A boat rocks back and forth in front of a green screen. Seagulls can be heard in the background. “Welcome, welcome,” calls a woman in a red judge’s robe before hiding behind her book. Then a second welcome speech in which intellectuals, pseudo-intellectuals and quasi-pseudo-intellectuals are enthusiastically welcomed before the master of ceremonies is introduced: Marc Abrahams, the editor of the magazine Annals of Improbable Research at Harvard University in Cambridge, USA, rocking between four others on the boat wearing a large black top hat, sunglasses and jacket.
The magazine awarded the Ig Nobel Prizes for the 33rd time on Friday night – this year the award ceremony took place once again only digitally. Before the pandemic, Harvard University’s venerable Sanders Theater had been reserved for the ceremony. The prize honors curious research work that is intended to make people “first laugh, then think.” The name is a play on words; The English word “ignoble” means something like “unworthy” or “dishonorable”. The research being recognized is not dishonorable, but it is very special. The prizes are usually presented by real Nobel Prize winners.
This year, among others, by Rich Roberts, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1993 for a work on the structure of genetic makeup. For the ceremony he had donned a black, pointed cap with eyeballs hanging from the points. He presented the prize for chemistry and geology to geologist emeritus Jan Zalasiewicz of the University of Leicester, who had studied the question of why geologists like to lick rocks. The answer is not particularly spectacular: the properties of stones are easier to observe when they are moist. In the past, when there were neither microscopes nor other sophisticated tools, scientists could identify stones by taste.
This year’s literary prize went to Chris Moulin and Akira O’Connor, who and their team investigated why words appear strange and foreign when they are repeated often in a row. A phenomenon that they also called Jamais-Vu. A study on the question of whether all people have the same number of nose hairs also received an award. To clarify this, Christine Pham and Natasha Mesinkovska counted the nose hairs of 20 corpses. They found that the average number of nose hairs per nostril is between 120 and 122.2.
A total of prizes were awarded in eight categories
Very close to science fiction, Te Faye Yap and Daniel Preston won the engineering prize for using dead spiders as mechanical grasping tools. They themselves refer to this type of robotics, which uses existing biotic materials as robotic components, as necrobotics. Since the spider’s legs work by hydraulic pressure, the grasping function could be used after the spider’s death by applying pressure to the biological hydraulic system through a needle. Yap and Preston write in their study that this method is sustainable and could help reduce technological waste. After all, a dead spider is biodegradable.
A total of prizes were awarded in eight categories. Researchers from China, Canada, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Ireland, the USA and Japan received a prize in the “Education” category for their methodical study of boredom among teachers and students. Among other things, it is more likely that students will be bored in class if they expect it in advance, said the research team in its acceptance speech. In addition, students are more likely to be bored in class if they have the impression that the teacher is bored.
Researchers from the United States received a prize for conducting experiments on city streets to find out how many pedestrians stop and look up when they see strangers looking up.
A South Korean-American researcher invented the so-called Stanford toilet – a toilet that uses various tools to analyze the substances excreted by people. “Don’t waste your excretions,” said researcher Seung Min Park during his short acceptance speech for the award. A prize also went to scientists from Spain, Switzerland, France and Great Britain for research into the extent to which the sexual activity of anchovies is reflected in sea water.
A team of researchers from Argentina, Spain, Colombia, Chile, China and the USA was honored for researching the brain activity of people who are experts in speaking backwards. “Thank you for this fun prize, we are happy to accept it,” said scientist María José Torres-Prioris and her colleague Adolfo García – forwards and backwards.
Before the corona pandemic, the gala – which was also attended by real Nobel Prize winners, including this year the German physicist Wolfgang Ketterle – was watched live in the Sanders Theater every year by more than 1,000 spectators. But the online awards ceremony, which lasted around an hour and a half and this time had the overall theme of “water”, also featured paper airplanes flying, sketches, bizarre short pieces of music and a lot more bizarre nonsense – ended by the traditional closing words of moderator Marc Abrahams: “If You didn’t win an Ig Nobel Prize this year, and especially if you did win one: better luck next year!”
With material from dpa