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It’s that time of year again! It’s time to honor those scientific “achievements that first make people LAUGH, then make them THINK.” Here is the youtube of the awards ceremony:
Join me below the fold for a list of the awards, as well as the comments.
The 2022 Ig Nobel Prizes:
CHEMISTRY and GEOLOGY PRIZE [POLAND, UK]
Jan Zalasiewicz, for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks.
Reference
LITERATURE PRIZE [FRANCE, UK, MALAYSIA, FINLAND]
Chris Moulin, Nicole Bell, Merita Turunen, Arina Baharin, and Akira O’Connor for studying the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times.
Reference
MECHANICAL ENGINEERING PRIZE [INDIA, CHINA, MALAYSIA, USA]
Te Faye Yap, Zhen Liu, Anoop Rajappan, Trevor Shimokusu, and Daniel Preston, for re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools.
Reference
PUBLIC HEALTH PRIZE [SOUTH KOREA, USA]
Seung-min Park, for inventing the Stanford Toilet, a device that uses a variety of technologies — including a urinalysis dipstick test strip, a computer vision system for defecation analysis, an anal-print sensor paired with an identification camera, and a telecommunications link — to monitor and quickly analyze the substances that humans excrete.
Reference1, Reference2, Reference3, Reference4
COMMUNICATION PRIZE [ARGENTINA, SPAIN, COLOMBIA, CHILE, CHINA, USA]
María José Torres-Prioris, Diana López-Barroso, Estela Càmara, Sol Fittipaldi, Lucas Sedeño, Agustín Ibáñez, Marcelo Berthier, and Adolfo García, for studying the mental activities of people who are expert at speaking backward.
Reference
MEDICINE PRIZE [USA, CANADA, MACEDONIA, IRAN, VIETNAM]
Christine Pham, Bobak Hedayati, Kiana Hashemi, Ella Csuka, Tiana Mamaghani, Margit Juhasz, Jamie Wikenheiser, and Natasha Mesinkovska, for using cadavers to explore whether there is an equal number of hairs in each of a person’s two nostrils.
Reference
NUTRITION PRIZE [JAPAN]
Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura, for experiments to determine how electrified chopsticks and drinking straws can change the taste of food.
Reference
EDUCATION PRIZE [HONG KONG, CHINA, CANADA, UK, THE NETHERLANDS, IRELAND, USA, JAPAN]
Katy Tam, Cyanea Poon, Victoria Hui, Wijnand van Tilburg, Christy Wong, Vivian Kwong, Gigi Yuen, and Christian Chan, for methodically studying the boredom of teachers and students.
Reference
PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE [USA]
Stanley Milgram, Leonard Bickman, and Lawrence Berkowitz for experiments on a city street to see how many passersby stop to look upward when they see strangers looking upward.
Reference (A blast from the past.)
PHYSICS PRIZE [SPAIN, GALICIA, SWITZERLAND, FRANCE, UK]
Bieito Fernández Castro, Marian Peña, Enrique Nogueira, Miguel Gilcoto, Esperanza Broullón, Antonio Comesaña, Damien Bouffard, Alberto C. Naveira Garabato, and Beatriz Mouriño-Carballido, for measuring the extent to which ocean-water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies.
Reference
For further details about the awards, the awards ceremony, and additional seminars that occur as part of the celebration, visit the Ig Nobel Prize webpage at the Improbable Research website.
Now, on to the comments:
Top Comments (October 1, 2023):
From inkstainedwretch:
ShamballaJones comment in jqjacobs diary Shutdown Averted. Pithy summation of just one fraction of the awfulness of 'equal opportunity offender' Republicans.
Top Mojo (September 30, 2023):
Top Mojo is courtesy of mik! Click here for more on how Top Mojo works.
Unfortunately, the Top Mojo script seems to have malfunctioned tonight. Apologies.
Top Photos (September 30, 2023):
Thanks to jotter (RIP) for creating it and elfling for restoring it.