'Laugh then Think': Strange Research Honored at 33rd Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony

slashdot ^

[algore]

Since 1999, Slashdot has been covering the annual Ig Nobel prize ceremonies — which honor real scientific research into strange or surprising subjects.

"Each winner (or winning team) has done something that makes people LAUGH, then THINK," explains the ceremony web page, promising that "a gaggle of genuine, genuinely bemused Nobel laureates handed the Ig Nobel Prizes to the new Ig Nobel winners."

As co-founder Marc Abrahams says on his LinkedIn profile, "All these things celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative — and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology."

You can watch this year's entire goofy webcast online. (At 50 minutes there's a jaw-droppingly weird music video about running on water...) Slashdot reader Thorfinn.au shares this summary of this year's winning research:

CHEMISTRY and GEOLOGY PRIZE [POLAND, UK] — Jan Zalasiewicz, for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks.

LITERATURE PRIZE [FRANCE, UK, MALAYSIA, FINLAND] — Chris Moulin, Nicole Bell, Merita Turunen, Arina Baharin, and Akira O'Connor for studying the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times.

MECHANICAL ENGINEERING PRIZE [INDIA, CHINA, MALAYSIA, USA] — Te Faye Yap, Zhen Liu, Anoop Rajappan, Trevor Shimokusu, and Daniel Preston, for re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools.

PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE [SOUTH KOREA, USA] — Seung-min Park, for inventing the Stanford Toilet a computer vision system for defecation analysis et al.

COMMUNICATION PRIZE [ARGENTINA, SPAIN, COLOMBIA, CHILE, CHINA, USA] — María José Torres-Prioris, Diana López-Barroso, Estela Càmara, Sol Fittipaldi, Lucas Sedeño, Agustín Ibáñez, Marcelo Berthier, and Adolfo García, for studying the mental activities of people who are expert at speaking backward.

MEDICINE PRIZE [USA, CANADA, MACEDONIA, IRAN, VIETNAM] — Christine Pham, Bobak Hedayati, Kiana Hashemi, Ella Csuka, Tiana Mamaghani, Margit Juhasz, Jamie Wikenheiser, and Natasha Mesinkovska, for using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person's two nostrils.

NUTRITION PRIZE [JAPAN] — Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura, for experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food.

EDUCATION PRIZE [HONG KONG, CHINA, CANADA, UK, THE NETHERLANDS, IRELAND, USA, JAPAN] — Katy Tam, Cyanea Poon, Victoria Hui, Wijnand van Tilburg, Christy Wong, Vivian Kwong, Gigi Yuen, and Christian Chan, for methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students.

PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE [USA] — Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz for 1968 experiments on a city street to see how many passersby stop to look upward when they see strangers looking upward.

PHYSICS PRIZE [SPAIN, GALICIA, SWITZERLAND, FRANCE, UK] — Bieito Fernández Castro, Marian Peña, Enrique Nogueira, Miguel Gilcoto, Esperanza Broullón, Antonio Comesaña, Damien Bouffard, Alberto C. Naveira Garabato, and Beatriz Mouriño-Carballido, for measuring the extent to which ocean-water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies.

[Billthedrill]

Behold the Stanford Toilet. It identifies you by your anus print. I swear I am not making that up.

[ComputerGuy]

Electrified chopsticks?

[lee martell]

For research that puts the OB in Obscure.

[Ed Condon]

“experiments on a city street to see how many passersby stop to look upward when they see strangers looking upward.”

We did a variation of this, when I was a teenager. On the night that stores downtown were open late, we would stop our car near a crowd of people waiting for busses, jump out, look up, and point to the sky, and see how many people would react. At that time in my life I didn’t realize I could get grant money for pulling foolish stunts like this.

[HartleyMBaldwin]

for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks

Textures and minerals are much easier to see when the rock's surface is wetted. Any geologist knows that; it didn't need a scientific study.

Geologists also learn when not to lick rocks, too. My professor in undergrad mineralogy had a piece of recrystallized bat guano that he liked to put out as an unknown in lab exams, just to see the students lick it.

I also used to caution new geologists never to let the core drilling crews see them lick a piece of core when examining it, because after that the drillers would urinate on every box of core.

[Newtoidaho]

Gotta wonder how much taxpayer $’s were thieved to fund this “research”.

[Silentgypsy]

We used to step over imaginary objects/creatures on the sidewalk; also grabbed each other yelling, “Look out! Here comes another one!”

[Silentgypsy]

Who organizes the Ig Nobel Prizes? — The Ig Nobel Prizes are organized by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research. The ceremony is co-sponsored by the Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students and the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association.

Source:

https://improbable.com/ig/about-the-ig-nobel-prizes/

[muir_redwoods]

Not all or even most research is government funded. Money for small efforts like these probably comes from private or industry grants.

[P.O.E.]

the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times.

raisin, raisin, raisin, raisin, raisin, raisin, raisin, raisin,