The 25th edition of the Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony held at Harvard University last month saw awards being handed out for scientific discoveries that make you “laugh first and think later”. Science humour magazine Annals of Improbable Research has been conducting the parody award ceremony since 1991. A FATHER FIGURE – MATH For Trying to use mathematical techniques to determine whether and how Moulay Ismael, the Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, managed to father 888 children during the years from 1697 to 1727. In the paper The Case of Moulay Ismael – Fact or Fancy, Elisabeth Oberzaucher and Karl Grammer estimate that the emperor’s sperm fertilised at least 1 to 1.6 female eggs per day, for the theory of 888 children to be true. The researchers say this rate is within the capacity of a healthy male. The duo factored in variables like sperm potency, ovulation rates, social and moral restrictions and the number of possible encounters, for their study. KISS AND TELL – MEDICINE For Experiments to study the biomedical benefits or consequences of intense kissing (and other intimate, interpersonal activities). Japanese doctor Hajime Kimata, who specialises in treating patients with atopic dermatitis, conducted the experiment with 90 subjects — 30 patients with eczema, 30 with hay fever and 30 healthy people. They underwent skin and blood tests to gauge changes in the intensity of their allergic reactions before and after kissing their lovers or partners freely for 30 minutes in a private room while soft music was played. The results showed that their allergic reactions “eased” after the session. STING IN THE TAIL — PHYSIOLOGY For getting stung by honey bees on 25 different parts of the body to learn which locations are the least painful (the skull, middle toe tip, and upper arm) and which are the most painful (the nostril, upper lip, and penis shaft). Michael Smith, a student of Cornell University, New York, let the insects loose on his own body and then carefully pressed them on particular parts, ending up with stings on his reproductive organ and 24 other places. Congrats to @Cornell #BigRedGrad Michael Smith for advancing improbable research and winning an IgNobel Prize pic.twitter.com/Yr1P7eOQyO — Cornell Grad School (@CornellGrad) September 22, 2015 He repeated the experiment for days before arriving at the final results. “If you’re stung in the nose and the penis, you’re going to want more stings to the penis, over the nose — if you’re forced to choose,” he said after the awards were announced UN-BOIL EGG – CHEMISTRY Inventing a chemical recipe to partially un-boil an egg A team of Australian scientists, led by Colin Raston from Flinders University, developed the Vortex Fluid Device (VFD) to change the structure of proteins in the eggs by spinning them at high speed. Earlier this year, they first demonstrated the technique using hard-boiled egg whites, showing that the sheer stress from spinning could cause the denatured proteins to re-fold, reverting the egg white to its raw, transparent state. Watch ceremony: (app users click here) A DINO CHICKEN – BIOLOGY Observing that when you attach a weighted stick to the rear end of a chicken, the chicken walks in a manner similar to dinosaurs Dinosaurs called theropods — Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor — are related to modern birds, and the scientists used this as the basis to figure out how the dinosaurs walked the earth. They attached a stick, to resemble a dinosaur tail, to the rear end of the chicken to see what happens. The chicken almost immediately started walking differently because the centre of gravity of its body had changed. The researchers concluded that “gradual changes in the location of the centre of mass resulted in a shift from hip-driven to knee-driven limb movements through theropod evolution”. BRIBE TACT – ECONOMICS For offering to pay policemen extra cash if the they refuse to take bribes The policy was announced by the Bangkok Metropolitan Police Bureau in early October 2014 to combat rampant bribe-taking among traffic police. Under the policy, officers who refused to take bribes would receive a cash reward of up to 10,000 baht. Ironically, the policy was heavily criticised in the social media and was withdrawn two weeks after its introduction. Just 2 officers were given the sum of 10,000 baht. PEE MATTER – PHYSICS Testing the biological principle that nearly all mammals empty their bladders in about 21 seconds RT @GeorgiaTech: Georgia Tech engineer wins Ig Nobel Prize for research… animals tinkle pic.twitter.com/cyqlStXp5R — Improbable Research (@improbresearch) September 23, 2015 A team of scientists from Georgia Tech University used subjects like rats, goats, cows and elephants to show that nearly all mammals, weighing more than 3 kg, take the same amount of time to urinate. The researchers used “high-speed video analysis and modelled the fluid dynamics involved in urination” to arrive at the finding. HUH, REALLY? — LITERATURE Discovering that the word ‘Huh?’ seems to exist in every human language — and for not being quite sure why The scientists sampled 31 languages from diverse language families around the world for this study, and found that all of them have a word with a “near-identical sound and function as English Huh?”. The scientists say that usually when words in different languages mean the same thing, they sound completely different, but “Huh?”, they say is a rare exception.
