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Do you wonder why geologists lick rocks? Do you want to know how many nose hairs there are on human corpses? Or do you like biodegradable mechanical grips made of dead spider claws? Do you want to know a "smart toilet" that can not only analyze the composition of urine and feces, but also identify the anus? These and other chic achievements were awarded the 2023 Ig Nobel Prize at this year's online ceremony.

The Ig Nobel Prize, founded in 1991, is a farce version of the Nobel Prize for "achievements that first make people laugh and then make people think". The awards ceremony unconventionally features microoperas, scientific presentations and 24umb7 lectures, in which winners must explain their work twice: within 24 seconds for the first time and seven words for the second. The acceptance speech is limited to 60 seconds. As the Ig Nobel theme says, honored research may seem absurd at first glance, but that doesn't mean it lacks scientific value.

The Ig Nobel Prize is awarded to "first make people laugh, then make people think". Audiences can listen to the regular 24ram 7 lecture and watch the award ceremony of "pseudo-opera" held on the water. A week after the ceremony, the winners will give public speeches, which will be uploaded to the website Improbable Research.

Needless to say, here is the 2023 Ig Nobel Prize.

Chemistry / Geology Award message: "Jan Zalasiewicz, honoring him for explaining why scientists like to lick rocks."

Anyone knows that geologists or paleontologists may acquire a strange habit: lick stones. They will tell you that this is a good way to judge whether a stone is a stone or a petrified bone. Because the latter will stick to your tongue. Grinding the stone with your teeth for a while can help you determine the size of the stone, so you can judge whether there is clay or sediment in the stone. Zarasvich, a paleontologist at the University of Leicester in the UK, studied a wonderful history of stone licking and other eccentricities, published in 2017 in the Palaeontological Society Newsletter.

"wetting the surface can show the texture of fossils and minerals more clearly, and in the case of a dry surface, these phenomena are hidden in tiny reflections and diffractions and become blurred," Zarasvich wrote, recalling a time when he licked a stone. The stone was found to be a well-preserved foraminiferal stone. According to Zarasvich, the "taste of geology" can be traced back to Giovanni Arduino, an 18th-century mining engineer, surveyor and self-proclaimed professor, who proposed the stratigraphic classification that eventually led to today's geological time scale.

Alduino wrote a letter to Antonio Vallisneri, a professor at Padua University, in which he described all the stones, minerals and fossils in the Anio Valley, including related taste records. For example, the burned fossil shell is "as bitter and smells like urine" as coal. The spring water from the strata rich in martensite and coal "has a hot and sour taste", which Mr Alduino likens to "the sour taste of wine". We can imagine that Alduino would be happy to know that his "taste classification" is still a common analytical tool among rock lovers today.

Literature Award words: "Chris Mullin (Chris Moulin), Nicole Bell (Nicole Bell), Merita Tulunin (Merita Turunen), Alina Bharin (Arina Baharin), and Akira O'Connor (Akira O'Connor) for their study of people's perception after repeating a word many, many, many times.

Many people are familiar with the feeling of "deja vu", which is a memory illusion and seems to have experienced something that has not happened. The opposite phenomenon is "Jamais vu", which refers to the fleeting perception of something new or unfamiliar that we have seen or experienced, usually a word, or a person or place. Strangeness is usually a symptom of epilepsy or migraine. Mullin and others guessed that "strangeness" might lead to "word alienation", so they recruited student volunteers at the University of Leeds to test the hypothesis.

The student subjects carefully copied the selected words and repeated them over and over again until they felt "strange", which usually occurred after 30 repetitions (in 2/3 of the subjects). Or about a minute later-a tipping point for "semantic saturation". For example, when a person stares at a word for a long time, he will feel that the word has lost its meaning. "they are like a combination of letters rather than a complete word." or a familiar word suddenly becomes strange, "it doesn't look right, in most cases, it's not like a word, but some people's tricks make me think it's a word." People who often have a sense of deja vu in their daily life are also more likely to have a sense of strangeness, indicating a connection between the two feelings.

Mechanical Engineering Award words: "Te Faye Yap, Zhen Liu, Anoop Rajappan, Trevor Shimokusu and Daniel Preston honored them for using dead spiders as mechanical grips."

One day, Ye Defei, a graduate student at Rice University, saw a dead spider curled up in the hallway of the laboratory. She knew that because of the internal hydraulic pressure inside the spiders, they would curl up when they died. She thought it might be possible to use dead spiders to make a small pneumatic clip to grab and manipulate small electronic devices. So she and her colleagues, including her mentor Daniel Preston, did it. They turned the dead spider into a grip tool with only one step of assembly, and they called the new field of cadaver mechanics (necrobotics).

