Last month I wrote about the Nobel Prizes, the most famous awards in science. Now it’s time for their more fun cousins – the Ig Nobel Prizes. These awards honour “achievements that make people laugh, then think”. The result is one of the quirkiest collections of research and development from science and beyond. Here is my summary of 2019’s winners.
Medicine – Silvano Gallus
The phrase ‘health food’ generally refers to grains, vegetables or fruit. However, Silvano Gallus won his Ig Nobel Prize for investigating the surprising health effects of Italy’s most famous meal – pizza.
Doctor Gallus led three studies between 2003 and 2006 that investigated whether eating pizza affected the risk of cancer and cardiovascular disease (CVD). They found that people who eat more pizza had better health in regards to CVD and cancers of the digestive tract. However, this diet had little effect on hormone-related cancers such as breast, prostate and ovarian cancer.
The scientists doing these studies do admit that this isn’t so straight-forward, though. The studies were run in Italy, where most pizza is healthier than our fast-food equivalent. Additionally, pizza is just one of many Italian dishes that heavily feature tomatoes and mozzarella cheese, which have proven health benefits. As such, maybe the key is traditional Italian cooking in general, of which pizza is just one example.
Medical Education – Karen Pryor & Theresa McKeon
If you’ve ever taught a dog, you may have come across a method known as clicker training. It involves using a small tool to make a clicking noise every time the pet does the right thing. This is a simple way for them to learn what behaviours are expected. However, this training method doesn’t only work for animals – it can also be used to train surgeons.
Karen Pryor and Theresa McKeon conducted two tests where they compared clicker training to standard instructions as a method of teaching new surgical techniques. They found that, if medical students heard a click each time they performed a step correctly, they were far more likely to learn the process accurately.
While those who weren’t clicker-trained performed faster at first, they made more mistakes and were equal speeds in the long run. This suggests that, for medical students to become the best doctors, they may end up being trained just like our pets.
Biology – Ling-Jun Kong, Herbert Crepaz, Agnieszka Górecka, Aleksandra Urbanek, Rainer Dumke & Tomasz Paterek
In my first ever article, I wrote about research into how birds see magnetic fields. This is an ability shared by some amphibians, insects, fish and mammals, but not humans. In an effort to further understand how this ability works, the winners of this prize researched dead and living cockroaches, to see how magnetic fields affect them.
The researchers put the insects near magnets, which magnetised small particles inside their bodies. When the cockroaches were removed, they had their own magnetic field which gradually faded away. The researchers measured how quickly this happened, and compared between the two sets of insects.
They found out that living cockroaches lose their magnetic fields about fifty times quicker than dead ones. This means that the magnetic particles must be found in liquids that get thicker after death. This could help in the search for what exactly cockroaches use to detect magnetism.
Anatomy – Roger Mieusset & Bourras Bengoudifa
Male infertility can occur for a number of reasons, but a key one is temperature. If subjected to a normal body temperature (37oc), sperm count and quality is vastly reduced. It is for this reason that the scrotum exists, allowing sperm production to occur in a cooler environment than the rest of the body.
Several studies into infertility have involved measurements of scrotal temperatures in men, but in the vast majority of cases, only one value is given. Roger Mieusset & Bourras Bengoudifa set out to investigate if this is an accurate representation.
In a series of three experiments, they measured left and right scrotal temperatures of postal workers, bus drivers, and naked and clothed men in a variety of positions. They found that the left side of the scrotum is consistently several fractions of a degree warmer than the right. This suggests that further studies into this area should use two measurements for greater accuracy.
Chemistry – Shigeru Watanabe, Mineko Ohnishi, Kaori Imai, Eiji Kawano & Seiji Igarashi
We can easily get so used to things that we don’t even think about them, until a particularly curious scientist asks a question we don’t expect. For example – when was the last time you thought about your spit? This group of Japanese scientists earned the 2019 Ig Nobel Chemistry prize for a paper they wrote 25 years ago, attempting to measure how much saliva a five-year old makes each day.
They did this by calculating how quickly saliva is made while awake, asleep, and eating. Eating makes the most, while sleeping creates virtually none. They then timed how long thirty children spent on each of these activities in an average day.
