THE IG NOBEL PRIZE 2020

The Ig Nobel Prizes are organized by the magazine Annals of Improbable Reseach. The ceremony is co-sponsored by the Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics students and the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association. The Ig Nobels are a good-natured parody of the actual Nobel Prize ceremony. Though the awards seem frivolous, "they honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." The prizes are often physically handed out by (real) Nobel Laureates. The problem of long speeches has been solved by limiting honorees to a 60-second acceptance speech. If they go over, a real 8-year old girl (Miss Sweetie Poo) begins saying, "Please stop. I'm bored," and keeps repeating it until they stop. A new Miss Sweetie Poo is chosen each year.

The winners receive eternal Ig Nobel fame and a ten-trillion dollar bill from Zimbabwe. It's a long-running Ig Nobel gag. Zimbabwe stopped using its native currency in 2009 because of sky-rocketing inflation and hyperinflation. At its nadir, the 100-trillion dollar bill was roughly the equivalent of 40 cents US. The 2009 Ig Nobel Prize for Mathematics was awarded to the then-head of the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, Gideon Gono, "for giving people a simple, everyday way to cope with a wide range of numbers - from very small to very big - by having his bank print bank notes with denominations ranging from one cent ($.01) to one hundred trillion dollars ($100,000,000,000,000).

Winners of the 2020 Ig Nobel Prize:

ACOUSTICS

Stephan Reber and four others, for inducing a female Chinese alligator to bellow in an airtight chamber filled with helium-enriched air.

Note: Alligator bellowing is related to body size, which in turn is relating to mating choices. Female alligators prefer to mate with males larger than they are.

 

PSYCHOLOGY

Miranda Giacomin and Nicholas Rule, for devising a method to identify narcissists by examining their eyebrows. 

 

PHYSICS

Citation: Ivan Maksymov and Andriy Pototsky, for determining, experimentally, what happens to the shape of a living earthworm when one vibrates the earthworm at high frequency.  

 

ECONOMICS

Citation: Christopher Watkins and eight others, for trying to quantify the relationship between different countries' national income inequality and the average amount of mouth-to-mouth kissing. 

Note: 3,109 participants were recruited from around the world. As the researches had hypothesized, income inequality was positively related to kissing frequency. "Individuals kiss their partner more in countries where resource competition is likely to be more intense, which may play an important role in maintaining long-term stable pair bonds in certain types of harsh environments," the authors concluded. 

ENTOMOLOGY

Citation: Richard Vetter, for collecting evidence that many entomologists (scientists who study insects) are afraid of spiders (which are not insects).

MEDICINE

Citation: Nienke Vulink and two others, for diagnosing a long-unrecognized medical condition: Misophonia, the distress at hearing other people make chewing sounds.

Note: This 2013 study has an interesting origin: Three patients were referred to the researchers' center for studying obsessive-compulsive disorders in Amsterdam after reporting extreme distress and aggressive outbursts at the sound of someone else smacking their lips or breathing. Dubbed "misphonia," their condition didn't fit any existing diagnostic disorder, but when word spread through a Dutch Internet forum, nearly 50 people with similar symptoms contacted the center. 

The researchers assessed 42 or those patients for their study. They found that the triggering sounds were all human-produced. Sounds from animals, or the patients themselves, did not induce the same distress. Eighty-one percent of the patients reported lip-smacking and other sounds associated with eating as a trigger. About 64 percent found loud breathing or "nose sounds" distressing. 

MEDICAL EDUCATION

Citaion: To the political leaders (by mane) of Brazil, United Kingdom, India, Mexico, Belarus, United States, Turkey, Russia, and Turkmenistan, "for using the COVID-19 viral pandemic to teach the world that  politicians can have more immediate effect on life and death than scientists or doctors can"

MATERIALS SCIENCE

Citation: Metin Eren and six others, for showing that knives manufactured from frozen human feces do not work well.

Note: A popular legend inspired this study. An Inuit man's family took away his tools in a vain attempt to make him leave the ice and join them in a  settlement. Undeterred, the man defecated and then honed the feces into a frozen blade, sharpening it with his own saliva. He used the frozen fecal knife to kill a dog and used its rib cage to make a sled. He used the hide to harness the sled to another dog and rode off into the Arctic.

Though the story was likely apocryphal, Kent State anthropologist Metin Eren decided to run some experiments in his lab to test whether a frozen fecal knife could really function as described. He and his colleague, Michelle Bebber, spent eight days pooping in a bag and fashioning knives out of the feces, then freezing them. Then they tested the knives on pig hide, muscle, and tendons. Alas, the knives just melted without making successful cuts in the hide, leaving behind streaks of melted poop. The authors noted, however, that the cutting had been done in a room with a temperature of 10 degrees C (50 degrees F), and therefore, "future experiments might examine colder contexts."