Researchers at Rice University used dead spiders as mechanical grips. As previously reported, the spider's forebody cavity (or hydraulic cavity) contains built-in valves that allow the spider to control each leg individually. Once the spider dies, this control disappears and its legs can only move together. All they need to do is insert a needle into the precursor of the dead spider and stick it to the spider's body with a special glue to form a sealing ring. The whole process only takes 10 minutes. The other end of the needle is connected to a laboratory test bench or to a hand-held syringe. Injecting a small amount of air into the chamber to pressurize the chamber can instantly activate the spider legs, make them open, release the pressure from the chamber and close the spider legs.

The team tested their spider catchers on a variety of objects. For example, they used it to remove jumpers from the bread board to disconnect the LED, to pick up a piece of red-stained polyurethane foam, or even to pick up another dead spider. The spider grabber can grab objects that weigh more than 1.3 times its own weight, with a peak grasping force of 0.35 millinewtons. It turns out that the sturdiness of the spider catcher is also surprising. It can be opened and closed 1000 times before the joint is worn out and eventually scrapped. In addition, the spider's body is completely biodegradable.

Words for the Medical Awards: "Christine Pham, Bobak Hedayati (Bobak Hedayati), Chiana Hashemi (Kiana Hashemi), Ella Pike (Ella Csuka), Tiana Magani (Tiana Mamaghani), Margaret Juhasz (Margit Juhasz), Jamie Wickenheather (Jamie Wikenheiser) and Natasha Masinkovska (Natasha Mesinkovska) They are commended for using corpses to explore whether human nostrils have the same amount of nose hair. "

The study stemmed from interest in alopecia areata, a disease characterized by scalp, eyelash, eyebrow and nostril hair loss. Kristen and others have noticed that many people with this disease are more likely to develop respiratory infections, allergies and dryness, because the disease also causes nose hair to fall off in each nostril. They realized that no one had really calculated the average number of human nose hairs, which was the first step in assessing the impact of lack of nasal hairs on a patient's quality of life.

So they studied 20 bodies (10 men and 10 women) from the University of California, Irvine School of Medicine. They not only counted the hair in each nostril, but also measured the length of hair growth in the upper nostril, lateral nostril and lower nostril with a tape measure. The result is that the average number of nasal hairs per nostril is between 120cm and 122cm, and the growth range of nasal hairs is usually between 0.81cm and 1.035 cm. The next time you are at a cocktail party, when you are eager to talk to someone, you might as well give these figures.

Communication Award words: "Maria Jose Torres Priolis (Mar í a Jos é Torres-Prioris), Diana Lopez Barroso (Diana L ó pez-Barroso), Estela Camara (Estela Camara), Solfetti Pardi (Sol Fittipaldi), Lucas Cedeno (Lucas Sede ñ o), Augustine Ibanez (Augustine Ib á ñ ez) Marcelo Bertier (Marcelo Berthier) and Adolf Garcia (Adolfo Garc í a) Praise them for their research on the psychological activities of people who are good at speaking in inverted word order. "

There is a group of residents in Laguna, Spain who are good at inverting word order (word reversal)-for example, they say nasbue chesno instead of buenos noches. They have tried hard to get UNESCO and the Canary language Institute to recognize this unusual way of speaking, but so far without success, the Canary language Institute believes that this phenomenon has no academic value. Torres Priolis and others do not think so. In their 2020 award-winning paper, they wrote: "inverted word order is an extraordinary ability to quickly reverse words, false words and even sentences, which requires a reordering of phonemes while retaining the characteristics of phonemes." They think this provides a new opportunity to learn more about how the brain processes phoneme ordering.

The team recruited two experts who spoke in reverse order-both native speakers of Spanish-because Spanish was particularly suitable for reverse order, regardless of the position of the phonemes and the surrounding fragments. Phonemes always have the same pronunciation. They also recruited a control group of 18 men for comparison. All participants received general cognitive and memory tasks, as well as positive and reverse language tasks. In addition, they scanned the brain structures of two reverse speakers and compared the results with a control group of 18 men.

The abilities of both reverse speakers are naturally formed, and without clear training, they show obvious behavioral advantages in reversing words, which has nothing to do with their memory ability. The brain imaging results of the two men showed that the volume of gray matter in the key parts of the brain related to language increased and the functional connection (white matter) enhanced. Priolis et al concluded: "although the sample size is small, these findings are consistent with previous studies of simultaneous interpretation experts, suggesting that even unconventional forms of language expertise, even those that are not publicly used in daily life or honed through professional training, may have language-related neuroplastic adaptation.

