THE IG NOBEL PRIZES - 2023

Established in 1991, the Ig Nobels are a good-natured parody of the Nobel Prizes. They honor "achievements that first make people laugh and then make them think." For a further explanation of the Ig Nobel Prize, please see the post for 10/13/2020.

Winners of the 2023 Ig Nobel Prize:

Mechanical Engineering

Te Faye Yap and her team from Rice University for re-animating dead spiders to use as mechanical gripping tools.

Medicine

Christine Pham and her team at the University of California, Irvine medical school, for using cadavers to explore how many nose hairs are in each of an average person's two nostrils. (120)

Communication

Maria Jose Torres-Prioris and his team for studying the mental activities of people who are expert at speaking backward. There's a group of residents of La Laguna Spain who are proficient in speaking backward (word inversion) - saying nasbue chesno instead of buenas noches, for example.

Public Health

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. 

Nutrition

Homei Miyashita and Hiromi Nakamura, for experiments to determine how electrified drinking straws and chop sticks can change the  taste of food. 

Education

Katy Tam and her team, for methodically studying how teacher boredom can influence how bored students become in class.

Psychology

Stanley Milgram and his team, for experiments on a busy New York City sidewalk to see how many passersby stop to look upward when they see strangers looking upward.

Physics

Bieito Fernandez Castro and his team, for measuring the extent to which ocean-water mixing is affected by the sexual activity of anchovies.