Harvard hosted the 33rd Ig Nobel Prize, which is awarded for unusual and ingenious research. The event took place online.
Awards were presented in ten categories. Thus, in the field of chemistry and geology, a prize was given for explaining the addiction of scientists to licking stones – it was received by the Polish scientist Jan Zalasiewicz. Scientists from the United States, Canada, Macedonia, Iran and Vietnam received the medical award for using cadavers to study whether the amount of hair in each of a person’s two nostrils is the same.
Physicists from Spain, Galicia, Switzerland, France and the UK were also awarded for measuring the extent to which ocean water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovy fish.
The public health award went to a South Korean scientist for his invention of the Stanford Toilet, a device that uses various technologies to “monitor and quickly analyze human waste.” In the field of communications, the prize was received by scientists from Argentina, Spain, Colombia, Chile, China and the United States for studying the mental activity of people “who can speak backwards.” In literature, the award went to scientists from France, Great Britain, Malaysia and Finland – for studying the sensations that people experience when they repeat one word many times;
Mechanical engineering research was also awarded, with scientists from India, China, Malaysia and the US reviving dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools. In the field of nutrition, scientists from Japan were awarded for experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food. In the field of education, the award was given to scientists from China, Canada, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Ireland, the USA and Japan for their methodological study of boredom among teachers and students. And three scientists from the United States received a prize in the field of psychology for conducting experiments on a city street, the purpose of which was to see how many passers-by stopped to look up when they saw strangers looking up;
The Ig Nobel Prize has been awarded since 1991 as the antithesis of the Nobel Prize.
Source: Rosbalt
Mario Twitchell is an accomplished author and journalist, known for his insightful and thought-provoking writing on a wide range of topics including general and opinion. He currently works as a writer at 247 news agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the industry.
