Josie Ford
September is here, and with it the year’s new crop of 10 Ig Nobel prizes, each for a piece of research chosen with the same simple criterion – that it makes people laugh, then think. As per tradition, Feedback presents them to you.
A question of taste
Jan Zalasiewicz at the University of Leicester, UK, won the chemistry and geology Ig for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks. His essay “Eating fossils”, in The Palaeontological Association’s newsletter, emphasises the simple practical gain: “Wetting the surface allows fossil and mineral textures to stand out sharply, rather than being lost in the blur of intersecting micro-reflections and micro-refractions that come out of a dry surface.” During the ceremony, he acknowledged that, yes, sometimes it is also a matter of taste.
A team based in France, the UK, Malaysia and Finland won the literature prize “for studying the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times”. Their paper, called “The the the the induction of jamais vu in the laboratory: Word alienation and semantic satiation”, was published in the journal Memory.
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During the ceremony, Nobel laureates present Ig Nobel prizes to the winners. Nobellian Al Roth told the team: “I have to say, I had never seen a paper like this before, and I say congratulations and congratulations and congratulations and congratulations.”
Spidery grip
Te Faye Yap, Daniel Preston and their colleagues at Rice University in Texas won the mechanical engineering prize for reanimating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools, thus pioneering a field for which they invented the name: “necrobotics”.
In presenting them the prize, Barry Sharpless, who has two Nobel prizes in chemistry, confessed he himself is terrified of spiders because of a childhood encounter with tarantulas. He expressed admiration for the necroboticists’ courage.
Seung-min Park won the public health prize for inventing the Stanford Toilet, a device that uses a variety of technologies – including a computer-vision system for defecation analysis and an anal-print sensor paired with an identification camera – to monitor and quickly analyse the substances that humans excrete. During the ceremony, Park spoke of his mixed hope and dread in trying to simultaneously diagnose individual people’s health problems and protect their privacy (and privates).
Going backwards
María José Torres-Prioris, Adolfo García and their team won the communication prize for studying the mental activities of people who are expert at speaking backwards. Their study “Neurocognitive signatures of phonemic sequencing in expert backward speakers” focused on a community in La Laguna, Spain, where some people grow up learning to speak backwards as well as forwards.
The medicine prize went to Natasha Mesinkovska and her team at the University of California, Irvine, for using cadavers as a means to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person’s two nostrils. Their surprisingly charming write-up in the International Journal of Dermatology says that the average nose hair count per nostril is around 120 in the cadavers they examined.
This started out as an attempt to learn the medical significance, if any, of there being hairs in one nostril but not the other in a living individual with alopecia.
It’s electrifying
Experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food won the nutrition prize for Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura at Meiji University in Japan. They have found ways, they report, to make food taste saltier than it really is. This is a potential health boon for people who like to dine on food that gains its tastiness from being ultra-salty.
Katy Tam, Christian Chan and their colleagues won the education prize for methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students. Anyone with sufficient interest can read details of that research in a pair of studies: “Boredom begets boredom: An experience sampling study on the impact of teacher boredom on student boredom and motivation” and “Whatever will bore, will bore: The mere anticipation of boredom exacerbates its occurrence in lectures”.
In 1969, Stanley Milgram – famous for his series of experiments about “obedience to authority”, in which people seemed to obey instructions to give electric shocks to strangers – performed a more gentle experiment.
Milgram (who died in 1984) and two of his students – at least one of whom, Leonard Bickman, is still alive – were awarded the psychology prize for experiments on a New York City street to see how many passers-by stopped to look upward when they saw strangers looking upward. Bickman accepted the prize on behalf of the entire trio.
Bieito Fernández Castro and his team won the physics prize for measuring the extent to which ocean-water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies.
The entire Ig Nobel ceremony was again, as in the first three pandemic years, held online.
Marc Abrahams created the Ig Nobel Prize ceremony and co-founded the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. Earlier, he worked on unusual ways to use computers. His website is improbable.com.
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