Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

Use AI to identify "anal lines" in the toilet, use dead spiders as mechanical hands, and study what's going on in the minds of people who always talk upside down.

With the appearance of these serious research groups, we know that the "first" Ig Nobel Prize is coming again. (the 33rd "first" ~)

Or familiar painting style (Happy Paper plane opens):

It's still familiar:

The presenters are as heavy as ever (true Nobel laureates):

And like many international awards, there is no lack of Chinese scholars.

Let's not talk about anything else. Come and see which award-winning studies can make you giggle.

Public Health Award: the Smart toilet Public Health Award for "knowing people with anal tattoos" is awarded to a toilet.

This smart toilet from Stanford looks mediocre at first glance:

In fact, there is a mystery-boy, there are not only urine test strips under the toilet seat, but also four cameras.

The division of work of the cameras is very meticulous: two focus on measuring the flow rate and flow of urine, one for poop, and one for chrysanthemums.

The authors solemnly say that based on the hardware and software that can be easily installed, researchers will be able to conduct a long-term analysis of the feces of toilet users to see if their owners have any health problems.

Of course, the toilet may be used by the whole family. So in order to accurately map the data to individuals, the Stanford smart toilet has two biometric systems: unique anal print recognition and conventional fingerprint recognition.

Briefly share the acceptance speech of Seung-min Park, the first work of the paper:

The toilet can not only keep us clean, but also keep us healthy.

Thank you for the Ig Nobel Prize. Remember, Don't waste your waste.

Mechanical Engineering Award: dead Spider transformed into Mechanical claw Mechanical Engineering Award Flower Rice University team. The mechanical claws they developed look like this:

Look at this spider grip, isn't it realistic? Yes, this is a really dead spider.

Specifically, spiders control leg movement through their own "hydraulic system". As a result, the researchers thought that by tapping a needle into a spider's corpse to connect the hydraulic system to the outside world, the spider could be transformed into a "baby-grabbing machine" by controlling the pressure.

Such a spider grip can pick up an object of up to 130% of its own weight.

In addition, the researchers believe that the advantage of spider grips is that they can pick up objects with irregular geometric shapes and achieve natural camouflage in an outdoor environment.

Oh, by the way, spiders are easy to get, and it's a big advantage of this mechanical system.

One of the authors of this paper is Zhen Liu, an alumnus of Xi'an Jiaotong University, who is currently studying for a doctorate at Rice University.

Nutrition Award: the winner of the Nutrition Award for more delicious Food with Chopsticks is Professor Yoshiaki Miyashita of Meiji University.

His award-winning research is a pair of chopsticks.

The magic of this pair of chopsticks is that they can shock your tongue and make you eat more delicious. Supporting products also include straws and forks.

Speaking of which, the professor probably likes watching food broadcasts. After all, there is also a TV set that can lick the screen and taste it in his research project.

Psychology Award: will you look up at the sky with passers-by? If you met a group of passers-by on the road looking up at the sky, would you look up with them?

Some scientists have really studied such a thing seriously. They designed an experiment like this:

On the busy city streets, crowds ranging from 1 to 15 people were set up to look up at a building. The researchers will be upstairs to observe the reaction of passers-by.

After observing 1424 passers-by, the researchers found that the more onlookers, the more passers-by are willing to stop and watch. In other words, the larger the group, the more likely it is that the behavior will be imitated.

Again, this is really serious research, and the paper has been cited more than 700 times.

Communication Award: people from Shandong are not the only ones who can do this when they come a long way back to their brains.

The study, which won the Communication Award, brought in two "inverted" experts, whose inverted mode is even more exaggerated:

Can pronounce banana as ananab and baskets is fun (basket is interesting) as nuf si teksab.

It's all over. Yeah, it's true.

The last time I heard of such a thing, it was Jay Chou's job in "you can hear me".

The researchers carefully conducted neurocognitive studies on the two inverted experts. It turns out that the brains of these two are really different from those of ordinary people:

Compared with the control group, expert 1 showed a larger volume of gray matter in a cluster at the junction of the left parahippocampal gyrus and fusiform gyrus.

