As we reach the end of yet another year, it’s time again to do my annual write-up of this year’s Ig Nobel Prizes. Once again, ten prizes have been given out for research that is funny, odd, or just a bit different. And with no further ado, the winners are:
Applied Cardiology – Eliska Prochazkova, Elio Sjak-Shie, Friederike Behrens, Daniel Lindh, Mariska Kret
Why are we attracted to particular people? It’s a question that has puzzled humanity for generations, and scientists are no exception. These winning researchers decided to set up some blind dates and see if they could find out.
The dates were performed in a booth where the two participants sat facing towards each other on either side of a barrier. This barrier was lifted three times. First, participants were given a three-second glimpse at their partner. The next two phases were each two minutes long; in one, participants had a conversation, while in the other they just looked at each other.
Participants rated their attraction to their partner after each interaction. Data was also collected about their body language and physical responses throughout the experiment. Researchers found that the more attracted pairs were, the more their heart rates and skin conductance (which is related to sweat) matched up. Maybe subconsciously picking up on this is how you know you’ve found ‘the one’?
Literature – Eric Martínez, Francis Mollica, Edward Gibson
Have you ever tried to read a list of terms and conditions before you click ‘Agree’? Most people would say they’re hard to understand, and these winning scientists have the proof.
They looked at five features they believed were more common in legal writing than everyday language. These were passive voice structures (such as “the study was done by scientists”, rather than “scientists did the study”), centre-embedded clauses, unusual capitalisation, and outdated and overcomplicated word choices.
After comparing over fifteen million words of contracts and everyday language, they confirmed that these features are found more often in legal writing. They also showed that they make it much harder to understand and remember the meaning of contracts. Sentences with centre-embedded clauses – where the main point is broken up by an insert like this one to provide additional information– were the hardest for people to understand. Hopefully these results will help lawyers write simpler contracts that people can actually understand before they sign.
Biology – Solimary García-Hernández, Glauco Machado
Many animals have the ability to detach parts of their body to escape from predators. While this can mean the difference between life and death at that moment, the long-term effects are not clearly understood. These two scientists decided to look into what happens to scorpions that have lost their stings.
Over the course of three studies, they investigated how losing the ends of their tails affects scorpions’ speed, hunting ability and success at mating. They found that running speed was largely unaffected, as was mating for males. However, stingless females tended to produce fewer offspring than their intact counterparts.
Hunting success was also reduced, as the scorpions were unable to inject their prey with venom. This was worse for males, which are half the size of females. But eating brings its own problems – as well as their stings, scorpions’ tails also contain the end of their digestive system. With that gone, they can’t poo, and eventually die of constipation.
Medicine – Marcin Jasiński, Martyna Maciejewska, Anna Brodziak, Michał Górka, Kamila Skwierawska, Wiesław Jędrzejczak, Agnieszka Tomaszewska, Grzegorz Basak, Emilian Snarski
We all love an excuse to eat dessert, and these scientists have just come up with one more. They’ve found that eating ice cream is an effective way of reducing side effects in patients undergoing chemotherapy.
Chemotherapy is a treatment where drugs are used to kill cancer. However, these drugs can also poison healthy cells, leading to painful side effects. Swelling of the throat and mouth, known as oral mucositis, is one such condition commonly experienced by patients being treated with the drug melphalan.
The risk of oral mucositis can be reduced by cooling the mouth to reduce blood flow, which is generally done by sucking on ice chips. This isn’t particularly pleasant though, so clinics often suggest ice cream instead, especially for children. However, until 2021 there wasn’t actually any evidence showing that the replacement worked. These scientists decided to check, and have confirmed that ice cream is in fact good for you – if you’re at risk of oral mucositis, at least.
Engineering – Gen Matsuzaki, Kazuo Ohuchi, Masaru Uehara, Yoshiyuki Ueno, Goro Imura
Many Ig Nobel prizes are awarded for work that sounds completely ridiculous, but other winning subjects seem incredibly mundane. These prizes acknowledge the level of detail that researchers have put into exploring an issue that everyone else just ignores. For example, these scientists won for their 1999 study into how people turn doorknobs.
The team wanted to know how peoples’ finger placements change when turning knobs of different sizes. To find out, they built a range of wooden columns ranging in diameter from 7 to 130 millimetres across. They then asked participants to rotate these knobs, filming the results from below.
