the more prestigious Nobel Prizes, which will be announced in October, the Ignobel (or Ig Nobel) Prizes are awarded for unusual areas of research that “make people laugh and then think.” They got their English name from the word ignoble – shameful.

Let us recall that the unusual award was established in 1991 by Mark Abrahams and the humorous magazine “Annals of Incredible Research”

The awarding of the buffoon prize is accompanied by the presentation of a check – the laureates receive 10 trillion dollars, but not American, but hyperinflationary Zimbabwean ones (which have also fallen into disuse). The award certificate, by the way, is presented in the form of a pdf document that you can print out yourself. But the award is presented by real Nobel laureates (by the way, some of them also received a Nobel, so despite all the humor, this is a rather serious award!).

And here are the most interesting scientific studies noted this year.

Transport rhinos upside down

The Ig Nobel Prize for transportation went to a team of scientists who discovered that transporting tranquilized rhinoceroses upside down is healthier for them. The researchers’ paper is worth mentioning in its title: “Pulmonary and metabolic effects of leg suspension versus side-lying in immobilized black rhinoceroses (Diceros bicornis) captured with air darts.”

Capture from dead spiders

A team of researchers including Teh Fei Yap and Daniel Preston from Rice University in the US have won the Nobel Prize in Mechanical Engineering for their work on reviving dead spiders for use as mechanical grasping tools.

“While setting up our laboratory, we noticed a dead spider curled up on the edge of the corridor,” says Yap about the emergence of an unusual idea. – Our “aha!” moment came when we discovered that spiders only have flexor muscles that contract their legs inward and rely on hydraulic pressure to extend them outward.”

In other words, a dead spider’s legs are naturally in a “closed” state, like a clenched fist, but the legs can be extended and the grip can be released by pressing on the spider.

Using this “necrobotic” approach, the team created a spider-based grasper that, among other things, can “grasp” irregularly shaped objects. “In addition, this gripper can serve as a portable device and is naturally camouflaged in the open air,” the researchers state.

“We follow the Nobel Prizes every year to see the creative and thought-provoking work they highlight, and several of our scientific role models have been recipients in the past, so we were incredibly pleased to receive this honor and join their ranks,” said study participant Daniel Preston.

Why do scientists lick rocks?

Other winners included Jan Zalasiewicz of the University of Southampton, who won the Ig Nobel Prize in chemistry and geology for explaining why many scientists enjoy licking rocks. He said that while 18th-century Italian geologist Giovanni Arduino relied on taste to identify rocks and minerals, modern field geologists often use tongue for a different reason.

“We do this to see better, not to taste, because mineral particles are more visible on a wet surface than on a dry surface,” the scientist explained.

It tastes better with electricity

The Ig Nobel Prize in Nutrition went to Homei Miyashita of Meiji University and Hiromi Nakamura of the University of Tokyo for their research into electrified chopsticks and drinking straws.

“The taste of food can be changed using electrical stimulation, and this is something that has been difficult to achieve using conventional ingredients such as seasonings,” Nakamura, a Japanese scientist, said of the discovery. Her research showed that it was possible to increase the saltiness of foods using electrical stimulation of the tongue.

Too smart toilet

The Ig Nobel Prize for Public Health was awarded to researchers for developing a smart toilet that uses various technologies to monitor human waste for signs of disease, and also includes an identification camera, a telecommunications link and… an anal fingerprint sensor as part of a user identification system. The sorting device, whose author is identified as Seung Min Park from South Korea, uses, among other things, a test strip for urine analysis and a computer vision system for analyzing bowel movements. All this equipment is designed for operational monitoring and express analysis of user secretions.

How many hairs are there in each nostril?

The medical prize went to researchers who used cadavers to find out whether each human nostril contained the same number of hairs. A whole team of scientists from different countries, from the USA and Iran to Vietnam and North Macedonia, pored over the article “Quantification and measurement of nasal hairs in a cadaveric population.” As they say, science owes a great debt…

What is jamais vu?

Ignobel in literature went to researchers of the special feeling that can arise when writing the same word over and over again. Chris Moulin, Nicole Bell, Merite Turunen and company are celebrated for studying the sensations people experience when they repeat the same word many, many, many, many, many, many times. This phenomenon, according to scientists, is an example of jamais vu (similar to déjà vu, from the French jamais vu, “never seen”), where people consider the familiar to be unfamiliar.

Anchovies have sex

The physics award went to researchers who discovered that the sexual activity of anchovies, which gather at night to spawn off the coast of Galicia, can create small eddies that mix different layers of water in the oceans. Biito Fernandez Castro from the University of Southampton, one of the winners, admitted that although he was surprised by the award, he welcomed the Ig Nobel Prize. “I never thought that research focusing on small-scale ocean physics could attract such widespread attention,” he said.