The Ig Nobel Prizes have been awarded since 1991 – for achievements that cannot be reproduced or there is no point in doing so. This year, scientists received Ig Nobel Prizes for the following achievements:
1. A group of British and American scientists, in an article for the journal Obesity Reviews, proposed a possible explanation for the increase in the number of overweight people – in their opinion, central heating systems in homes may be to blame. Indoor temperatures in winter in the USA, Great Britain and other developed countries have been rising in recent years, and, as the authors of the article note, it is the increase in the duration of stay in comfortable temperature conditions that may be one of the main factors in the spread of obesity.
2. David Bishai from Johns Hopkins University and his colleagues assessed the risk of getting some kind of pathogenic bacteria from a handshake for a specific risk group – school leaders participating in graduation ceremonies. Participants in the experimental group shook 5,209 hands, and in 93% of cases only bacteria that were harmless to humans were transmitted.
3. Austrian scientist Markus Appel from Johannes Kepler University warns against the dangers of reading stories about stupid actions or people. In his experiment, 81 volunteers read a story about a football fan, which emphasized his low level of intellectual development. Then the experiment participants answered simple questions about geography, physics and art history.
4. Andries van der https://bingostormcasino.co.uk/withdrawal/ Bilt from the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands and his colleagues found that when a person eats cookies or other crunchy foods, the bones of his skull vibrate, and the vibration stops only when the food has completely softened.
5. Firoz Alam from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia and his colleagues studied the aerodynamic characteristics of different types of badminton shuttlecocks. To do this, the researchers took 10 different shuttlecocks and placed them in a wind tunnel, where they were exposed to wind speeds from 60 to 120 kilometers per hour.
6. An unusual factor in economic growth was studied in his work by Tattoo Westling from the Helsinki Center for Economic Research. A Finnish economist found that the GDP of any country in 1985 was statistically related to the average length of the male genital organ of the inhabitants of this country: the dependence curve had a U-shape, where the maximum GDP was in countries with average indicators.
7. A group of scientists from the Italian universities of Bari and Trento assessed brain symmetry in 11 dogs using computed tomography data. With this work, the University of Bari continues a series of studies on symmetry in dogs: previously scientists studied the asymmetry in the way these pets wag their tail.
8. Four student interns at Cooper Union College in New York experimentally discovered that cockroaches like to dance to the music of Lady Gaga. The young researchers needed to get the insects to move, and at first they used small electric shocks to do this. But gradually the cockroaches got used to such impulses and stopped reacting to them, after which the students decided to try different types of music. The cockroaches did not react in any way to the rock band Weezer and the heavy metal band Avenged Sevenfold, but they “danced” quite willingly to the songs of Lady Gaga.
9. Low-flying helicopters do not bother goats – this is the conclusion reached by a group of researchers from the Netherlands. Scientists placed five goats in a pen, over which a Dutch Air Force Chinook heavy military transport helicopter flew at an altitude of 50 meters. The goats responded to the noise by turning their heads towards the source and listening to it, but none of them showed signs of stress or increased emotionality.
10. Osaka University specialists, in an article for the Journal of Prosthodontic Research, reassure everyone who does not clench their teeth while solving mathematical problems: it turns out that the presence or absence of such a habit does not make any difference in terms of the effectiveness of the process. Japanese doctors asked 20 volunteers to solve four sets of tasks, while they had to either clench their jaws or relax them. According to the results of the experiment, the researchers concluded that conscious clenching of the jaws does not improve mathematical abilities.
11. Stefan Stieger from the University of Austria and his colleagues have determined the optimal swearing strategy for a football player. According to FIFA rules, a player must receive a red card for swearing – however, as an experiment involving 113 judges and 28 selected swear words showed, only 55.7% of the words on the list can get you sent off from the field, while only 12 swear words absolutely guarantee a red card.