The Ig Nobel Prizes are my favourite event in the scientific calendar, so once again here’s my summary of this year’s ten achievements “that make people laugh, then think”.
Biology – Susanne Schötz, Robert Eklund & Joost van de Weijer
Wouldn’t it be great if we could understand what our pets are saying? That’s the goal of these researchers, who’ve spent the past ten years analysing the sounds their cats make.
The three are all experts in language and work together on a project called ‘Melody in Human–Cat Communication’, also known as ‘Meowsic’. They aim to understand the wide range of noises made by cats, and how humans react to them.
So far, they’ve conducted several tests analysing the different noises made by Susanne’s three cats – Donna, Rocky and Turbo. These sounds have been placed into categories such as chatters, miaows, mews, squeaks, moans, murmurs, chirps, chirrups, tweets, twitters, tweedles, growls, yowls, snarls, hisses, spits and shrieks.
The team has also discovered that people are able to tell the difference between food- and vet-related noises, even if they’ve never owned a cat before. It seems that, while each cat has its own voice, they all speak the same language – one we’re gradually learning.
Ecology – Leila Satari, Alba Guillén, Àngela Vidal-Verdú & Manuel Porcar
There aren’t many things grosser than accidentally touching someone’s old, chewed-up gum. It’s squishy, difficult to get rid of and, worst of all, you know it came out of a stranger’s mouth. Who knows what germs are in it? These scientists do.
These four researchers used DNA analysis to determine exactly what bacteria could be found in old gum. First, they collected gum from the ground in Spain, France, Greece, Turkey and Singapore. They discovered that most of the samples contained the same main groups of bacteria, regardless of where they came from.
They also chewed some gum themselves, and left it on a pavement to see how different bacteria grow over time. They found that for the first few weeks most of the germs came from the chewer’s mouth, but these were gradually replaced by soil bacteria. These results raise some health concerns (imagine catching a disease from some old gum), but may end up having uses in forensics or designing more biodegradable gums.
Chemistry – Jörg Wicker, Nicolas Krauter, Bettina Derstroff, Christof Stönner, Efstratios Bourtsoukidis, Achim Edtbauer, Jochen Wulf, Thomas Klüpfel, Stefan Kramer & Jonathan Williams
Movies are made to impact our emotions. We laugh, we cry. We get excited, we get scared. And each of these changes in mood has an effect on our bodies. These scientists decided to measure peoples’ reactions to various films and try to link them to what was happening onscreen.
Our bodies naturally create a wide range of chemicals, including some volatile organic compounds (VOCs) which can be found in our breath. The amount we produce depends on several factors, potentially including mood.
To test this, the researchers analysed the air in a cinema throughout a series of movie sessions. They then tried to link the measured levels of VOCs with what was happening in the film. They found that some types of scene, such as a death or a conversation involving the main character, created recognisable patterns in the chemicals people breathed out. The team are now working on methods to try and predict the features of a film based on audience reaction alone.
Economics – Pavlo Blavatskyy
Tracking political corruption can be quite difficult. Anyone who is corrupt will try to hide that fact, so most measures can only be based on best-guesses by foreign experts. Pavlo’s work aims to change this, by demonstrating a link between a nation’s corruption and the physical appearance of its politicians.
Pavlo trained a computer program to look at photographs and estimate the body-mass index (BMI; a comparison between someone’s weight and their height) of politicians in fifteen post-Soviet states. Calculating the average for each country, he then compared this to several traditional estimates of corruption. He found that the more corrupt a nation is, the fatter its politicians will be.
This isn’t the first objective measure of corruption to be suggested; one previous method involved monitoring the popularity of luxury Swiss watches. The problem was that once politicians learned about this method, they stopped wearing their watches in public. This new technique gets around that trick – politicians’ faces can’t be hidden nearly as easily.
Medicine – Olcay Cem Bulut, Dare Oladokun, Burkard Lippert & Ralph Hohenberger
If you have a blocked nose, there are several ways you can try and fix it. The simple solution would be to use a nasal decongestant spray, but if you don’t have one (or that’s too mainstream for you) there’s a number of other remedies. Exercise, holding your breath, using a crutch under one arm or soaking your feet in warm water have all been shown to affect nasal breathing, and now you can add ‘having sex’ to that list.
These four researchers enlisted eighteen couples to measure their nasal breathing before and after sex, and compared this to using a medical decongestant. Measurements were taken immediately, thirty minutes, an hour, and three hours after the ‘treatment’. The results show that sex unblocks the nose as well as a decongestant for up to an hour. If you’re wanting a clear nose for any longer than that, you should probably stick to the medical alternative.
