They blinded them with wacky science.
Scientists got top “honors” for counting nose hair and studying anchovies’ sexual intercourse at this 12 months’s IG Nobel Prizes, a parody of the Nobel Prize.
The lighthearted but brainy annual ceremony, first held in 1991, recognizes the 10 most unusual or trivial achievements in scientific research around the globe.
Jan Zalasiewicz, a paleontologist from Poland, took home a prize for explaining why many scientists lick rocks.
“Licking the rock, after all, is an element of the geologist’s and paleontologist’s armory of tried-and-much-tested techniques used to assist survive in the sphere,” Zalasiewicz wrote in The Palaeontological Association newsletter. “Wetting the surface allows fossil and mineral textures to face out sharply, moderately than being lost within the blur of intersecting micro-reflections and micro-refractions that come out of a dry surface.”
A gaggle of scientists hailing from India, China, Malaysia and america landed a prize for studying how one can repurpose dead spiders. Their team managed to successfully transform a dead wolf spider right into a gripping tool.
“The useful properties of biotic materials, refined by nature over time, eliminate the necessity to artificially engineer these materials, exemplified by our early ancestors wearing animal hides as clothing and constructing tools from bones,” they explained in Advanced Science, a scientific journal.
The event, now in its thirty third 12 months, was held at Harvard University, but for the reason that pandemic, has been pre-recorded and streamed online.
It’s produced by the magazine Annals of Improbable Research and sponsored by the Harvard-Radcliffe Science Fiction Association and the Harvard-Radcliffe Society of Physics Students.
With Post Wires