The trick of licking rocks, live cutlery that makes for tastier food and toilet seats that read your poo and “anal prints”. These are just some of the research areas that have been awarded the year’s funnest science prize – the Ig Nobel.
On the night of Friday Swedish time, this year’s Ig Nobel Prize was awarded for the 33rd time. The idea behind the odd prizes is to draw attention to research that “first makes you laugh, then think”.
And that is probably true according to most people. Among the prize winners are Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura from Japan, who researched whether chopsticks, cutlery and straws that carry electricity can give us tastier meals. In their paper, they investigate how the taste of something you eat can be changed by electrical impulses. For example, the current can lead to the food being perceived as more salty than it actually is.
Detective toilet
The toilet that quickly analyzes feces and urine in search of diseases is also rewarded. The competent toilet can also recognize who defecates through personal “anal prints”. Behind the research is Seung-min Park from Stanford University, and the idea is that the toilet can collect all kinds of health data.
The medicine prize went to researchers who studied corpses to investigate whether an individual’s nostrils contain the same number of hairs – on average, there are 120 nostrils in the left nostril and 122 in the right. The prize in communication was given to researchers who showed what happens in the brain of people who speak backwards.
Stone lick
Why many geologists choose to lick the rocks when examining them is explained by Jan Zalasiewicz, who receives the prize in chemistry and geology. He describes that it is an old tradition that comes from, among other things, that wet stones get a better luster and then it is easier to see which minerals are included.
Some of the other prizes go to research that students become more bored if they perceive the teacher as bored and studies on the sex lives of anchovies.
Ig Nobel is awarded at Harvard University in the USA and the name refers to both the Nobel Prize and the English ‘ignoble’, which means roughly simple. The price tag is $10 trillion of the worthless and extremely inflationary Zimbabwean dollar.