Peace – Ethan Beseris, Steven Naleway & David Carrier
Have you ever wondered why only men grow beards? These scientists did, and they’ve developed a theory that links facial hair with another stereotypically-masculine trait – fighting.
It’s known that men are much more aggressive than women, and that most of their attacks are directed at other men. The head and face are the most common targets, and injuries can be quite devastating (especially before the rise of modern medicine). As such, reducing the damage from blows to the head can dramatically increase a fighter’s chances of survival.
This is where beards come in. These scientists covered replica bone with sheepskin to simulate a human jaw. The skins were either shaved, plucked or remained covered in hair, representing different beard lengths. When they dropped weights onto each sample, they found that long hair cushioned the blow, reducing the damage to the bone underneath. This isn’t actually proof that beards evolved to stop broken jaws, but it certainly suggests there’s something more to it than just looks.
Physics – Alessandro Corbetta, Jasper Meeusen, Chung-min Lee, Roberto Benzi & Federico Toschi
We walk past other people almost every day, but have you ever thought about how you make sure not to bump into those around you? Understanding this often-unconscious process is actually quite important for people who design major walkways, which is why these scientists have created a computer program to simulate how pedestrians avoid each other.
They monitored a three-metre long stretch of hallway in a Dutch train station 24/7 for six months. Cameras recorded the path of millions of people who passed through – everything from rush hour crowds to lone individuals.
The team were specifically interested in what happens when two people are walking directly towards each other, so they created a computer program to find every time this happened. Analysing the thousands of examples they’d recorded, they saw that most people will change direction so they miss each other by at least half a metre, then continue on straight – behaviour which they then programmed into their simulations.
Kinetics – Hisashi Murakami, Claudio Feliciani, Yuta Nishiyama & Katsuhiro Nishinari
Sometimes, however, avoiding other pedestrians isn’t that simple. There’s no point in sidestepping if you both go in the same direction. Our brains avoid this by predicting where the people around us will be moving next, but this process isn’t always perfect.
These researchers conducted experiments where groups of people walked in opposite directions along a narrow path. Some of the participants were told to type on their phones as they walked, which distracted them and made them more likely to run into other people.
However, the other pedestrians were also confused. The lack of eye contact made it hard for people coming the opposite way to predict where the phone-users were going to walk next. As a result, they kept walking straight until the last moment, when they both had to make a sharp turn to avoid each other. Next time you’re walking in a crowd, try and stay off your phone – you’re not the only person it could distract.
Entomology – John Mulrennan Jr., Roger Grothaus, Charles Hammond & Jay Lamdin
The world of fifty years ago was a very different place to today. The year 1971 brought us Starbucks, Mr. Men, Prime Minister William McMahon, the country of Bangladesh, and one report on how to kill cockroaches in a submarine.
Cockroaches are well known for their ability to survive nearly everywhere, and this makes them serious pests. The most common way to deal with them is fumigation – filling a room with poisonous gas until all the insects are dead. However, since humans can’t use a fumigated area before all the gas has been vented away, this is quite an awkward process when dealing with submarines.
These four scientists tested a new chemical for fumigation that was both cheaper and quicker to use than the main poison of the time. Not only did dichlorvos require less effort and time, but it killed virtually every cockroach on all eight submarines they tested – perhaps unsurprising, since the chemical has since been banned for being too toxic.
Transportation – Robin Radcliffe, Mark Jago, Peter Morkel, Estelle Morkel, Pierre du Preez, Piet Beytell, Birgit Kotting, Bakker Manuel, Jan Hendrik du Preez, Michele Miller, Julia Felippe, Stephen Parry & Robin Gleed
Rhinoceroses flying through the sky sounds like something from an animated movie, but for African conservationists, it’s not an unusual sight. Since 2010, they’ve regularly transported wild rhinos by hanging them upside-down underneath helicopters. However, it was only this year that scientists tested how this actually affects these massive animals.
The black rhinoceros used to be found across southern Africa, but poaching and habitat loss reduced its population to only two and a half thousand in 1995 (although the number has doubled since then). To help the remaining populations mix, rhinos are regularly sedated and transported. However, the landscape is often too rugged to drive in, so air travel is the only option.
These scientists measured oxygen and carbon dioxide levels in the blood of rhinos that were either lying down or hanging by their feet. Surprisingly, being upside-down was actually better for them than lying on their side – good news for all the rhinos that’ve taken helicopter rides in the past ten years.
Lachlan Writes Science 