They concluded that an average five-year old creates about half a litre of saliva in twenty-four hours; sixty percent of this is during the roughly eighty minutes per day spent eating. This turned out to be much lower than previous estimates based on adults had been.
Engineering – Iman Farahbakhsh
As many parents will likely agree, changing nappies can be quite a challenge. Not only is there the task of cleaning the baby and replacing the nappy; parents are also required to make sure their child remains in position, and preferably comfortable, throughout the whole process. This is where Iman Farahbakhsh comes in, with his designs for an automatic baby-changing machine.
The child is placed in a small seat and strapped in so it can’t move. At least one of its legs is also strapped down, to allow access to the nappy. This is removed by a moving arm located beneath the child. At this point several sprinklers can be used to wash the baby, which is then dried by an inbuilt dryer. Finally, a set of clamps is used to place a new nappy on the baby. This process can be modified by the parent to provide some impersonal personalised care for their child.
Economics – Habip Gedik, Timothy A. Voss, Andreas Voss
Money gets passed between people constantly. Its entire purpose is to be given to others in exchange for more useful items. Because of this, diseases carried by money could potentially spread incredibly quickly. These scientists decided to see which countries are most at risk of cash-related infection.
They spread three different disease-causing bacteria on banknotes from Europe, Canada, Croatia, Romania, Morocco, India and the United States. After several hours they tested to see which bacteria had survived. Most money contained at least one species at the three-hour mark, and many survived for six hours. All three varieties were detected on the Romanian Leu, which was also the only note to still contain bacteria a day later. Conversely, no species survived until testing on the Croatian Luna.
Different countries’ notes are made out of different materials, some of which are evidently better environments for microbes. While other factors such as local climate need to be considered, this research could lead the way for healthier money worldwide.
Peace – Ghada A. bin Saif, Alexandru Papoiu, Liliana Banari, Francis McGlone, Shawn G. Kwatra, Yiong-Huak Chan & Gil Yosipovitch
There are very few things that feel quite as good as scratching an itch. Sure, you might’ve been told that it’s better to leave it alone, but that advice is very easy to ignore in the heat of the moment. When an itch gets really bad, there’s simply no other solution. And now, thanks to these scientists, we know exactly how good a scratch can be.
They used itchy hairs from the cowhage plant to irritate volunteers on their forearms, backs and ankles. After monitoring the itchiness for several minutes they repeated the experiment, but this time they scratched the itch with a small brush as well.
They showed that the most irritating place to have cowhage was the ankle, while the forearm got the least itchy throughout the experiment. They also found that the itchier you are, the better it feels to scratch, officially confirming what we’ve all known for ages.
Psychology – Fritz Strack
Time for you to do an experiment of your own. Find a pen. Now hold the end of the pen in your mouth using only your teeth – don’t let your lips touch it. How do you feel? Now do the opposite – poke your lips out like a fish, then use only them to hold the pen. Has your mood changed?
According to research from 1988, you should feel happier when using your teeth to hold the pen. That’s because you’re nearly smiling in the first pose, and almost frowning in the second. The theory goes that when your brain thinks you’re smiling you become happier and vice versa.
However, thirty years later some more tests were done by Fritz Strack, one of the original researchers, to try and prove this theory. Instead, they showed that the results are pretty much random. This means what I just explained could be complete nonsense, and you held a pen in your mouth for no reason at all.
Physics – Patricia Yang, Alexander Lee, Miles Chan, Alynn Martin, Ashley Edwards, Scott Carver & David Hu
For many years, wombats have been known to hold a very bizarre claim to fame; they’re the only mammals whose poo is shaped into cubes. However, it was only in 2018, thanks to the work of these seven scientists, that we finally found out why this happens.
The team investigated the intestines of dead wombats to see what’s going on inside. They found that the elasticity of the intestine changes near the end. This causes the poo to change from a liquid into the famous solid cubes.
Patricia Yang says that they use these poos to create small piles to mark their territory. The square shape makes them more likely to stay stacked and visible to other wombats. She also says this discovery could be quite useful for manufacturing. “We currently have only two methods to manufacture cubes: we mould it, or we cut it.” Now, by copying the wombat, we have a third alternative.
Lachlan Writes Science 