Unique, strange, and amusing research wins the 2023 Ig Nobel Prize

The study aimed to find out why scientists like to lick rocks or invent smart toilets that monitor waste by the winner of the 2023 Ig Nobel fun science prize.

Ig Nobel is a fun science award that is held annually, imitated and announced before the prestigious Nobel Prize. Achievements and research that win the Ig Nobel Prize must meet the criterion "first make people laugh, then make them think".

Ig Nobel is a fun science award held annually, announced before the prestigious Nobel Prize.

Annals of Improbable Research magazine, founder of the Ig Nobel Prize, on the evening of September 14 (US time) held an online award ceremony. The organizing committee invited Nobel Prize winners to announce the Ig Nobel Prizes in 10 different categories to scientists around the world.

According to the Guardian newspaper, a unique feature of this year's awards ceremony is that the awards are announced in pdf document form, which can be printed and assembled to form a 3-dimensional trophy. In addition, winning individuals or groups will receive a 10,000 billion Zimbabwean dollar bill.

In addition to announcing the awards, this year's event also included the launch of seven water-themed songs, giving researchers time to explain their work in just seven words, in 24 seconds. .

The 2023 Ig Nobel Prize in the mechanical engineering category goes to the research of reviving dead spiders to use as mechanical clamping tools by the team of authors Te Faye Yap and Daniel Preston from Rice University (USA).

"When we were setting up the lab, we discovered a dead spider, curled up at the edge of the hallway. The idea came to our mind when we realized that spiders only have flexor muscles that pull their legs inward and lean on them. on hydraulic pressure to stretch the legs out ," Yap shares.

Based on that principle, Yap's team created a device that can grip irregularly shaped objects. "Furthermore, this tool can be handheld and camouflaged in outdoor environments ," concludes the authors.

Jan Zalasiewicz of the University of Southampton (UK) became the winner of the Ig Nobel Prize in chemistry and geology thanks to his research explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks. According to him, while Italian geologist Giovanni Arduino in the 18th century used his sense of taste to distinguish rocks and minerals, today's geologists often use their tongue for other reasons.

'For us, licking the ice helps visually more than taste, because the wet surface displays mineral particles better than the dry surface,' Mr. Zalasiewicz said.

The Ig Nobel Nutrition Prize was awarded to two scientists, Homei Miyashita of Meiji University and Hiromi Nakamura of the University of Tokyo (Japan) for their research on electric chopsticks and straws. These authors believe that using electrical stimulation of the tongue can instantly change the flavor of foods and drinks and help enhance taste, something that common ingredients such as spices cannot do.

Researcher Seung-min Park with the toilet that helped win the 2023 Ig Nobel Prize, placed in front of the statue of thinker Rodin at Stanford University. (Photo: PR Image/Natuurhistorisch Museum Rotterdam).

The winners of the Ig Nobel public health prize are researchers who developed smart toilets, using many technologies to monitor signs of disease through human waste as well as anal sensors to identify user. The research team was led by Seung-min Park of Stanford University (USA).

The prize in medicine went to a team of researchers who used cadavers to discover whether each nostril of an individual contained an equal number of hairs. Meanwhile, the Ig Nobel Media Prize is awarded to scientists who have done research, including neuroimaging analysis, on people with the ability to speak backwards.

The organizing committee awarded the literary prize to researchers who explore the special feeling that can arise when writing the same word over and over again. They call this phenomenon 'jamais vu', when people see familiar things become strange.

The Ig Nobel Prize in Physics honors researchers who discovered that the mating activity of anchovies at night off the coast of Galicia can create small whirlpools that mix with different layers of water in the ocean.