The larger the knob, the more fingers were used to turn it – many people only used one finger and a thumb for the smallest knobs, gradually adding more as size increased until the whole hand was used. While that might sound obvious, this information can help engineers improve knob designs by showing them the best place to put indents for users’ fingers.
Art History – Peter de Smet, Nicholas Hellmuth
When it comes to art, it’s sometimes a struggle to know what you’re looking at. Add in a thousand-year gap to lose context, and the puzzle gets even harder. These two researchers took on the challenge, and in 1986 put together a detailed report examining images of enemas on ancient Mayan pottery.
The pictures, found on a series of different objects, appear to show the stages of a ritual where participants received enemas of an unknown, possibly intoxicating liquid. These images were our first evidence that Mayan people performed enemas for reasons other than medical treatment.
To try and figure out what was going on these images, Peter and Nicholas looked at four key areas. First, they analysed the images and writing found on the pottery itself. They then selected several possible ingredients that could have been used in the ritual. For each of these they asked whether there’s any evidence Mayans used them and whether they’d work as an intoxicating enema.
Physics – Frank Fish, Zhi-Ming Yuan, Minglu Chen, Laibing Jia, Chunyan Ji, Atilla Incecik
Unlike the Nobel Prizes, Igs are generally only given to one group at a time. This award is an exception, celebrating two separate studies into why ducklings swim in formation.
When riding a bike, it takes a lot less energy if you’re following behind something. The same theory would explain why ducklings tend to swim in a long line behind their parent. Frank was the first person to test this, by training baby ducks to swim behind a decoy parent. He confirmed the theory by showing that swimming in formation did help them to use less oxygen, especially for younger ducklings.
The rest of the researchers completed their study years later, using a computer model to learn why this works. They found that the first duckling in the line can ride along on a wave created by the parent, almost like surfing. What’s more, the second duckling can ride the wave created by the first, and so on all the way down the chain.
Peace – Junhui Wu, Szabolcs Számadó, Pat Barclay, Bianca Beersma, Terence Dores Cruz, Sergio Lo Iacono, Annika Nieper, Kim Peters, Wojtek Przepiorka, Leo Tiokhin, Paul Van Lange
We tend to think of gossip as something bad, but it actually has an important role in relationships. Talking about people who aren’t around allows us to tell our friends whether or not someone can be trusted. Knowing who we can rely on allows us to work together with the right people to do things that benefit us. However, if the gossiper is lying, that makes it more likely that we’ll make the wrong choices of who to try and cooperate with.
These researchers created an algorithm to learn when people will tell untrue gossip. They found that the two main factors are whether you want to help the person you’re talking to, and whether telling the truth will do that. If both answers are the same, you should tell the truth. If the answers are opposites, you should lie. And if it’s more complicated than a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’, it’s up to you to decide which factor is more important.
Economics – Alessandro Pluchino, Alessio Emanuele Biondo, Andrea Rapisarda
You’ve probably heard that if you want to succeed at life, you need to be good at something – you need talent. Yet if we look around at the world, many of the most successful people don’t seem to be much more skilled than the rest of us. So what’s the difference? These three scientists say it’s pure luck.
Previous studies have shown that randomness plays a large role in how success is achieved, but these scientists are the first to mathematically describe the effect. They simulated up to a thousand people with different levels of ‘talent’, who randomly experienced lucky or unlucky events. At the end of the simulation, the most successful person always had an average talent score. They were just luckier than the rest.
With this in mind, Alessandro and Andrea must be incredibly lucky, because this is their second Ig Nobel Prize. The two previously won in 2010 (along with Cesare Garofalo) for showing that giving random promotions increases a business’ efficiency.
Safety Engineering – Magnus Gens
This award is for designing a crash test dummy, but not the one you’re used to seeing. Instead, Magnus spent his Master’s degree putting together a dummy that accurately simulates a moose.
Moose can grow up to two metres tall, three metres long and weigh half a ton, which is bad news if you crash into one. Even worse, their legs are so long that the front of a car will go straight under the animal’s body. This means almost all their weight completely misses the areas of the bonnet that are designed to absorb the shock of a collision. Instead, the moose rolls along the top of the bonnet and into the car’s windscreen, which can easily kill the passengers inside.
Magnus designed a rubber-and-steel dummy with the same basic shape and weight of a real moose. Car manufacturers can use this to study what damage their vehicles will suffer in a crash, and what changes can be made to better protect northern drivers.
Lachlan Writes Science 