Public Health Award words: "Seung-min Park, for the invention of the Stanford toilet, a device that combines a variety of technologies-including urine analysis test strips, computer vision systems for defecation analysis, anal pattern sensors with recognition cameras and communication connections-to monitor and quickly analyze human excrement."

Are you tired of using nasal swabs to test for COVID? How about installing a "smart toilet" to track your health by regularly monitoring your urine and defecation, or even testing for COVID (and other symptoms)? If Park Shengmin, the inventor of the active Medical PH toilet, can get what he wants, this may be our near future. This is a smart toilet that integrates sensors that monitor heart health, blood pressure, blood oxygen saturation and urine and fecal samples.

Smart toilets that can monitor users' health in real time, for example, have built-in urine analysis bars, computer vision as a urine flow meter, and deep learning will be used to deal with fecal classification. The prototype is designed for men's urine flow, but Park claims that it is also possible to add an expandable stick with a urine analysis bar for women, or use a "sonic urometer" to analyze urine flow through sound. The COVID special edition will be equipped with a removable unit similar to a bathtub whose module can collect fecal samples and quickly detect viruses. The test results can be sent to the user's smartphone in a few minutes. The same method can also detect noroviruses or bacteria that cause gastroenteritis, such as Shigella, to help control outbreaks in real time, Park said.

It should be pointed out that the concept of smart toilet appeared as early as the 1970s, but its development has been slow because of privacy issues. In addition to collecting sensitive medical information about personal defecation and defecation, Park's concept will also identify each user through biometric technology, that is, fingerprints and "anal skin". " Yes, I'm very excited about the built-in toilet camera to take pictures of my anus-just make sure it's mine (blink). "" We guarantee that all this sensitive data will be stored and analyzed in encrypted cloud servers, and all of a sudden, those nose swabs seem less aggressive, don't they? "

The message of the Nutrition Award: "Homei Miyashita Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura Nakamura are honoring their research on how charged chopsticks and straws change the taste of food."

Our sense of taste is very important. it not only allows us to enjoy our favorite foods and drinks, but also helps us avoid eating foods that have gone bad or may be inedible. In their 2011 paper, Miyashita Hiromi and Yumi Nakamura regretted that we only had taste buds on our tongues, unlike catfish whose taste buds spread all over the body, so it was a "swimming tongue". Their solution is to use electrical stimulation to enhance our sense of taste, producing a sour or metallic "electric smell" that was recorded as early as 1752. Previous studies have shown that people can change their sense of taste by electrical stimulation, the authors say.

Miyashita Homei and Nakamura Yumi inserted two different straws into the negative and positive electrodes, respectively, and then inserted the two straws into two drinks containing electrolytes. When the user drinks, the circuit is closed and the electrical stimulation is transmitted from the straw to the mouth, producing "electric smell". They did the same for the food, plugged in the positive and negative poles and used chopsticks instead of straws as the client. Obviously, the ability to sense this smell depends on the voltage, so the author adds a voltage regulation function. They concluded: "our goal is to take the tongue to a new stage so that it can taste a taste that we couldn't feel before."

Pedagogy Award words: "Katy Tam, Cyanea Poon, Victoria Hui, Wijnand van Tilburg, Christy Wong, Vivian Kwong, Gigi Yuen and Christian Chan for their systematic research on the annoyance between teachers and students."

According to the research of Katie and others, it is a common phenomenon for students to be bored in class, doze off, stare out of the window or doodle on the book, which is not a good phenomenon for education. because bored students tend to show lower motivation and grades. Teachers also get bored, especially when they teach the same thing to indifferent students year after year.

In a 2020 study, Katie et al investigated how teachers' boredom affects students' boredom in class, and its impact on students' motivation to learn. The researchers asked 437 students and 17 teachers from two local secondary schools in Hong Kong to keep diaries for two weeks to record their boredom. Students were also asked to write down how bored they felt about their teachers and their own enthusiasm in the classroom. Indeed, when teachers are bored, students are less motivated to learn, the researchers found. Although students' judgment of when teachers are bored is not accurate, their feelings lead to a decrease in their enthusiasm for learning. Boredom leads to boredom, whether it is real or felt.

