Serious, valuable research is sometimes a little, well, silly. The initiators of the Ig Nobel Prize in Cambridge, USA, have been honoring this fact for more than 30 years. In contrast to the big, serious role model in Stockholm, they don’t honor the work that contributes the most to the progress of mankind, but rather for amusement in group chats or at the coffee machine. Scientifically something has to come of it, just not in the first place. It’s about achievements that make people “laugh first, then think”. After all, winners of the real Nobel Prize present the awards.
Due to the pandemic, the annual award ceremony took place digitally on the night from Thursday to Friday and not as a gala event at Harvard University as usual. However, with a little imagination, the twelve awards could still be handed out physically: the laudators folded a piece of paper that had been sent in advance as a PDF and then printed out according to the instructions to form the trophy, a gear wheel. They then handed it over the edge of their picture section to the winning scientists, who accepted it at the end of the video window.
Recipients include, for example, Solimary García-Hernández and Glauco Machado. The Colombian-Brazilian duo found that Scorpio males affected by pre-constipation have disadvantages when it comes to finding a partner. Some scorpion species shed their tails to escape their predators in an emergency. Not only is their sting lost, but also the end of their digestive tract. The animals can no longer excrete leftover food. García-Hernández and Machado found that males who suffer from constipation as a result of a lost tail also slow down. As a result, it takes them longer to find potential partners. And they don’t have much time, the animals only survive a few months without their hindquarters.
What makes legal documents so illegible
The Ig Nobel Prize in Engineering went to a Japanese team, so to speak, because they got the hang of it. Gen Matsuzaki and his colleagues published a study entitled “How to use fingers during rotation of a columnar knob”. To do this, they evaluated video recordings of 31 test subjects turning knobs of different diameters.
One has only to imagine the research work of Eric Martínez, Francis Mollica and Edward Gibson. In her in the specialist journal cognitive published study, they explore the question of why legal documents are so difficult to understand. To do this, they combed through a 10 million-word collection of such contract documents in English. They looked for specific characteristics of particularly difficult-to-process language. According to this, legal documents have more technical terms, atypical upper and lower case letters and special convoluted sentences that cause “short-term memory limitations due to widely differing syntactical relationships” compared to nine other predefined text genres. Or, as it says elsewhere: more “bad writing”.
The in is also about language Philosophical Transactions published work by a large international team. It explores the question of how gossip, i.e. the exchange of information about a third party without their knowledge, can be used strategically. How can gossip motivate members of a social group to contribute to the good of the community? The result: Depending on how dependent the gossiper is on his counterpart and the person he is gossiping about, he should lie or stick to the truth. The inventors received the Peace Ig Nobel Prize for this “gossip algorithm”.
Other prizes:
- Applied Cardiology: When romantic partners first meet, their heart rhythms match.
- Medical: As a component of some chemotherapy regimens, ice cream causes fewer side effects than other drugs.
- Art history: the study “An interdisciplinary approach to depicting ritual enemas on Mayan pottery”.
- Physics: How ducklings manage to swim in formation.
- Economics: A mathematical explanation of why success has a lot to do with luck and less with talent.
- Safety technology: A crash test dummy the size and weight of a moose.