Ig Nobel Winners Include Studies of Nose Hairs, 'Necrobotics'

Dead spiders were used to create gripping tools
By Newser Editors and Wire Services
Posted Sep 15, 2023 6:12 AM CDT

Counting nose hairs in cadavers, repurposing dead spiders, and explaining why scientists lick rocks are among the winning achievements in this year's Ig Nobels, the prize for humorous scientific feats, organizers announced Thursday. The 33rd annual prize ceremony was a prerecorded online event, as it has been since the pandemic, instead of the past live ceremonies at Harvard University. Ten spoof prizes were awarded to the teams and individuals around the globe.

  • Among the winners was Jan Zalasiewicz of Poland who earned the chemistry and geology prize for explaining why many scientists like to lick rocks, the AP reports. "Wetting the surface allows fossil and mineral textures to stand out sharply, rather than being lost in the blur of intersecting micro-reflections and micro-refractions that come out of a dry surface," Zalasiewicz wrote in the Palaeontological Association newsletter in 2017.

  • A team of scientists from India, China, Malaysia, and the United States took the mechanical engineering prize for its study of repurposing dead spiders to be used in gripping tools in robotics. They created a gripper in an approach they called "necrobotics." "Furthermore, the gripper can serve as a handheld device and innately camouflages in outdoor environments," they wrote in their research.
  • The nutrition prize was won by Japanese researchers Homei Miyashita Hiromi Nakamura, who studied electrified chopsticks and drinking straws, the Guardian reports. "The taste of food can be changed immediately and reversibly by electrical stimulation, and this is something that has been difficult to achieve with conventional ingredients such as seasonings," said Nakamura.
  • The medicine prize went to a team that counted the nose hairs in 20 cadavers at a medical school in California to determine whether there was an equal number in each nostril. "Our intention to describe human nose hair growth patterns may seem unusual, but it originated from a need to better understand the role they play as front line guardians of the respiratory system," researcher Christine Pham tells Cosmos. They found that the average number of nose hairs in the right nostril is 122, two more than in the left nostril.
Other winning teams were lauded for studying the impact of teacher boredom on student boredom; the affect of anchovies' sexual activity on ocean water mixing; and " the sensations people feel when they repeat a single word many, many, many, many, many, many, many times ," according to the organizers. (More Ig Nobel Prizes stories.)

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