Expert 2 had larger gray matter volume in the middle frontal gyrus, inferior frontal gyrus and right superior occipital gyrus.

In addition, the brains of the two men also showed increased functional connectivity.

Chemistry Prize & Geology Award: trilobite fossils taste a little delicious. Geologist Jan Zalasiewicz took out the trilobite fossils he picked up and said: delicious.

Most people really don't have this kind of "taste in rock", but geologists seem to have it. Is it a mysterious ritual to lick (twist, soak)?

To find out why, Zalasiewicz licked countless stones and summed up the way geologists lick them.

First of all, licking the stone wet the texture will be more prominent, so that you can better observe the size, shape and arrangement of the rock particles.

And you can taste different tastes in the process, because the minerals are different, so you can better distinguish the rocks.

In addition, the tongue is more sensitive, and you can feel the fine-grained differences of different types of rocks.

Warm reminder: non-professionals should not lick stones casually, it may be poisonous.

Literature Award: what's it like to repeat a word all the time? Look at this group of people:

Behind what seems to be odd behavior is an odd study.

Everyone may have had the feeling that if you read too many words, you will feel that you don't know the word. This phenomenon is called Jamais vu (semantic saturation).

In response to this phenomenon, Chris Moulin, Akira O'Connor and their colleagues asked a group of people to do experiments to explore how people feel when they repeat a word (in this case, the).

It was found that:

When participants repeated the same word an average of 27.7 times, they felt like "I don't seem to know the word." In addition, the word "the" was chosen because high-frequency words are more likely to trigger semantic saturation.

Medicine Award: count the number of nose hairs in a corpse. This study is very underworld. The first step is to count the number of nose hairs in the two nostrils of a corpse.

Where do all these nose hairs grow? How long is it? Is it black?

You have no idea. It's all about alopecia areata.

The thing is, when people with alopecia areata lose their hair, they are often accompanied by the loss of scalp, eyelashes, eyebrows and nose hair. Without the protection of nasal hair, many patients will have upper respiratory tract infection, nasal dryness, allergies and so on.

To better assess the impact of the number of nasal hairs and the lack of nasal hairs on patients' quality of life, Christine Pham and her colleagues experimented with 20 cadavers.

It was found that there were about 120 nasal hairs in the left nostril and 112 hairs on the right, and they grew mainly in the front part of the nose, basically growing only about 1 cm inward.

Education Award: boring research on boredom. It's boring.

Researchers from Hong Kong, China and other researchers specialize in boredom.

Students anticipate that the lecture is boring before listening to the lecture, but will they feel more bored when they actually listen to the lecture?

The experiment was divided into two groups, one was to listen to the lecture naturally, and the students who found that the lecture was expected to be boring were then more bored in the lecture. The other group of students experimentally manipulated their expected boredom before attending the lecture, and found that those who were guided to be bored before attending the lecture felt more bored during the lecture.

Combined with the previous research, I can hardly understand the word boredom.

Physics Award: so much energy for anchovies? How do surface water and deep water mix, wind and waves? The tide? Anchovies can also have sex.

In the summer of 18, the team observed 15 consecutive days of intense coastal turbulence in the Siberian peninsula in Norway, where strong sound signals and tiny eggs floating in the sea revealed everything, and it was animal mating season again.

Previously, turbulent mixing caused by marine life was thought to be inefficient, but this finding shows that the agitation caused by frenzied mating of fish is as efficient as geophysical turbulence.

One More Thing, by the way, the Ig Nobel Prize is funny, but trophies and bonuses still have to be given out.

The trophy is a PDF document, and the winner needs to print it out by himself. Because this year's theme is water, the finished trophy is marked with Coke and reads:

It may contain fewer than 12 cans.

Well, not even a can.

As for the bonus, it has to be huge: 10 trillion-but the Zimbabwean currency is no longer in circulation.

Well, that's all for today's funny. what else do you think of "outrageous" research that failed to win the award this year? Welcome to share in the comments area, let's have fun.

Reference link:

[1] https://improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig2023

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