Katie et al published a paper in 2023 detailing follow-up research to determine whether the simple expectation that a lecture or class would be boring is a sign of self-gratification. The first study, which involved a lecture on psychology for undergraduates at King's College London, confirmed that the more students expected the lecture to be boring, the more boring it became. The second study involved a similar lecture at the University of Hong Kong, and the researchers also tried to control students' expectations-an attempt that failed, although the results were consistent with the first study. The third and final study (also conducted at the University of Hong Kong) was more successful in controlling expectations and reconfirmed the hypothesis. If you expect the lecture to be boring, you are likely to be bored.

Psychology Award words: "Stanley Milgram (Stanley Milgram), Leonard Bukman (Leonard Bickman) and Lawrence Berkowitz (Lawrence Berkowitz) for their experiments on the road to see how many pedestrians stop and look up when they see strangers looking up."

Stanley Milgram, a social psychologist, is best known for his six-degree separation theory (the small-world experiment) and his 1963 study of obedience to authority, in which one group of participants were ordered to deliver higher and higher electric shocks to the other. The results were indeed shocking: 65% of the performers obeyed orders at the highest shock level allowed in the experiment, although they expressed reluctance as the voltage increased. Milgram also conducted a less controversial experimental study on crowd aggregation in 1969, especially examining the cohesion of people of different sizes. He used a 50-foot section of New York City's bustling sidewalk as a laboratory.

When a signal is sent from the window of an office building on the sixth floor across the street, a designated "stimulus" crowd (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10 or 15) enters the observation area, stops, looks up at the window for a whole minute, and then receives the signal to spread out. The experiment was repeated many times and photographed for later analysis to see how many of the 1425 passers-by had changed their behavior, whether to stop and look up, or to look up while walking.

The results show that the size of the stimulating crowd is the key factor affecting the stopping of passers-by. If only one person looked up, only 4% of passers-by would stop and look up, while when there were 15 people, 40% of passers-by would stop and look up. The same thing happened to passers-by who didn't stop: if there was only one person, 42% would look up, while when there were 15 people, 86% would look up. This is contrary to the assumption in the existing model, which assumes that the number of people who can join a group (in this case, pedestrians) is a key factor rather than stimulating the size of the population.

However, Milgram and his collaborators stress that the nature of the stimulus-what the stimulus crowd is looking at-can also have an impact on these numbers. Their experimental scene was not particularly interesting, so it was not very attractive; passers-by left soon. However, if an acrobat performs on the windowsill, their interest may last longer, causing the crowd to expand rapidly to its maximum.

Physics award words: "Fern á ndez Castro, Marianne Pernia (Marian Pe ñ a), Enrique Nogueira (Enrique Nogueira), Miguel Gilcoto (Miguel Gilcoto), Esperanza Broll ó n (Hope Broll ó n), Antonio Comesan (Antonio Comesa ñ a), Damian Buffard (Damien Bouffard). Alberto Navila Galabato (Alberto C. Naveira Garabato) and Beatrice Moos Carmel (Beatriz Mouri ñ o-Carballido) They are commended for their research on the relationship between marine mixing and anchovies' sexual activity. "

Ocean mixing is a key research field of climate science, because it plays an important role in affecting climate, affecting the temperature, salinity, air content and nutrients of water. Winds and tides are the main sources of energy for ocean mixing around the world, but some scientists believe that some marine organisms-plankton, fish or marine mammals-may also be important sources of energy for ocean mixing in a larger region. However, this biophysical turbulence is difficult to capture in lakes and oceans, and previous studies have shown that the mixing efficiency of this activity is too low to have a significant impact.

A schematic diagram of biophysical turbulence caused by the sexual behavior of anchovies Fernandez Castro and others have suggested that biological mixing can be used as a very effective marine mixture. In a 2022 study, they analyzed two weeks of data collected in the summer of 2018, which showed "strong biophysical turbulence" at night. The culprit is the spawning anchovies. Although the team did not directly detect the presence of fish, the acoustic backscattering data were consistent with the fish aggregation behavior, and there were high concentrations of anchovies eggs in the plankton net salvaged every morning. Depending on their developmental stage, these eggs spawn about 4 to 14 hours, compared with fresher eggs collected at night, spawning less than 4 hours. As a result, anchovies that lay eggs are obviously quite active at night. The authors conclude that their findings provide "convincing evidence that fish can produce strong turbulence over a long period of time".

Author: Jennifer Ouellette

Translator: Xiao Cong

Revision: Sheri

Original link: Meet the winners of the 2023 Ig Nobel Prizes: The award ceremony features miniature operas, scientific demos, and the 24 lectures.

This article comes from the official account of Wechat: Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (ID:cas-iop), author: J. Ouellette

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